In March 2020, I went to New York for a residency period of two months at Residency Unlimited (see also Mistakes. The artist talk). The reason for coming to New York was the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The museum is famous for its habitat dioramas: realistic reconstructions of landscape ecologies using background paintings, artificial landscape elements such as plants and rocks, and taxidermic animals. They appear to be, as photographer Hiroshi Sagamato describes, somewhere between alive and dead, in suspended time. Dioramas, both the habitat dioramas of museums of natural history and Diorama theatre shows, were an important subject of my initial doctoral research, due to the similarities between the simulation environments of dioramas and my virtual artist’s studio.
New York, March, 9, 2020.
First visit to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH): a report.
We are now about 6 weeks into the Covid-19 coronavirus panic, which became a global emergency just before I traveled to the U.S. as part of my residency at Residency Unlimited in Brooklyn, New York.
Prior to my trip, I had a cold that had not completely healed yet while I boarded the plane on February 29, a leap day. In New York, I still have a bit of a cough, which could be a leftover from the cold, be part of my occasional smoking habits, or is induced by the dust in the apartment I’m currently staying in. In any case, so far, I feel fine.
Despite feeling utterly jet-lagged, on my first week in New York I managed to walk about 10 kilometers a day, according to the ‘health app’ on my phone. The walking was done between visits to MOMA and to the art fairs of the Armory Show and Art on Paper (as the progressing pandemic coincided with NY art fair week), as well as the Brooklyn Museum and the MET, before I finally got to the ultimate goal of my residency, the American Museum of Natural History.
The previous months I had already researched the museum quite extensively – through articles, books, and the elaborate online archives of the AMNH itself – but nothing had prepared me for the overwhelming amount – and variety – of mesmerising dioramas. The dioramas are present in all kinds and sizes, and they are all wonderful in different ways.
The dioramas are divided across halls which are themed according to region or ecology. Unfortunately, not every exhibition space of the museum is a pleasant research environment: the Hall of Ocean Life feels like a hotel lobby rather than a museum, and the mammal halls suffered from noisy acoustics. The noise was a problem, since my initial plan was to sit for longer stretches of time in front of a selection of displays in order to see what they would ‘do’ – in the spirit of ‘anschauung’, contemplation through looking at something. I am quite sensitive to sound, and I resolved to buy noise-canceling headphones that would prevent the distraction of other visitors’ conversations.
Other halls were much more quiet, like the Hall of North American Forests. The space did feel a bit like walking through a forest, with its wooden panelled walls, and a selection of displays in various sizes and proportions (vertical, for example). The exhibit also houses an animated diorama in the spirit of 19th century dissolving views: a miniature scene showing a forest before and after a fire, using light effects, glass and mirrors.
I gravitated towards the Hall of Human Origins.
Featuring four life-sized tableaux of Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and Cro-Magnons, the Spitzer Hall of Human Origins shows each species in its habitat, demonstrating the behaviors and capabilities that scientists think it had. Also displayed are a variety of important fossil casts, including the 1.7-million-year-old “Turkana Boy.” The hall also features examples of what are thought to be some of humans’ earliest forms of artistic expression, including an original limestone engraving of a horse carved about 25,000 years ago in southwestern France.
(Text from the website of AMNH)
Upon entering, a full scale model of Australopithecus Lucy and a companion are on display in a glass case. The models used to be part of a large diorama, based on the find of 3.66 million year old footsteps in East Africa. It showed them walking in volcanic ashes with an erupting volcano in the background. The diorama was photographed by Sugimoto, and a photo of the display was used for the cover of ‘Evidence’, a book by Dutch artists Roy Villevoye and Jan Dietvorst, accompanying their eponymous 2-channel film.
Unfortunately, the display was dismantled in 2007, when the hall got a complete make-over. The pair, now isolated, seem lost without the context of the landscape. The displays in the Hall of Human Origins are all fairly recent. The original dioramas of the museum were mostly constructed in the first half of the 20th century, and aim for realism – an illusory ‘window to nature’. More recent dioramas abandon the illusion and are rather tableaux, than wondrously uncanny scenes.
The tableaux in the Hall of Human Origins have printed backdrops – I could see the polygons giving away their digital origins – and the lighting is theatrical, opposed to fitting the background’s scene. Additionally, no attempt was made to blend the foreground – sand, rocks, plants – with the background, which is a key element in the illusion of real habitat dioramas; confusing the sense of depth of the visitor, and making the vistas look endless, like real windows to real landscapes.
Back to the Halls with original dioramas, this is what struck me the most: here I am, in one of the most iconic urban centers of the world, surrounded by views on savannahs, mountains, deserts, and forests, rendered so realistically, it felt as if one could step into them – like portals. It really was a surreal experience.
Note, d.d. May 31, 2026
After the visit, I went back another time and stumbled upon the museum’s library where I met some of the archivists of the AMNH. I was offered a working place in the library, and shown models of the dioramas. The librarian connected me to the retired head of the Hall of Human Origins, anthropologist Ian Tattersall. On Friday, March 13, we met in front of the museum as it had just been forced to close due to the first Covid lockdown. Taking our meeting to a nearby café, Tattersall explained how sometimes exhibition designers overrule the scientists – it was not his choice to replace the dioramas in the Hall.
On Sunday, March 15, I flew back to Belgium, on what was the last direct flight between New York and Brussels for some time. Although dioramas remained relevant for my work, the pandemic – in conjunction with the spruce bark beetle outbreak that devastated our family’s forest – introduced a new sense of urgency in my work that the diorama subject did not. The diorama is largely a historical subject, and digital 3D software in itself a continuation of the dioramic simulation. Although augmented reality and 3D scanning are intimately intertwined with the confusing depth perception on screen (similar to the display’s glass), and questions of materiality and authenticity, I felt my research could not contribute enough to the existing bodies of media research. The dioramas were abandoned in favour of ecological anxieties, commentaries on human approaches to ecological collapse, and the tracing of a real Plot of land instead of simulated ones.