Originally published in two parts on my initial research blog in april 2019, as part of The Appeal of the Unreal, an artistic research proposal for the associated faculty of the arts (KU Leuven/LUCA Brussels).
I. On Screens as Dioramas as Screens
This is a media history approach to digital technology, using the screen as a lens. As an artist trained in ‘traditional’ media — namely painting — who has worked with digital 3D software for over 20 years, I find the computer screen a fascinating object: fixed in its physical dimensions yet elusive in its virtual ones. It is interactive yet inaccessible at the same time. It is capable of genuinely evoking emotions, even if it is always at a distance. Through media and art historical analogies, I attempt to situate the ‘ultramodern’ technological screen within a much broader lineage of illusory devices. Please note that these are sometimes meandering thoughts, previously published in bits and pieces on blogs and social media, and often elaborated on at a later stage.
Afterimage (v0, test, 2023), self portrait with camera in the reflection of my iPad.
Illusions behind glass
Over the last century, screens have become omnipresent in human life. Since TVs first entered our homes, screens have been introduced in the form of computer monitors, smartphones, tablets and VR sets. We have now become accustomed to mediated information – neat, boxed windows that appear to offer access to a seemingly interconnected parallel world.
The experience of looking through a screen into another space is an illusion that has been extensively covered by media theory using terms such as ‘the fourth wall’ and ‘suspension of disbelief’. Our willingness as humans to immerse ourselves in these ‘virtual’ imaginary dimensions is evident in the ongoing popularity of computer games and cinema. This illusion is not confined to films, TV programmes and funny cat videos on YouTube; it also incorporates the way we use apps and text editing software, as well as the internet itself.
The internet is a layered structure – ‘stratified’, in geological terms. The average user only engages with the surface layer: the visual interface that vaguely resembles a print publication. This is a fairly ‘flat’ experience of digital space. Those who are more fluent in digital applications (sometimes called ‘power users’) understand the illusory nature of the visual interface and tend to look beyond it (it seems that one cannot escape spatial metaphors when discussing digital environments).
As an occasional contributor to the collective project of Wikipedia, I am using this platform as an example. Wikipedia is one of the largest sites in terms of visitor traffic. Most people only use the top layer of this online encyclopaedia to search for information on a wide variety of topics. Many are aware that the site is maintained by a fluid community which may include anyone. However, only a small number of people contribute to the site or know that serious discussions often take place before changes are made or a new page is created. Wikipedia is transparent about this; all a visitor has to do is click the ‘talk‘ button at the top of an article.
This is the second layer: the backstage area of the published content, so to speak, which opens up an entire new world of interactions. It is where the discussions take place that shape the more contentious subjects of the project, or where new research is first added. It is also where we find ‘edit wars’, a whole range of abbreviations (WP:3D, WP:GF, WP:HA), absurd deviations, conspiracy theorists, fringe theories, crazy questions, arrogance, and additional knowledge. [1]
Visitors who dig deeper will find guidelines, Wikipedia humor, games, pages that are up for deletion, or insoluble disputes and blockades. Somewhere in between, there are ‘bots’, crawling the site for lost links, or vandalism. Technical layers such as CSS – the language that defines a website’s design – and html code – which is responsible for hyperlinks and a website’s structure – are even further down, on top of the internet protocols themselves, which are in their turn part of the World Wide Web that now defines the internet. [2]
The intangible space that appears to linger just behind the screen’s surface is, in that sense, architectural. There are metaphorical nooks and crannies, liminal spaces, forms that are incomplete and scattered within this digital, technological architecture. By way of anchoring the contemporary digital experience in a wider history of screen-media, I arrived at the 19th century diorama phenomenon.
Dioramas
When I first arrived in New York in 1974, I visited many of the city’s tourist sites, one of which was the the American Museum of Natural History. I made a curious discovery while looking at the exhibition of animal dioramas: the stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished,and suddenly they looked very real. I had found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real. – Hiroshi Sugimoto
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Earliest Human Relatives, 1994
Different definitions of a ‘diorama’ exist. According to Wikipedia, a diorama ‘can either refer to a 19th-century mobile theatre device or, in modern usage, to a three-dimensional model, either full-size or miniature, which is sometimes enclosed in a glass showcase for display in a museum’. While both theatre devices and miniature models are interesting, I first would like to focus on full-size dioramas enclosed in glass showcases.
The glass is important because it prevents onlookers from interfering with the scene. The most common example of this is the natural history diorama: a simulation of a scene from reality, reconstructed from a blend of real and artificial 3D and 2D components. It is a static display that creates the illusion of being a window into the world of a particular animal; it is a spatial snapshot. This artificiality contrasts greatly with the ‘natural’ situation it depicts. For this reason, I find dioramas ‘moving’ in an emotional sense. The once living animal is embalmed and entombed, frozen in time and space.
Some dioramas are literally moving. They may feature day/night cycles with colour-changing lights, or mechanical movement built into the models – but I will return to that later.
Poignantly, AI learns from an illusion. Since artificial intelligence has no understanding of what we experience as reality, generative image AI – visual machine learning – is based on interpreting reality from its representations: paintings, prints, photographs, films and text. These are fed into the system as data. Currently, AI learns from an isolated layer of existence. It is quite good at that, and useful when it comes to many scientific or medical purposes, but it quite obviously has its limitations in terms of grasping the complexity and messiness of reality.
Returning to ‘the screen’: in many ways, a computer screen is very similar to the glass pane that separates a natural history diorama from ‘the real world’. This is particularly true when working with 3D software, which enables me to create my own ‘dioramas’ and carefully construct simulations of ‘unreality’ within the confusing dimensions and scale of virtual space.
There is also a significant difference between the screen and a diorama: scenes are interactive, meaning the viewer – the artist – can interfere with them. On the internet, hypertext and links act as portals between different web pages. Games provide the experience of an avatar moving around ‘inside’ the diorama.
Afterimage, print on dibond, 2025. Open edition, 1:1 reproduction of my iPad screen. Available, read more here.
Augmented Worlds
When a screen resembles a diorama, the classic natural history diorama display behaves very much like a screen. They are illuminated, emitting light in otherwise dark exhibition spaces. A diorama has real depth, even though it appears to extend far beyond the display set. This is in contrast to the illusory digital/virtual depth of a two-dimensional screen. However, it is impossible to walk through it or view it from another side. The set is carefully composed for the viewer. It’s not completely flat either. A diorama is more like a stereo image, creating the illusion of depth on a flat surface with a limited 3D view.
Virtual reality has been around for a while, but it still requires bulky headgear and lots of technical equipment. Augmented reality, on the other hand, has the potential to be much more widespread: the tablet or phone screen acts as magic glasses, transforming the world in front of you for as long as you keep looking at the screen. The screen itself creates the illusion: it tricks you into feeling as though you are looking through it, when in fact you are simply looking at it while it displays what the camera sees. At some point, the device will probably be made entirely from glass so that you can actually see through it. [3]
The first example of AR I ever saw was ages ago at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, where dinosaur skeletons came to life when viewed through a special viewer. For a very long time, I only used outdated phones that were too slow and primitive to display mobile AR. I remember trying to get Pokémon Go to work on an old iPhone in 2016, but it just kept overheating and crashing whenever I tried to open it. 4
II. On Screens as Caves as Screens
In the previous segments, I discussed the differences and similarities between screens (such as computers, tablets and phones) and classic dioramas. I have always been interested in prehistoric ‘decorated’ caves as the first example of narrative architecture (or ‘scripted spaces’, as Norman Klein refers to them). I am now moving on to dioramas that simulate scenes from fiction rather than reality.
Prehistoric Media Art
One of the most common misconceptions about prehistoric cave art is that people tend to think of it as ‘paintings’. While many of the images are indeed painted, they are in fact part of the cave’s natural architecture. They are not randomly placed or inspired by a flat, canvas-like surface, but are instead integrated into the shapes, nooks and crannies of the interior of the individual caves. The art is not separate from the architecture, but an integral part of it that enhances the experience of the spaces.
This means that caves are multimedia environments. They are not just to be looked at, but experienced and interacted with. Depending on their size and layout, people used them for various purposes. Some of the better-known caves, such as Lascaux and Chauvet, are not accessible to the general public and have been partially recreated so that wider audiences can see them. This removes the decorations from their original context and raises new questions: are these simulations? Are they dioramas? Does it matter that they are inauthentic copies? Natural history dioramas have a distinct educational purpose: they show us things that we would otherwise not be able to see. That is precisely what the Lascaux and Chauvet simulations do.
But the caves themselves are very real, and their ‘decorations’, ‘art’, or ‘interior design’, still have an undeniably immersive effect. Even as a copy, Lascaux’s Hall of the Bulls, with its ceiling showing an imposing stampede of life-sized bison, deer and horses, is incredibly convincing as a 360-degree virtual experience. Looking up, visitors are surrounded by a dynamic circle of imposing shapes that seem to press in on them. When I visited the Lascaux II replica in 2012, I felt as if it was intended to make the viewer feel small, in a similar way to how a courtroom looks down on the defendant.
Caves are a form of natural architecture, and it would not surprise me if they served as inspiration for subsequent human-made buildings, particularly Neolithic dolmens, temples, churches, official buildings, and museums.
Returning to dioramas, one of their most important characteristics is their lack of interactivity. People are not supposed to change the depicted scene; they are intended to be three-dimensional snapshots, frozen in time. Theatre and altar sets are interesting in this context because they are only really dioramas when they are not in use. Once a play is being performed on stage, the set loses its frozen-in-time quality and becomes part of a time-based narrative. Actors interact with the scenery, and the diorama is lost. When a theatre set is abandoned, it could very well be considered a diorama. What are film sets, stages and other sets simulating? And how ‘alive’ are they without actors engaging with them?
The making of Lascaux IV, photo via The Guardian/Denis Nidos/Département 24, 2016.
I consider the virtual space that appears behind the screen of a computer device to be a direct descendant of the multimedia spaces found in some of the more elaborate Paleolithic caves. Apart from habitat dioramas depicting a static scene from a real-world ecosystem, there are also diorama theatre shows – large-scale paintings that are brought to life using light and sound effects. This is considered a predecessor of the cinematic experience and is sometimes called ‘precinema’.
This lineage could be termed ‘metaphorical spaces’: illusory environments that depict not quite reality, but rather a concept or idea. Even if the ‘display’ is intended to simulate reality, it will always differ in some way: it will be uncanny or sublime. This is what makes 3D software such an attractive medium for me: I am working in a metaphorical, unreal space.
acrwrs, 2019, edited 2026.
Footnotes:
[1] A typical example of a comical runaway discussion is this thread concerning the exact angle of Duchamp’s Fountain.
[2] Bots are small programs created by members of the community. Since the large-scale implementation of AI, bots also identify AI texts. Some less experienced or critical users tend to copy AI paragraphs to Wikipedia pages without checking for sources. As a side-note, the Depths of Wikipedia project by Annie Rauwerda highlights some of the comical and absurd particularities that surface on Wikipedia.
[3] This text was originally written in 2019, browser based AR or Web AR only became widely available (on certain standard browsers such as Chrome and Firefox) since the 2020s onwards About transparent screens: see also this article on The Verge from 2013 (!)
[4] AR applications only became available to me in 2020 – after purchasing my first iPad – and 2021, when I bought my iPhone pro (for its Lidar-scan options). Just to say that progressing availability of technology always has an effect on (my) artistic practice. I began experimenting with virtual 3D ‘sculptures’ and AR in 2020 and 2021.
Reading list:
- Klein, Norman M., The Vatican to Vegas. A History of Special Effects, New Press, New York, 2004
- Wonders, Karen, Habitat Dioramas: Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of Natural History, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Uppsala, 1993
- Huhtamo, Erkki, Illusions in Motion: Media Archeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2013
- Lewis-Williams, David, The Mind in the Cave, Thames & Hudson, London, 2002