Medium Specificity

di·o·ram·a

ˌdīəˈramə,-ˈrä-/

noun

• dusty wax Neanderthals in a museum....??

As I walked down the steps of my favorite building, contemplating what to create as a demonstration for medium specificity, a poster caught my eye. “Seeing Absence, Listening to Silence—the Challenge of Reconstructing Chinese Rail Workers’ Lives.” 

Seeing absence.

It stuck. So much of what we understand from our eyes depends on the negative space surrounding it. Paintings are static. An illusion of depth and light. What if they weren't though? What if the illusion was more real? Sculpture dabbles in space, but not as much with light....

A diorama.

Now before you go about complaining of how stale and dusty and creepy are the life-size wax figures in museums, consider what a diorama is. Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” delves into what makes a medium (particularly comics) and the various creative possibilities within that medium. He encourages us not to mistake the message for the messenger. So museums may be full of creepy wax people, yes, but what creative possibilities lie within the mixed media of dioramas?

Enter Louis Daguerre, the inventor of the diorama. The word literally means “through that which is seen,” meaning that Daguerre manipulated light through various angles of a thin canvas. He not only fundamentally changed the paintings, but also gave them life. It's a phenomenon that belongs solely to the medium and nowhere else. 

My work seeks to celebrate both conceptions of dioramic art. I've combined 3D objects juxtaposed against a rendered background with Daguerre’s light manipulation. In the first image lit from above, we see a knight facing a fierce dragon, who seems to be recoiling at his advance. When lit from behind, the tables are turned. The dragon is spewing fire, eyes bright and menacing, and our brave knight is cowering before it. I found it interesting that though the different lighting strategies function best with flat images, creating a silhouette of objects can also manipulate the message of a scene. It's manipulation of both space and light and the same piece can be projected different ways. 

In popular definitions, we see two main types of dioramas: the 3D recreation of a scene, and Daguerre’s conception. An exact definition is difficult and I don't have enough engagement with the medium to present one, but it's clear that dioramas mix elements from other mediums—sculpture, painting, lighting, printing and digital image manipulation (my image was created using photoshop and some tricky printing magic), etc. It's also helpful to note that dioramas embrace real space and real light instead of manufacturing it. Thus they beg for greater engagement from the audience. 

In experimenting with different combinations, I began to see the vision that Daguerre had when he invented the medium. The capacity to transcend what is traditionally 2D and 3D is enormous and largely untapped. Even so, the medium is far from a rare phenomenon. Remember this the next time you pick up a snowglobe, because you're really actually holding a very small diorama.