Project Details
Projekt
Mimesis of the Space-Image: The Diorama as serial and immersive Mimesis
Subject Area
Theatre and Media Studies
Term
from 2013 to 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 213948042
In the second project period the investigations of the mimesis of the moving image will be extended to the space image. Specifically, this will focus on the example of the diorama. This object that will be investigated jointly now, will be used to combine the previously parallel projects into one. The continuation of the project will therefore take into account the results of the first period. On the one hand, starting with the cinematic McGuffin, it motivated stronger attention to space-consuming, material things and arrangements in their attention-controlling and fiction-driving mimetic function. On the other hand, starting from the serializing nature of television, it suggested a greater consideration of spatiotemporal interlocking relationships, productive development dynamics, and indefinability of the medial dispositive. Both research desiderata are now included paradigmatically with reference to the visual arrangement of the diorama. Here, the project remains interested in conducting research, both theoretically and empirically, in the processes of immersion and serialization. Immersion and seriality in the case of the diorama are located within the cultural practice of inferior and excessive mimesis as they lie at the core of the research groups interest as a whole, and how they are staged particularly effectively in dioramic arrangements and especially in the habitat dioramas. Since research on the diorama has been somewhat sparse on the descriptive level, a suitable empirical survey and description of dioramic arrangements will determine the goals of the research project. Special focus will be placed on the concrete dispositive, media-technological, and media-aesthetic compositions of dioramas and their immersive effects. In addition, questions about the relationships between vitality and artificiality, and animation and instantaneity are important. It is especially central to address the relationship between knowledge and its (entertaining) mediation. Finally, the diorama must also be situated (media-)historically and concerning the critique of ideology ((post-)colonialism, domination of nature). Likewise, the transmedial continuation of dioramic operations in holography and photography is relevant. A significant theoretical, imitation-aesthetic or even media-philosophical discussion with the diorama is so far entirely unknown. The theoretical work of the project on the logical-emotional foundations of mimesis and on the medial dimension of Ludwig Wittgensteins conception of family resemblance is therefore particularly challenged by the new object; it will be pursued intensively and at the same time expanded to the realms of space-aesthetics and the comparative research of media.
DFG Programme
Research Units
Subproject of
FOR 1867:
History and Theory of Mimetic Practices
