Anders Ekström

Exhibiting disasters : Mediation, historicity and spectatorship

The main purpose of this article is to draw attention to a long-standing history of exhibiting disasters to distant audiences. In particular, the article explores the transregional imaginaries and cross-temporal connections that emerge from the history of what may be labelled the disaster display or disaster show. This refers to a particular genre of multimedia re-enactments of extreme events that developed in the context of temporary exhibitions and popular amusements in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Disaster displays typically involved visual representations, sound effects, fireworks, lectures and theatrical performances, and invited their audiences to experience a diversity of extreme events, for example distant wars, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, fire fighting and floods. In offering a blend of special effects and the thrills of authenticity, disaster shows copied and competed with, and sometimes incorporated, some of the traits of a variety of attractions in turn-of-the-century popular visual culture, such as serialized wax displays, moving panoramas and early film. The article especially investigates some of these intermedialities but it also discusses how the displays engaged and positioned the audience.

History of participatory media : politics and publics, 1750-2000

This book argues for a historical perspective on issues relating to the notion of participatory media. Working from a broad concept of media – including essays on the 19th century press, early soun ...

Remediation, Time and Disaster

This paper explores the deep historical contexts for imagining natural disasters. By focusing on a foundational event in the Western disaster imaginary – the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 – and its remediation across centuries, the paper suggests that the real-time aesthetic of the mediation of extreme nature events that now abounds in contemporary culture is profoundly embedded in processes of historical intermediality. The term remediation is used to denote a genuinely historical mechanism by which past and present (process and event) are simultaneously made visible. Empirically, the paper investigates the superimposition of temporal dimensions in recreations of the ancient disaster from the late 18th century to the present. Using the insights gained from this spectacular case study, the paper ends by arguing that a re-temporalization of historical analysis itself is needed for history to contribute to contemporary concerns with the present as a conjuncture of multiple and conflicting time scales.

‘Showing at one view’: Ferdinand Boberg’s ‘statistical machinery’ and the visionary pedagogy of early twentieth‐century statistical display

This article highlights the educational and intermedial discourses that developed around the representation of statistics in museums and temporary exhibitions in the early twentieth century. It is especially concerned with pictorial representations of statistics and the visual realism that were attributed to the statistical media by educational reformers. The article also aims to discuss how experimentation with statistical displays around the turn of the twentieth century can be related to other media usages in the same period. In this perspective, the article describes two statistical pavilions erected by the Swedish architect Ferdinand Boberg for temporary exhibitions in Helsingborg in 1903 and Stockholm in 1909. On these occasions, Boberg developed a figurative method of representing statistics using moving models, or what he referred to as a ‘statistical machinery’. This work drew on popular forms of picture statistics, but also on a much wider range of fairground attractions. At the 1909 exhibition, the statistical pavilion was placed in the entertainments section, next to staged enactments and rides, and it is argued that it was from these amusements that Boberg copied and refined techniques to attract the attention of the audience. In the conclusion of the article, there is a brief discussion on the educational, political and aesthetic visions that developed around the statistical museums at the beginning of the twentieth century, and especially in relation to the picture statistics developed by Otto Neurath.