ABSTRACT
Much has been written about the turn-of-the-century World’s Fairs and their phantasmagorical landscapes, which offered their wide-eyed visitors encyclopedic representations of the world’s latest technological, demographical and territorial wonders (Çelik 1992; Gunning 1994; Tobing Rony 1996). In several ways, the great exhibitions constituted ‘total’ media situations by virtue of their capacity to accommodate and integrate a variety of other media phenomena (Habel 2006). Discursively important sites for staging and showcasing Western modernity to the public, the great expositions furthermore assembled a variety of spatio-temporal planes to set off the latest achievements of technology, architecture, and culture against each other (Ekström 1994, 12f, 20, 170; Jülich 2006). I would argue that the compression of time and space presented in these contexts contributed to defamiliarizing visitors from their everyday sense of orientation, requiring them to learn new ways of looking at, and interacting with the exhibition architecture. Borrowing Janet Ward’s formulation, spatiality was rediscovered (Ward 2001).
