ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century, the question of whether there existed an ice-free Arctic Ocean around the North Pole was vigorously debated in public media and scientific circles. The two Austro-Hungarian Arctic expeditions in the early 1870s were among many other polar expeditions which attempted to provide an answer to this question. The chapter takes as its starting point the media coverage of the two expeditions and investigates how scientific knowledge about the potentially open Arctic Ocean was communicated within and across different material spaces such as lecture halls, maps, and feuilletons. It analyzes how this knowledge was circulated through a highly complex and entangled performance of bodies, names, genres, images, objects, histories, and settings. The chapter thus contributes to recent debates about the circulation of knowledge by arguing first that the metropolitan spaces of Vienna were central preconditions for understanding how such performances evolved, second that the Arctic was a global space that had an impact far beyond its geographical location, and third that an awareness of the entanglement of knowledge is essential if we are to understand how material and media spaces intersect.
