World exhibitions engineered realism through painstaking detail to guarantee a perfect model-reality correspondence

Evidence

At first sight, the distinction between representation and ‘external reality’ seemed very clearly determined. There are three features of the world exhibitions I will mention in order to illustrate how this distinction was set up: the apparent realism of the exhibits, their organisation around a common centre, and the position of the visitor as the occupant of this central point. First, it was remarkable how perfectly the exhibitions seemed to model an external world. As the Egyptian visitor noticed, on the buildings representing a Cairo street even the paint was made dirty. It was precisely this kind of accuracy of detail that created the certainty, the effect of a determined correspondence between model and reality. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 66

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the theme of representation and simulation — connects to the reader’s broader interest in how artifice creates the effect of the real, resonating with postmodern treatment of the copy over the original. — connects to: The mechanical view of reality mirrors machine structure point for point — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 874
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘the dirty paint’ — how hyperrealism in exhibits, museums, and even film sets manufactures certainty of correspondence by exaggerating deliberate imperfection.