Might the jellies literally matter in their displays such that questions about their agency or “actorship” (Latour 2005 Haraway 2008) should be asked? Are aquarium-goers (such as myself) shaped and reshaped by the immersive space of the displays, the movements and corporealities of the non-humans, and the architecture of animal capitalisms (Shunkin 2009)? Do jellies, technologies, and people sometimes exceed the promise of aquariums to offer immediacy? How do the bodies of the display (organic or inorganic) exist simultaneously as not fixed or immutable, but also differentiated and always already constitutive, always “dynamically enacted,” and already “materially configured” (Barad 2007)? To begin to answer these questions, I turn my attention to the materiality of perception, display technologies, and the animals themselves. Instead, I want to follow out other resonances at work in these jellyfish displays: differences in display technologies variations in viewing subjectivity and perception and, alterations in cross-species encounters. I am not suggesting that the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and more specifically the Drifters exhibit, do not share in this “civilizing” history-they clearly do. technological achievement, and the expansion of nation and its dominion under the salty waters. As these spaces gave entry into inaccessible environments for most observers, they also suggested the extension of biological knowledge, the prowess of U.S. The most prized organisms were “exotics” from non-European environments, fueling ongoing colonialism in the mode of animal husbandry. The animal other, here, is subjected to a politics predicated on differential hierarchies of power. The monumental scale and architectural detail of these buildings demonstrated the power of nation, the ability of culture (nationalism) to maintain dominion over its non-human inhabitants. These early aquariums, strategically placed at the borders of land and water and nation, offered the public a prescribed amount of underwater nature. The Shedd Aquarium, constructed on the shore of Lake Michigan, marked the beginning of erecting grandiose spaces inspired by oceanic themes to house underwater animals. The New York Aquarium is constructed in Castle Clinton, a former fort established before the War of 1812 to defend Manhattan. Shedd Aquarium (1930) in Chicago that turned aquatic attractions into examples of monumental civic architecture. It was the New York Aquarium, followed later by the Waikiki Aquarium (1904) and the John G. Barnum, who saw the spectacular potential of aquatic organisms and their display technologies, initiated the advent of the aquarium in the United States (Taylor 1993). At their worst, aquariums use captive animals to evoke an anthropocentric sanitary zone, a generative and informative force in the purification of Western civilization. The aquarium presents itself as a stage, an unspoiled garden in nature, a hearth for learning self from other or human from animal, a clarification of the ontological and epistemological disorders of nature and culture (Davis 1997). Many have also argued that these exhibits engage a story of looking with deep roots in “imperialism and the process of nation building… a contemporaneous sense of what their observers are by showing them what they are (supposedly) not” (Desmond 1999: 144). However, they also give us what Ralph Acampora calls a “zoöscopic” experience, a totalizing view that disappears meaningful human-animal encounters at the price of reinvigorating anthropocentrism (2005). In their most benign form, they act as sites of ecological hope, maybe even compassion (Clifford 1997). These exhibits are familiar they provide a simulation of the real thing, soliciting the sensation of unmediated encounter with marine worlds. It is markedly different from the common habitat exhibits at the aquarium, which attempt to give the observer an authentic marine environment-such as the Giant Kelp or the Mid Waters exhibits. I have been drawn to the Monterey Bay Aquarium (MBA), trying to figure out what are the poetics of the Drifters display in the Outer Bay exhibit.
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