Come and See: Sensory Stimulation in Leisure Culture

In this chapter, I focus on the role of the senses in leisure culture by exploring some of the attractions that were presented at the Universal Exhibition of 1900. I examine one in particular: the Mareorama, a multi-sensory panorama that simulated a half-hour journey on the Mediterranean Sea. After reconstructing the workings of the attraction using archival material, I argue that the multisensory landscape is a fundamental step in the construction of simulated experiences: the moment in which the spectator of the expanded picture that is the panorama is endowed with corporeality and his/her presence begins to be conceived beyond an abstract eye, that is to say, understood as having a body and sensibility, which are both fundamental in the genesis of the simulation. The constant search for new mechanisms that replicate life in a realistic way, culminating in the Mareorama, allows us to understand the obsolescence implicit in this game of simulation. The Mareorama reflects the race for illusionism that panoramas undertook throughout the nineteenth century, in which each of the new typologies renewed simulation by creating mechanisms that made the previous devices obsolete.