Édouard Riou, “Intérieur de la grande serre dans le jardin reserve,” Grand album de l’Exposition Universelle 1867 (Paris: Michel Levy Frères, 1868)
“Ambient Empire” explores greenhouses, aquariums, and gardens in French art and mass culture from 1860 to 1940. A media archaeological examination of spaces of nature in Paris, this dissertation will attend to scholarship on infrastructure, French empire, and technologies of visualization. By studying environments built for various contexts including expositions, film studios, and surrealist exhibitions, I will interrogate the diverse political and aesthetic purposes behind simulated ecologies. What gave rise to this widespread interest in nature as public entertainment in the mid-19th century? Why was nature managed and mediated by bureaucrats and artists alike? And how did experiences of constructed “nature” inflect and inform ideas of technology, culture, and race? Methodologically, my research will look between and across media: first examining records of built sites through firsthand textual accounts, prints, and photographs and then exploring the influence of these new sites and technologies on contemporaneous film, photography, collage, and installation art. Overall, this dissertation suggests that these environmental constructions emerged as part of a modern world-building strategy to stage the new and the different—whether applied to explore ecosystems, visit colonies, imagine futures, or encounter the unconscious.