I remember this one diorama from a museum where we used to go for family outings when I was a kid. I guess this one was my favourite, because the memory is quite vivid. It was about cowboys. You could press a button, and a flickering orange light from a campfire brought the scene to life. Two life-size, motionless men in cowboy hats sat around the fire to share a drink. One of them held a guitar, and the speaker piped in some plucked strings and a nostalgic song. Behind them was a wagon, presumably holding all their worldly possessions.
I’m not sure what it was about the scene that held my attention back then. I guess it was the warm comfortable feeling invoked by the flickering orange of the campfire, the guitar-player’s song. The display felt like a portal to a world that promised adventure while delivering perfect safety. A world almost within touching distance, yet impossible to grasp.
Something curious about diorama is how it twists time around its finger. A fleeting moment is made to stand in for a decade, a lifetime, is stretched and distilled until it ceases to be a moment and becomes a place, a room you can enter and leave and enter again. In the process, its character changes. Whatever emotional currents the moment may have held, all that survives is a vague sense of wellbeing and a distinct if objectless nostalgia.
As far as I can tell, these are accidental side-effects of diorama. No-one is designing museum exhibits to instil a feeling of cozy nostalgia tinged with irreparable loss. Probably.
This brings me to my central thesis: lo-fi is the culmination of diorama. Specifically, lo-fi YouTube compilations. Every one of diorama’s curious effects - the stretching of time, the moment as place, the cozy nostalgia - is made more deliberate and dialled up to eleven. And while even the most committed museum attendee would move on from a diorama in minutes if not seconds, this lo-fi variant is regularly extended into the hours.
If you’re new to lo-fi YouTube compilations, I’ll include some of my favourites below. Or you can search for “lo-fi” anything and come up with 5000 more in a similar vein.