In their photographs David and Tania Willen focus on the aesthetic, pictorial dimension of today's aquariums. The motifs come from Swiss zoos and the Swiss high-end aquarium scene — public and private laboratories in which people act as “aqua scapers,” designers of mineral-vegetal-animal cabinets. Like pictures themselves, these cabinets stand in the field of tension between reality and virtuality, presence and absence, the animate and the inanimate. The fish drawing its circles in the aquarium may be present as a living creature, yet through the glass one experiences it as the image of a fish. That the fish in the Willens' strictly front-facing photographs seem literally to hang in mid-air underscores the virtual character of the aquarium: it is nothing less than a precursor of television. In his essay, Jörg Scheller uses the example of the aquarium's co-founder and populariser Philip Henry Gosse (1810–1888) to show how the aquarium emerged as an interface between art, science and religion.