According to Jonathan Crary, taxidermy is “continuous with the operation of both cinematic and photographic illusion” (Crary 2014, p. 163, p. 165). It is not, he says, a “nature morte but a glimpse of timelessness in the present. The objects are not a symbolic form of survival in the face of time's destructiveness, but an apprehension of the marvelous, of a real that is outside of a life/death or waking/dream duality”. We call this experience of viewing viviscopic in order to emphasise the ways in which the observer can be trained by the necroaesthetic procession of natural history collections to see as alive what is evidently, even at times emphatically, dead.