Panoramas

Panoramic history: Devices and Interfaces

We can say that there had been, in this last quarter century, a new panoramic image vogue: new photography, cinema and video equipment and devices were created. Among them, we point out a new computer-based visualization method based on panoramic images that has originated several programs that allow for the creation of the so-called ‘virtual visits’.

Several exhibits and publications have been produced, having the panoramic image as the main theme: The Panoramic Image (John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 1981), The World is Round (Hudson River Museum, 1987), Panoramania (Barbican Art Gallery, London, 1989), Panorama – La Collection Bonnemaison (Actes Sud, Arles, 1989), Panorama des Panoramas (Centre National de la Photographie, 1991) and Sehsucht (Bonn, 1993). Recently, Expo 02 (2002), in Switzerland, presented six giant panoramic installations, two of which were set up in a building erected by Jean Novel in Lake Neuchatel.

Interest in panoramic photography has been renewed through the photos by David Hockney, Andrew Davidhaze, Joseph Kudelka, Jeff Guess, Jeff Wall and Bernard Bonnamour. Important contemporary artists have worked with panoramic installations: Michael Snow, Gary Hill, Stan Douglas, Doug Aitken, Pipilotti Rist, Sam Taylor-Wood, Egbert Mittelstädt, Ann Hamilton and many others. In the field of new medias, artists like Jeffrey Shaw, Michael Naimark, Christian Ziegler, Du Zhenjung, Masaki Fujihata, André Parente, Luiz Velho and others have presented several immersive and interactive installations. Some of these installations recreate the cinematographic device in all dimensions, adding to the cinematographic image the immersive architecture of the panoramas and the interactive language of the new computer interface.

For us to be able to understand the extent of the issues raised by interactive panoramic installations, we need to look back to the problems raised on the one hand, by the panoramic image, with the advent of panoramas and, on the other, situate the immersive and interactive audio-visual installations within the history of the wide-screen cinema.

Panoramas

A panorama is a type of mural painting built in a circular space around a central platform where spectators can look around in all directions and see a scene as if they were in the middle of it. It was patented by Robert Baker in 1787 and at that time was a very popular representation of landscapes and historical events. The drawing below shows a section in a three-storey panorama building dating from 1793.

Panoramic images bear an impressive history since the panorama comprised the first imagetic mass device, and prevailed in Europe during the nineteenth century, even before the cinema and photography.

The panorama is the first imagetic mechanism of tele-presence. The panoramas simulated – through a 360-degree painting, gazed at from a central platform – ‘represented’ reality with such perfection that the spectator felt as if he were actually there, surrounded by it. The premises created by the panoramas were similar to the ones created by the most sophisticated simulators, which provided the simulation of a real experience, namely, in the case of panoramas, the experience of visiting a place.

In fact, the panorama represents an epistemological breakthrough in the escopic regime of images as important as the emergence of pictorial abstraction. It is pertinent to note that modern art arises from a transformation detected by Diderot in eighteenth-century French paintings, with the works by Greuze, David and Chardin. According to him, these paintings are strictly related to an effort to combat the theatrical nature of representation and rationalization of figuration, caused by the remnants of Cartesian rationalism, evoking an unbound image intended to be looked at by the eye of reason, thus denying the presence of the spectator.

Modern art dealt with the place of the spectator through two different ways: the aesthetics of opacity and the aesthetics of transparency. In the first case, painting would become more and more impenetrable, with the use of impressionist strokes and later on, of abstraction. In the second case, on the other hand, painting would do everything to bring the spectator inside the picture. Both these conceptions deal with the problem of the presence of the spectator, who becomes the observer, and strengthens the tension between subject and object, situated at the origin of modernity. Impressionist painting, and later on abstract painting, would take radical measures and take to the last consequences the aesthetics of opacity, while panoramas are the perfected mechanisms of the aesthetics of transparency, since their main objective is to bring the spectator into the image.

The evolution of the panorama is related to the betterment of different panoramic immersion mechanisms with the aim to take the spectator to the centre of the represented action. A first modification was introduced by Charles Langlois, in 1831, when he replaced the central platform, from where the spectator looked at the painting along 360 degrees, with a ship, from where the spectator looked at the battle of Navarin, represented in the Panorama de la Bataille Navale de Navarin.

Certain variations of panoramas used other kinds of architecture. The American panoramas, nicknamed moving pictures or moving panoramas, differed from European ones by their non-cylindrical shape. Their great innovation consisted in replacing the traditional platform with a device that simulated a ship or a train, so as no longer to create simply a visit, but a real trip. Once placed there, the spectator took part in a trip along the Mississippi or the Grand Canyon, for example, through a large flat painting that ran along the window before which he remained for hours (it has been said that some pictures were more than three miles long). The simulation of movement became more effective when moving pictures started to adopt cinematographic images, captured from windows of trains and ships.

In 1900, at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, some remarkable panoramas were shown, transforming the panorama into a complex installation, half way between theme park, cinema and advanced systems of virtual reality. The Mareorama case is well documented. With Mareorama, the spectator would travel among the more representative landscapes between Marseille and Yokohama, including Naples, Ceylon, Singapore and China. The platform, disguised as a transatlantic ship, 70 metres long and capacity of up to 700 people, would lie on a Cardan suspension system to simulate the swaying of the waves. Actors would execute navigation manoeuvres while a ventilation system diffused marine scents and the light was altered creating an effect of dusk at the end of the trip. A truly complete show that was nothing short of anything found at current theme parks.

Cineorama, patented by Grimoin-Sanson in 1897, is a mechanism formed by a circular building with circumference of 100 metres. Its white walls function as a continuous screen on which the images of ten projectors form an apparently single image. The centre of the room is occupied by a huge balloon basket equipped with routine accessories, anchor, ropes, counterweight and ladder. The ceiling is covered by a curtain imitating an aerostat envelope. The ten synchronized devices are fixed under the basket and, once the room is darkened, they project views of take-offs, balloon trips and landings, the last obtained by rewinding the film.

All these variables have certain common aspects. The spectator remains in a sort of ‘environment’ represented by images ‘projected’ around him. The interaction offered by the panoramas is naturally accepted by the spectators, since it is very similar to the way we are used to perceiving the world, as if we found ourselves in its centre, like bearers of affections and sensations that support what we see.

The panoramic image displays its own historical tradition, set in two very distinct trends: the architectural panoramas and the iconic panoramas, with the photographic ones being the best known. The photographic panoramic images are true moving images, even before the movies. The panorama allows us to re-stage the history of art and of the technical image since it deals with a system that is the origin of many fundamental questions. Immersiveness and a new type of visibility, amongst others, are questions that are highly dependent on the observer’s appearance on stage. In this sense, it seems that the panorama comes to render problematical the relationship between image and spectator.

Virtual Panoramas

Recent advances in image-based rendering techniques have enabled the real-time simulation of panoramas on the computer, which we call virtual panoramas.

In a virtual panorama a digital image is ‘painted’ onto a panorama surface using environment mapping techniques. A virtual camera is then used to observe the surface interactively. The user is allowed to rotate the camera around its nodal point and change its field of view. The image to be projected on the surface is called the panoramic image. This is illustrated in Figure 1:

The panoramic image represents the projection of the environment on the panorama surface. The virtual panorama systems provide tools for the creation of these images from photographs. These could be taken from the real world or from a modelled environment.

After being mapped on the panorama surface the panorama image can be interactively observed on the screen, as if the user were at the location where the pictures were taken. The process just described involves two projections: (1) the projection of the environment on the panorama surface; (2) the projection of the panorama surface onto the virtual camera screen. The panorama surface should have a simple geometric shape (cylinders, spheres and cubes) to facilitate these two environment projections.
A virtual panorama system has two major components: an authoring environment and a visualization system. The first allows the creation of the panoramic image. The second performs the projection of the panorama surface onto the virtual camera interactively, allowing the user to pan, tilt and zoom with the camera.
The rebirth of the panoramic image through virtual panoramas (the photorealistic virtual environments), leads us, for the first time in the history of technical images, to reposition the age-old opposition between images and models, between the sensitive and the intelligible.

In fact, the interactivity of new panoramic installations will potentialize what already existed in embryo in ancient panoramas and that represents an even more radical transformation in the relation between the image and the spectator, initiated by modernity. In modern works, the spectator cannot be idealized as a subject of knowledge: his vision evokes the sensitive and carnal eye, since it becomes a support for the sensations produced by the aesthetics of opacity and transparency (the
first focuses on sensitive aggregates, the second on a world of sensations). But the contemporary work and its inherent interactivity presupposes an increased complexity of this relation. In fact, the contemporary work, instead of the modern one, does not pre-exist in its interaction with the spectator. The installation allows the artist, the film-maker and video-maker to spatialize elements that constitute the work. The term indicates a kind of creation that refuses the reduction of art to an object to better consider the relation between its elements, among which, many times, is the spectator himself. The experience of the work by a spectator constitutes a determinant factor. The work is a process, its perception takes place during a journey. Engaged in a journey, implied in a mechanism, immersed in an environment, the spectator participates in the work’s mobility.

The mechanism designates the form through which the material presentation of the work is inscribed in a systemic and structured gaze. Since the end of the 1950s, art started to elaborate the concept of work as a situation, an environment, an architecture, a mechanism. That is, an installation that engages the physical participation of the spectator, who becomes one of the work elements.

More recently, the projection of moving images went on to constitute the main elements of work. The participation of the spectator, by means of advanced technologies, has been gaining greater amplitude. In this case, not only does the spectator inhabit the work but he can interact with it, transforming it with his action. The installations that use immersive and interactive panoramic mechanisms are interesting to the point that they act for the convergence of contemporary art, advanced technologies and cinema as new media.

Finally, with the panoramic image, the hybridization between images reaches its paroxysm: between painting and virtual reality (by the immersiveness of the panoramas); between the artistic image and the installation (which requires spectator participation); between photography and the cinema (a chronotopic image, which is made in movement); between photography and the photorealist virtual environments (the recent image-based visualization systems); between the image and the Net (hypertextual panoramic image).

The panoramic image bears a number of basic characteristics: an extrafield lack, but the presence of framing (= the total field idea pursued by the panoramic image); a single image, but a multiplicity of perspectives (= the rotation of the camera creates a multiplicity of perspectives); a single take, but a inscription in time (the image is an image-movement, which corresponds to the sweep performed by the camera); the illusion of teletransportation instituted by the architectural panoramas: the spectator feels transported into the universe represented by the image.