Projects

This comprises an interactive audio-visual installation in which the spectator, using the Visorama, interacts with images which tell the story of the landscape. Upon interacting with an urban scene (the first navigation level), the spectator perceives, little by little, that he is before a mosaic image that hides hundreds of other images containing other levels of navigation. The landscape and faces seen comprise part of the story of the characters that inhabit the scene initially displayed. The installation mixes scenes and faces, images and sounds, fixed and moving images, leading the spectator into exploiting the images to find his own place in the landscape. By manipulating the Visorama, the spectator displaces himself ‘inside’ the projected image, exploiting it in its tiniest details. As from a 30x zoom, the spectator starts to perceive that the initial image is made up of small natural landscape images, which comprise another level of navigation. It is important to notice that the image keeps its resolution throughout the zoom selected whatever the navigation level. Upon penetrating one of these landscapes, the spectator becomes aware that the same process repeats itself, that is, it comprises a mosaic image with two depth levels in the former, the urban image is comprised of images with ‘natural’ scenery, in the latter, the ‘natural’ scenery is made up of faces. These faces display movement and talk about landscapes. The spectator perceives that these comments, which mingle with the sound of the landscapes previously seen (at the first and second level of navigation), are nothing more than the impression of the feelings of these persons into the landscapes that they lived in or imagined.

This is an interactive installation project in which Visorama is used for interacting with 360-degree panoramic photographs created between 1900 and 1904 by the Lumière Brothers with their Périphote camera. The panoramic photographs – in the cellulose nitrate format (8.7 cm x 62.8 cm) – are found in the CNC Archives. They had been made to be presented on Photorama, a system allowing for the projection of these panoramic pictures in a 20-metre diameter rotunda with an 8-metre high screen on the entire periphery. The goal of this project is the remaking of photographs of the places represented by the Lumière sights in order to allow the user to observe the transformations occurring to the landscapes represented, as well as to travel in space and time by way of Visorama. The user interacts with the photos of the past and present as if they were a virtual environment. The software component comprises a visualization system with a high-level language, allowing for the design of transition between the images and a multi-resolution module so as to preserve the same image definition resolution during the zoom. These two characteristics of the visualization system allow for an immersion and greater interactivity of the environment represented through the photographs.

Visorama integrates a group of contemporary mechanisms, halfway between audio-visual, art and interactive interfaces. In fact, in these last few years, we have watched the coming of a series of panoramic installations, contemporary to Visorama, whose mechanisms are also, in their own individual ways, a variation of the convergence of contemporary art, advanced technologies and cinema as new media. To make art converge in another way, with audio-visual and narrative interfaces, we radically transform the narrative possibilities of cinema. In the Rear Window Project, we use Visorama to reinvent the cinematographic experience of Hitchcock’s film. The space of the Rear Window installation simulates the loft in the film by the same name. The idea is to force the interaction between the loft’s real window and Visorama’s virtual window. When the spectator manipulates the device, he produces certain events on the windows observed on buildings in sight. He can decide whether he wants to get closer to this or that window and, when he does so, he induces events. Certain events will transform the physical conditions of the loft where he is, mainly the lights, sounds, images on the television and the operation of certain devices such as the stereo and the clock. Everything is done so that the events triggered by the spectator surprise him, like in the movie.

The Visorama may be featured also as a virtual museum for the creation of dynamic and interactive information spaces, a virtual window that allows us to visualize perceptive adventure in space and time. In order to understand the Visorama better, we shall analyse three examples of some changes currently taking place with the educational action of cultural centres, through the emergence of new communication technologies. The Visorama brings together, all at one time, these three features of the new museums as information spaces, by enlarging their spaces and actions, rendering their collection and experiences dynamic and, above all, by extending their networks. The Visorama brings together, all at one time, three new features of the museums as information spaces, by enlarging their spaces and actions, rendering their collection and experiences dynamic and, above all, by extending their networks.