In documentary filmmaking, there exists a fundamental dialectic between continuity and montage – between the representation of a continuous flow of time as captured by the camera and the interruption of the continuous shot to introduce an alternative view, image and/or idea. This dialectic is common to all linear, time-based visual media including film, video, and digital video, as well as to audio recording. The presentation of uninterrupted time-images made possible by these, mostly, 20th Century media, has a corollary in 19th Century observational painted and photographic presentations of spatial contiguity,  particularly in the form of painted and photographic panoramas.

Among the changes brought about by computing technology are the ways in which digital tools enable the integration of temporal and spatial imagery on a common surface and, the ways they both minimize and maximize the dialectic of continuity and montage. They offer the potential to present temporal continuity and uninterrupted (or contiguous) spatial representation, while, at the same time, allowing for montage, collage, layering, compositing, and other forms of media-mixing.

Once dialectically opposed methods of panoramic art and cinema, such as those of continuity and montage, of close-up and long-shot, and of exposition and narrative, now co-exist. They are not mutually exclusive; the compositing and layering of materials on a continuous and/or contiguous environment enables the simultaneous presentation of both syntagmatic and paradigmatic elements.

The impact is significant. Cinematic and photographic viewing experiences are, equally, readerly ones. Passive "viewers" become active "users". As is true with Web interactivity in general, panoramic works can provide ways to bridge critical and creative modes of representation such as writerly modes of exposition, poetry and narrative. In the same vein, the differences between researcher, artist, and user may also dissolve. The researcher and artist may use the same or similar programs to gather and compose their materials.

Similarly, users may follow --or participate in-- the process of building propositions, arguments and/or expression. Thus we see a critical and methodological shift from product to praxis: theory and practice merge in ways that integrate methods of prior arts, including notably, panorama and cinema, in new and hybrid environments.

THE 19TH
>CENTURY PANORAMA

19th Century circular painted and projected photographic panoramas were generally presented in rotundas designed to achieve, as much as possible, an unobstructed view in 360 degrees of a location seen from a singular point. They were designed to offer viewers the illusion of being able to grasp a vision of places in their entirety rather than by fragments – as, say, through a montage of related pictures. They were designed to offer viewers the illusion of being able to grasp a vision of places in their entirety rather than by fragments – as, say, through a montage of related pictures.

From the center of the pavilion, the spectator safely views a scene–––perhaps even a ghastly one– and achieves some comfort or even power in grasping the image as a version of a world that is resolved. The viewer possesses in its entirely the image of a world that is seamless and enclosed. Bernard Comment write that this produces the illusion of control; "The invention of the panorama was a response to a particularly strong nineteenth-century need–for absolute dominance. It gave individuals the happy feeling that the world was organized around them and by them, yet this was a world from which they were also separated and protected, for they were seeing it from a distance."(1999 : 9/1993 : 9)" (1)

Paradoxically, the inverse may be more accurate. Actually, it is the image that encompasses the viewer in both the exotic locales of its form (the panoramic rotunda) and in its content (representations of foreign lands, ancients worlds, battlefields, etc). It is impossible to grasp a panorama in its entirely in that it offers more than one can take in at a single glance. As one turns, one must remember what one cannot see while looking in some other direction.

Both in actuality and in this medium, the impression (one might say, illusion) of unity is provided by spatial and temporal seamlessness. In turning, one does not see a break in the image or sense any break in time. This illusion of seamlessness is one of the characteristics of panoramas that new media artists have been exploring, as, for example, by showing how even the same scrolling scenes can lead in differing directions.

Robert Baker patented the concept of panoramic paintings in 1887. His groundbreaking works includes The Panorama of Edinburgh(1888), which he presented in his home, London from the Roof of Albion Mills (1892), which was shown in a rented space, View of the Fleet at Spithead (1896) which is shown in a small split level rotunda that Baker built for the purpose in Leicester Square, London, and the highly successful Battle of Abonlair (1898), which also was shown there. The success of these works led to international invitation and a flurry of similar projects being developed by other artists and entrepreneurs, and the popularity of panoramas continued until the rise of cinema in the 1890s, about 100 years after Robert Baker's invention.(2)

Various attempts at achieving verisimilitude through the inclusion of changing light, smells, platforms that rocked to simulate boat rides, or performed re-enactments (particularly in battleground panoramas) magnify the limits of the form. The was always something that would be missing, as for example, in the response in La Nature (June 15 1889) to The Panorama of the Transatlantic Company, "What the illusion lacks is a light breeze, floating pavilions, the sound of the lapping of waves..." (3) The illusion of the panorama is an expression of absence – particularly of time, and those elements like wind and waves that exist in, mark, and measure time.

In 1894, about 100 years after the invention of the painted panorama and just moments before the invention of cinema, Charles Chase introduced the Stereo-Cyclorama to present a circular image of the Great Chicago fire. Using slide changes, he was able to create an impression of movement. (4) The form was still popular when the famed inventors of film, the Lumiere Brothers, mounted a photorama in the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition. But, where the panorama resonated with 19th sensibility,(5) the rise of cinema, radio, and television in the 20th Century left the popular 19th form marginalized.

The panoramic photo, typically an elongated flat image, is quite different. Photographic panoramas become popular forms of capturing images of lands and landscapes. The length required to print a 360 degree view most often limits its size, which presents a paradox; images often made to express sensory excess of a 360 view in turn reduce the image to tiny representation in printing, diminishing detail and excess, which are primary qualities of the panoramic experience.

The question of size is a problem also common to film; the conventions of deductive and inductive editing and of zoom camera movements are means to balance the wish to gain an overview with a desire to view the details that make-up that whole. The problem is central to the dialectic of continuity and montage – to see the parts that make up the whole is to get close to them, and to contextualize them via their use and significance in diegesis as well as their place in the overall landscape. Elements that may have a singular place in the visual whole – the overview– may have multiple significations when seen up close and in relation to specific contexts such as those of individual concerns and collective narratives.

Like the panorama, the cinematic long-take is structured by a constant; where the long-take provides temporal unity the panorama offers a spatial unity. The cinematic pan provides both, and all three --the long-take, pan, and panorama-- generally reinforce objectivist illusions of contiguity and continuity. Many of the earliest films, such as the first works by the Lumiere Brothers, presented single takes, constructing an experience of verisimilitude though this expression of temporal continuity ­-- a forever reviewable slice of time.

The paradox of seeing and not seeing the whole is exaggerated all the more in the cinematic pan, which combines continuity and contiguity. While the seamlessness of space and time suggests that the world beyond the frame remains fully intact, verification is frustrated by the limits of the frame line; the user must wait for the technology to deliver the confirmation of wholeness that is established by a rhetorical convention.

Film technology imposes an authoritative, organizational structure; the time-base of the technology imposes a constant (the frame-rate) by which the content (the images) is mediated. This is very much like the authority that is installed culturally through the introduction of other technological institutions of time, such as the universal time system, train schedules, mechanized assembly lines, and workplace timecards. In film, the flicker of images, whether at 18, 24, 25, or 29.97 seconds per minute is essentially fixed. The cut breaks the flow of time (although some strategies of editing minimize the effect of this rupture on the apparent continuity of the action).

Montage, heavily theorized through the past century of film,(7) is the cutting from a single uninterrupted take to some other shot or to a discontinuous moment of the same shot, as is the case with a jump-cut. Through a linear sequence of edits, a filmmaker presents images that may imply continuity by following action and preserving a compositional stance (continuity editing), or not.

Thus, the cut implies a movement from one image to another. The rupture, frequently dialogical in nature, refigures the viewers position vis a vis the original image, and it provides opportunity to change perspective on the context by which the images are viewed. In the processes of post-production, the creator of the edited work is therefore applying poetic and rhetorical strategies. The viewer interprets these choices, deciphering how one image leads to the next. (8)

Roderick Coover
Temple University
Contact Information

      DIGITAL PANORAMAS

The digital panorama is a hybrid that combines elements of the 19th Century form of panoramas with aspects of cinema and browsing environments. Some digital panoramas are time-based, turning like a pan in cinema, and others are navigated by a viewer using a panoramic digital software such as Quicktime VR or gaming devices. Some digital panoramas, particularly those used to market real-estate and tourist locations, are maximize contiguity and continuity and avoid apparent seams and sutures. Such models usually do little to take into account the temporal conditions and cultural contexts of panoramic moment (which in fact is an amalgamation of moments tied together.

Where traditional panoramas bind all elements in an image to common photographic instant and to a single axis of perception, alternative uses of panoramas may disrupt this authority, revealing some of the ways it is constructed. Modes of exposition, voices and viewpoints mix. The circular image may be layered with objects like photos, sound clips, videos and text like an organizing scrap book, and these panoramas may contain links and paths to other locations or arrays. This is the case, Mysteries and Desire: Searching the Worlds of John Rechy(8) which is an experimental autobiographical DVD co-authored by Rechy and the Labyrinth Project at the University of Southern California.

Mysteries and Desires presents a series of interpretations of Rechy's life experiences, with particular attention given the symbols and conditions of being a gay writer in mid- to late- Twentieth Century Los Angeles. The panoramas in Mysteries and Desires are environments that a viewer navigates, choosing links that lead down interactive paths or into collections of materials. Three primary panoramas represent three models of representation, introducing a theme that runs through the work, that differing methods of representation are needed to bring forward diverse aspects of gay cultural life that include playing with taboos, role models, and cultural symbols.

Therefore, one must discover the hidden aspects of a panoramic view, and on discovering links, the viewer may be invited to pursue differing kinds of interactivity to illicit responses that otherwise remain concealed. The insights that the various responses yield about the culture under view maybe expressed by language, or photos, or comic images or even dance.

A series of links leads viewers to a comic book section about body-building. Based on an advertisement for a weightlifting tool, the comic strip shows a scrawny boy who has sand kicked in his face on the beach by a tough guy. The boy responds by purchasing weights and becoming a muscleman. Rechy uses interaction to offer viewers two routes though similar material: an essay on the role of the muscleman in gay culture or an animated photo-sequence evocative of the visual iconography of the muscleman in the contexts of athleticism, power, and sexual desire.

The choice of which approach to engage with is in the hands of the viewer, literally: the computer mouse is represented on the screen by a small iconic barbell. If the reader-viewer starts to lift the barbell and "workout", the reward is evocative and sensual body transformations. If not, the reader-viewer listens to the exposition.

Thus from within a panorama, viewers enter into layers of material that evoke, as much as explain, Rechy’s views of gay cultural conceptualizations the body. Other examples of genre-crossing and disciplinary crossing uses of panoramic environments include the documentary projects of Tirtza Even and Brian Karl such as Occupied Territory(10) and the narrative projects of John Cayley, such asWhat we will have of what we are: something past,(11) as well as in my own works such as the animated panorama Something That Happened Only Once (2005).

Recorded in Mexico as a set of photographs that were then composited in Photoshop and animated in After Effects, Something That Happened Only Once combines a composited, animated panorama with text about a subject projecting experiences of rootlessness on a field of other subjects in the visual public sphere. Found-sounds and expressive poem fragments written by an author express these projections, each of which fails, thwarting the realization of narrative potential. Any one form of interpretation is greatly limited without the aid of others.

A panorama is a collection of moments seamlessly combined; it is not one moment. To demonstrate the impact of this composition fact, the cycle in Something That Happened Only Once changes as one turns a second time through it. Some events that begin in firth cycle conclude in the second one, while other events begin in the second cycle and conclude in the first. This is one of several strategies to liberate the elements of an image (characters, objects) from the authority of a singular time-space frame while still allowing for the presence in the visual sphere. Some individuals engaged in fore-fronted activities may appear several times in a single cycle as the individual actions function independent of the time it takes to complete a cycle.

Actions in the cycle in Something That Happened Only Once float freely liberating individual actions (and the worlds of individuals who performed them) from the singular authoritative time-base of the camera. The free floating elements -- composited in diverse rates of frequency and order -- run counter to the dominating order of time given by the technological apparatus of the pan. As the image turns, the user will recognize that the second time around is not the same as the first. Elements that make up the panorama, such as images of individuals, follow actions at rates shaped by their own narratives and not by the singular structure of time (as traditionally established by the recording device).

The structure of the cycles resembles a möbius strip. Some events that begin in one cycle may be shown to develop in a second one, while other events that would seem to begin in that latter cycle may conclude in the former, such that there is no beginning. Or, rather, there are many beginnings and each beginning is determined by the actions of individuals rather than by the seamless backdrop. The effect of this is that users cannot rely on the temporal apparatus of the pan as a means of making the elements of the space conform to a single narrative. Instead users must identify characters and follow their narrative trajectories through a temporally destabilized space.

Although contrary to many conventions of panoramic representation, these strategies may be truer to natural processes of cognition than those of the conventional long take or pan. In looking at the world in-action, attention jumps from one action to another. Users commonly gloss over areas that are bland. If the goals of the viewer change such that the details matter, otherwise ignored aspects of experience are then looked at closely.

The slow pans used in works like Something That Happened Only Once accentuate this tension between sight and apparatus, because they draw attention to how the frame line becomes an marker of time; this experience is magnified when the work is played on two adjoining walls spiraling in opposite directions from a common line where they abut each other.

The choice, although contrary to the convention of panoramic representation is truer to how the images are actually gathered in witnessing spurts of activity in one or another area in view. And, people who are seen in one part of a panorama may appear in another – they are not spatially confined to a single zone. Using the camera a provocative tool, drawing out elements that seem defining of certain narrative trajectories and symbolic structures.

 CONCLUSIONS
AND DIRECTIONS

These works of mine as well as others discussed in this essay share in their maximizing the horizontal form to draw attention to social spatial constructions and the authority of linear media conventions. This critical re-evaluation of the technique of panoramic production and presentation is advanced through the use of layering by which diverse elements are brought into the contiguous image demanding reader-viewers evaluated relationships between parts of an image and the whole.

Links open the panorama into a field of potential paths – whether paths through space or paths to various kinds of documents, fieldnotes, interviews, archive photos, etc. And, disruptions of the panoramic image or even a layering of one panorama on another is used to displace subject to place relationships while also offering a means to describe similarity and difference between cultures, or, at least, between cultural means and modes of expression.  The digital panorama points to an excess that it also destabilizes.

In these ways, the marginalized medium of the 19th Century panorama returns in a new form in vital conjunction with the arts of documentary cinema and those of browsing environments. While no one tool is good for all seasons any more than any one discipline or genre can be, the digital panorama expands the range of ways to show, and question, the construction of places in time. The digital panorama can be used to draw viewers into interactive path-making processes.

In these ways, viewers explore how objects recorded in actuality might relate to each other in the cultural imaginary – how they function, the ideas or histories they might point to, etc. As such, the digital panorama limited to the traditional constraints of circularity; viewers may as much enter through the panorama as cycle along its surface imagery, linking into the possibilities or propositions that any one image might point to and holding such ideas in balance with the surface representation.