framelessness + temporality : the nineteenth-century & virtual reality panorama

Abstract

This dissertation explores the way in which image-technologies have
been historically used to represent ‘space’ within Architecture and Art,
relative to both the static and moving viewer. In particular, this poster
graphically narrates the final chapter of my dissertation.
Virtual Reality Panoramas have fascinated me for some time, their
interactive nature affording a spectatorial engagement not evident
within other forms of digital imagery. This interactivity however is not
generally linear, as is evident in animation or film, nor is the engagement
with the image reduced to the physical or visual border of the image as
its limit is never visible to the viewer in its entirety. So what is it about VR
Panoramic images that are so different to traditional analogue and
digital images or its nineteenth-century forefather? The historical and
conceptual difference is related to two concepts; the image’s
‘framelessness’ and embedded ‘temporality’. The image’s
‘framelessness’ can be understood both in terms of the physical
destruction of the images edge, or rather its subversion or interruption
of the viewer’s perception of the image’s boundary, but also in terms of
the image’s inseparable physical and conceptual relationship with the
framing capacity of a corporeal viewer whom directly engages with the
image. The image’s ‘framelessness’ therefore exists both as a
consequence of bodily and non-bodily mediations. Secondly, the nature
of the media that is used to compose the VR Panorama [the photograph]
contains its own multiple temporalities that, through the typological
framework of the Panorama, expose a looped temporal framework that
is unlike any other image media.

This research therefore investigates questions regarding the stasis,
movement, framelessness, and temporality of both the image and the
observing subject, that provide new insights into the nature of the
nineteenth-century panorama, the VR panoramic image, and potentially
to that of emerging image technologies and artefacts that continue the
immersive and conceptual affects of the panoramic genealogy.