Early Popular Visual Culture
ISSN: 1746-0654 (Print) 1746-0662 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/repv20
Nature at a glance: Immersive maps from
panoramic to digital
Brooke Belisle
To cite this article: Brooke Belisle (2015) Nature at a glance: Immersive maps from panoramic
to digital, Early Popular Visual Culture, 13:4, 313-335, DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2015.1111590
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2015.1111590
Published online: 02 Feb 2015.
Submit your article to this journal
View related articles
View Crossmark data
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=repv20
Download by: [Brooke Belisle]
Date: 03 February 2016, At: 18:00
Early Popular Visual Culture, 2016
Vol. 13, No. 4, 313–335, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2015.1111590
Nature at a glance: Immersive maps from panoramic to digital
Brooke Belisle*
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
Department of Art and Consortium for Digital Art, Culture, and Technology, Stony Brook
University, SUNY, Stony Brook, USA
This article offers a media archaeology of immersive world maps and astronomical models, focusing on walk-in terrestrial and celestial globes. Innovations in
digitally interactive data visualization promise spectators new ways of extracting
knowledge from complex information. But the outsized claims and expanded
formats of emergent displays invoke the ambitions of earlier scientific spectacles
such as the nineteenth-century Georama – a giant sphere whose interior was
painted to model the surface of the globe. Comparing immersive and interactive
models of earth and sky exposes changing assumptions about how nature is
ordered, how aesthetic representation should recapitulate that order, and how a
spectator might perceive and know not just a model but the construct of reality
itself. This article discusses examples spanning almost two centuries, such as
the Gottorp Globe, the Georama, Wyld’s Great Globe, the Celestial Globe of
the 1900 Paris Exposition, the Atwood Sphere, the twin maps of Google Earth
and Google Sky, and the Reality Deck 1.5 gigapixel display recently funded by
the National Science Foundation at Stony Brook University.
Keywords: Georama; Celestial Globe; data visualization; World Exposition;
Google Earth; Google Sky
Reality Deck
In 2012, Stony Brook University unveiled the Reality Deck digital visualization
environment.1 As ‘the world’s first immersive, 1.5 gigapixel display’, the Reality
Deck is a rectangular enclosure of 40 × 30 × 11 feet tiled with 416 high-resolution
LCD displays (Figure 1). Costing $2 million to build, largely funded by the
National Science Foundation, its stated purpose is ‘to break barriers in data visualization and help scientists deal with the challenges presented by the massive datasets of today and tomorrow’ (Anon n.d.b; Tarantola 2012). Institutions ranging
from private corporations to the Department of Defense and NASA have expressed
interest in developing applications for the facility or creating systems modeled after
it. The Reality Deck seems to respond to a pressing demand that is both produced
and met by contemporary conditions of digital culture: Big Science, driven by Big
Data, needs bigger pictures.
Although the Reality Deck is adaptable to ‘any application that involves a
tremendous amount of data,’ current applications focus on datasets that lend
themselves to spatial display and navigation. For example, a climate modeling
simulation uses ‘global scale GIS [geographical information system] visualization’
to map layers of data about weather and pollution onto satellite imaging of the
*Email: brooke.belisle@stonybrook.edu
© 2016 Taylor & Francis
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
314
B. Belisle
Figure 1. Digital illustration of the Reality Deck running a simulation of the Milky Way.
Earth’s surface (Figure 2). The most popular simulation in the Reality Deck
extrapolates the logic of global, geographical mapping to an astronomical scale; a
wrap-around image of the Milky Way galaxy maps the dimensional coordinates of
stars around the flat array of screens. Using motion sensors, the image can be
dynamically rendered in response to input from a headset that tracks a viewer’s
position and viewing angle within the enclosure of screens.2 When the viewer steps
toward the array of LCD screens, the image zooms in; when he turns his head, the
image scrolls.
On one hand, the Reality Deck marks an unprecedented innovation, using interactive new media technologies to address contemporary epistemological challenges.
On the other hand, the Reality Deck is only a recent articulation of the ways that
science and spectacle have repeatedly intertwined in efforts to break representational barriers. In its claims to offer an embodied encounter with knowledge on display, it especially restages aspirations, rhetorics, and viewing strategies associated
with panoramic spectacles in the nineteenth century. In particular, its immersive,
cartographic displays of the globe and the galaxy suggest resonances with enormous spherical panoramas that were once built like giant, walk-in terrestrial and
Figure 2. An observer in the Reality Deck examines a climate modeling simulation that
uses satellite imaging of the Earth’s surface; figure is not wearing trackable headset.
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
Early Popular Visual Culture
315
celestial globes. Georamas and Celestial Globes offered immersive, educational,
and purportedly accurate representations of the entire planet or of its astronomical
context. Like the Reality Deck, Georamas and Celestial Globes concatenated an
overarching image from multiple, discrete aspects. Like the Reality Deck, they
prompted spectators to visually and viscerally explore an image as an encapsulating, material environment.
What follows will recall several influential examples of walk-in, wrap-around
representations of earth and sky. Drawing multiple instances into a coordinated
account is not meant to enact a panoramic view in its own right, as if these examples are necessarily or seamlessly connected. The Reality Deck does not constitute
the repetition or evolution of any earlier spectacle, pointing directly back to the
past; nor does it stand as a unique beacon of the present, pointing directly toward
the future. Rather, to consider walk-in maps from multiple moments suggests that
such innovative spectacles, and spectacles of innovation, recirculate historically persistent ideas in culturally specific ways. As changing technological and cultural
contexts innovate new forms of a walk-in map, what aspirations are repeatedly
restaged? Alternatively, how does each construction express specific assumptions
about how knowledge manifests through natural phenomena, aesthetic form, and
perceptual experience?
Panorama
The first panoramas appeared at the turn into the nineteenth century as enormous,
wrap-around paintings that offered to present a ‘total view’.3 The name ‘panorama’
was coined by the painter Robert Barker to name an invention that his 1787 patent
initially called la nature à coup d’oeil [nature at a glance].4 The patent specifies
that a linked series of canvases were to be stretched around a cylindrical, inner
chamber what would be lit from above and viewed from a central platform
(Figure 3). Scrims were to extend from the viewing platform to the top and bottom
Figure 3. Cross-section view of Robert Barker’s first cylindrical panorama, which had two
rotundas and canvases. Source: Robert Mitchell, Plans and Views in Perspective, with
Descriptions,.. in England and Scotland, London: Wilson and Co., 1801.
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
316
B. Belisle
edges of the canvas, framing a complete angle of vision so as to produce the sense
of a continuous and borderless view.
In a public advertisement for his first panorama, Robert Barker describes a
‘view-at-a-glance of the cities of London and Westminster [...] which appears as
large and in every respect the same as reality’.5 Following Barker’s lead, early
accounts repeatedly emphasize how panoramas produced a sense of being present
within the pictured scene (Anon 1842; Griffiths 2003). One review claimed that
through the panorama ‘the sight-hunter of our times may enjoy a kind of imaginary
tour through the world […] all the world in an acre – of canvas’ (Anon 1929, as
reprinted in Herbert 2000 393). A panorama’s overall reality effect was described
as a recapitulation ‘in every respect the same as reality’ but, at the same time, this
impression relied on partitioning a view into sections that could be rescaled and
coordinated as an image. The panorama was a technique for compressing and condensing an outsized reality, ordering it into the perspectival logic of a consumable
scene – ‘all the world in an acre – of canvas’.
Although scholars of digital media have retroactively interpreted the panorama
as a form of proto-VR (e.g. Grau 2003), it is significant that the patent refers to
‘coup d’oeil’ – not ‘trompe l’oeil’, with its connotations of optical illusion. The
panorama’s strategy of verisimilitude was anchored in aesthetic conventions and
visual desires that cannot be precisely equated with those that animate visual culture today.6 As a technology of visual mastery, the panorama’s special technique
was coherence; it promised to construct an image that visually cohered in the same
way that nature itself visually cohered. It promised to organize different, discrete
perspectives into an integrated view that could be experienced ‘at a glance’.
The ‘glance’ that could take in a wrap-around view was only singular to the
extent that it took place as a continuous, embodied look. In Barker’s 1787 patent,
he specifies that the panorama artist must ‘delineate correctly and connectedly
every object which presents itself to his view as he turns round’ in a given place
so that the same view can be seen by ‘an observer turning quite round’ in the
panorama (Barker, quoted in Oetterman 1997, 358). Rotating on the viewing platform to take in a painted scene arrayed around her, the panorama viewer actively
adopted the viewing position that had ordered, and was ordered by, the image. She
actively coordinated a view that required her participation; it was integrated through
her act of seeing.
The immersive verisimilitude of a panorama was based on the presumption that
the way the panorama coordinated its multiple panels into an overarching image
matched the way that a viewer’s perceptual grasp would order not only a painted
environment but also an actual environment into a coherent view. To conceive of the
world as a panoramic spectacle in this manner is to imagine that its diverse appearances already exist together as objectively coordinated. In other words, the reality
effects of a panorama both relied upon and cultivated the presumption that the world
offered itself to perception in the same manner as a panorama. In the nineteenth century, the rise of the panoramic format correlated with a broader panoramic imagination that helped support the assumption that coherence was a characteristic of reality
itself – what might otherwise be considered too fractured, multiple, or vast could be
integrated from the privileged position of a central point of view (Comment 1999;
Oleksijczuk 2011). It became possible to consider not only any extended scene a
panorama, but also almost any coordination of parts into a whole: literary collections,
series of photographic images, and even the globe itself.7
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
Early Popular Visual Culture
317
Georama
The Georama appeared several decades into the nineteenth century as a variation
of the painted, wrap-around panorama. Specifically, it was meant to offer spectators an embodied encounter with the spectacle of the globe. The Georama took
the idea of the panoramic image to a hyperbolic limit, offering an image of the
whole world organized by the circumference of the Earth itself. To see the globe
‘at a glance’ correlated with ways the world was being actively interconnected:
through relationships of empire and industry, new shipping routes and telegraph
lines, standardizations of measures such as the meter, the establishment of ‘world
time’ mapped in equal intervals around the Greenwich meridian. The Georama
gave visual expression to a broader interest in picturing the world as a coherent
whole that could be encompassed by universal scientific, political, economic, and
cultural frameworks.
The first named instance of the Georama was proposed by Charles Delangard to
the Geographical Society of Paris in 1822 and was erected in Paris in 1826 (Anon.
1827; Delangard 1828; Oetterman 1997, 9). A sphere of approximately 40 feet in
diameter, its interior was painted with a geographical representation of the entire
Earth. Curved iron rods used as structural supports doubled as a grid of latitude
and longitude lines, lending a pretense of mathematical accuracy to the Georama’s
painted map.8 Viewers could ascend a spiral staircase to a viewing platform level
with the equator and examine labeled images of the oceans and continents
surrounding them (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Illustration of Delangard’s Georama (the illustrator has translated French place
names into German because this was printed for a German audience).
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
318
B. Belisle
Delangard’s Georama could not claim to perfectly recapitulate the experience of
actually standing within the scene that the image pictured – at the center of a planet
turned inside out. Instead, it emphasized the unique perspective offered by an
inside-out Earth: the world wrapped around your gaze. Delangard described his
innovation as a ‘machine’ that improved upon the ordinary globe such that ‘the eye
can embrace almost the totality of the surface of the Earth in one glance’. He
emphasized that the Georama was especially valuable for displaying geographical
information because it could be analyzed at different visual scales; it ‘allow[ed] the
spectator either to examine a single place minutely, or to take a coup-d’oeil to the
full extent of his visual angle’. For Delangard, the Georama’s ability to express
information across various scales allowed it to communicate ‘a volume of information brought together, which could not be collected by any other means’. This
helped overcome the ‘great obstacle to the study of Geography’, namely, ‘the difficulty of managing the voluminous details’.9 His use of the words ‘volume’ and
‘voluminous’ suggests that the Georama could bring together this increased quantity
of information and details due to its shape as a sphere. The ability to be bodily surrounded and perceptually immersed within the image is associated with a special
capacity to engage and understand the otherwise overwhelming quantity and
patterns of information that the image communicates.
After Delangard’s Georama was taken down, another was built by Charles
Langlois and August Guerin and opened in 1844 on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
A report that year by the Institut de France celebrated it as a powerful new means
of grasping geography and recommended that georamas be built in all the major
cities of France (Anon 1846, 1849, 355). By this time the format of the georama
had gained international acclaim. Alexander von Humboldt, the great explorer,
physical scientist, and father of modern geography was said to consider it
a lovely and ingenious idea to place the spectator in such a situation that he could
embrace in one glance all the regions of the world and the immensity of the seas and
bring together and compare the different countries, as if in an immediate intuition.
(Jullien 1829)
Humboldt mentioned the georama in his magnum opus, Cosmos, and it seemed to
emblematize his own influential ambition, expressed in that work, to express all of
nature within one overarching framework.10
The most influential georama was erected in London’s Leicester Square in
1851, down the street from the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, where it
remained for over a decade.11 Conceived and built by geographer and mapmaker
James Wyld, what became known as Wyld’s Great Globe was set within a larger
building in which Wyld exhibited and sold globes and maps. A hollow sphere, over
180 feet in diameter, its inner surface was painted with a topographical map of the
Earth’s outer surface (Figure 5). After purchasing a ticket, visitors would pass
through a darkened antechamber to a door that opened into the Globe’s painted
interior. Stairways led to multiple viewing platforms from which visitors could
examine, wrapped around them, all the world’s oceans, continents, rivers, and
mountain ranges.
Most contemporaneous accounts of the Great Globe follow those of Delangard’s
Georama in arguing for its value as a tool for teaching geography. One author
claimed:
319
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
Early Popular Visual Culture
Figure 5. (a) Wyld’s Great Globe, exterior view. T.H. Shephard, Chavanne. Engraved for
‘Mighty London’, Read & Co. 10, Johnson’s Court, Fleet Street, c. 1855; (b) Mr. Wyld’s
Large Model of the Earth, printed in The Illustrated London News, 22 March 1851, p. 234.
The modeling of the Earth’s surface within rather than without so large a Globe,
involves no possible misunderstanding, or apparent inconsistency. […] Instead of having one large square map hung up in a room, we have a room made globular, and a
map of the whole world evenly spread over it; so that all relative distances and size
can be kept, and the whole picture be seen without distortion. (Morley 1851, 370)
Rather than emphasizing the accuracy of its details, the author emphasizes the correctness of its coherence, the way it is ‘evenly spread’ so that ‘relative distances
and size can be kept’ and relationships between different parts can be seen without
‘inconsistency’. The innovation, in other words, is not simply a ‘whole picture’ of
the ‘whole world’, which any miniature globe could offer, but the way in which a
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
320
B. Belisle
viewer, embedded ‘in’ the image, could accurately ascertain forms of interconnectedness within this whole. In a pamphlet that Wyld himself produced for visitors, he
differentiates the Great Globe from a map, claiming it teaches ‘what no map can
teach – the earth’s form as a whole, its general aspect, the relative quantities and
positions of its several parts’.12 In other words, by standing inside the sphere, the
observer could view all aspects of its inner surface relative to one another: Earth’s
‘general aspect’ was purportedly disclosed through the sum of relationships visible
between its ‘several parts’. The georama’s ability to communicate information was
less about the reality effects of verisimilitude or immersion than about the way the
georama’s spherical structure could uniquely display and produce visual
knowledge.
The image inside the Great Globe may have lacked the ‘distortion’ ordinarily
introduced by projecting global geography onto a two-dimensional map, but did
involve other forms of distortion and possible ‘misunderstanding’ or ‘inconsistency’. For one, the scale was different for longitude and latitude, compressing the
distance between North and South poles to make it easier for visitors to take in
details of the entire interior surface from a viewing deck placed at a central elevation (Lightman 2012, 24). The larger and more peculiar distortion, however, was
the way the georama turned the world inside out for more convenient examination
and placed the spectator at its putative, albeit impossible, center.
Standing inside a georama, a world unfurling itself for apprehension actually
torqued in self-enclosure. Every feature of the planet’s face arced around the viewer’s gaze; the infinite points around the planet’s circumference, the infinite angles
of view imagined from outside it, were consolidated in an implosion of perspective
such that every mountain leaned toward every other, and every peak pointed toward
the new center of the world, which was wherever the viewer stood. This involution
coordinated a global view through a mutual effacement of self and world – the
spectator at the vanishing point of an image swallowing itself up. The inversion
performed by the georama folded a purportedly expanded view back upon itself as
an all-encompassing representation.13
The correlation of Wyld’s Great Globe with the Great Exhibition in 1851 marked
a coordination among political, scientific, and aesthetic efforts to stage the whole
world as one integrated spectacle – a panoramic imagination that animated the
second half of the nineteenth century. The collusion between georamas and global
exhibitions continued for many World’s Fairs to follow. A smaller georama was popular at the 1889 Paris Exposition, and perhaps the most extravagant example was
planned, through never produced, by Élisée Reclus for the 1900 Paris Exposition
(Dunbar 1973; Nead 2007) (Figure 6). In a presentation to the Royal Geographical
Society in 1898, Reclus made the following pitch for his proposed georama:
Now, at a time when every […] newspaper brings us news from all parts of the
world; when every one of us […] is fed and clothed with productions of all continents
and seas; […] the moment has come for us to have grand representations of our common home, and not to satisfy ourselves with petty spheres. […] Now Globes must be
temples themselves, as well by the magnificence or proportions as by the beauty of
workmanship and the scrupulous care of scientific drawing. In sight of such constructions, people must feel grave and respectful, not only because those monuments
consecrated to science will partake of its majesty, but also because they will belong to
all men, without any privilege for race or nationality, and will help to strengthen
within us the feeling that we are one and the same family. (Reclus 1898, 406)
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
Early Popular Visual Culture
321
Figure 6. Planned Georama for 1900 Universal Exposition; image in French national
archives, catalog F 12/4446 D.
The need to stage the globe as a grand spectacle seems prompted by felt effects of
globalization – news media and commercial products that circulate across national
borders. Reclus draws on the sanctity of science to elevate this sense of connection
from the vulgar reality of capitalism to a ‘grave and respectful’ reverence for the
world as a ‘common home’. He seems to imagine that situating spectators at the
physical center of his georama would not only disclose the inherent unity of
the globe itself but also engender a more profound feeling of integration, a sense
that all Earth’s inhabitants stand together as members of ‘the same family’. Echoes
of his sentiments would reverberate through the twentieth and twenty-first century,
as images of the globe produced from space achieved a different turning-inside-out
of perspective than the georama’s imploded view.
Celestial Globe
Although the terrestrial globe that Reclus proposed was not built for the 1900 Paris
Exposition, another panoramic sphere recast the georama’s ambition at an even
grander, cosmic, scale. Photographs, postcards, and posters of the 1900 Universal
Exposition in Paris show an enormous panorama that once stood near the Eiffel
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
322
B. Belisle
Tower along the right bank of the Seine: the blue Celestial Globe, marked by a grid
of longitude and latitude lines and decorated with figures of the Zodiac and constellations (Figure 7). Visitors were invited inside to stand on the platform of a
mechanical Earth and rotate around the sun, watching stars and planets circulate
around them (Anon 1899; Boyd 1900).
Designed by architect Paul Louis Albert Galeron, it was planned by Camille
Flammarion, the charismatic founder of the French Astronomical Society, the
author of popular books on astronomy, and a science-fiction writer who believed in
extraterrestrial life. Merging education and entertainment, the Celestial Globe was
thematically linked to the Giant Telescope installed in the Palace of Optics, whose
simulated views of the solar system, stars, and comets were understood as scientifically accurate. Just as the Georama was described as a visual tool for teaching
geography, the Celestial Globe was described as a visual tool for teaching
astronomy.
The planned pairing of a Georama and Celestial Globe at the Paris Exposition
follows a long tradition of producing paired terrestrial and celestial globes
(Stevenson 1921). Georamas and Celestial Globes reflected this tradition most literally when the outsides of their spheres were decorated with the image that would
complement the image visible within their interiors. The exterior dome of Wyld’s
Great Globe, for example, was painted blue and decorated with stars (Altick 1978,
465). Likewise, perhaps the earliest walk-in celestial globe, the Gottorp Globe, was
painted on the outside as a terrestrial globe (Figure 8). It was built around 1650 for
Frederick III, Duke of Holstein, and at just over three meters in diameter is smaller
than later panoramas. Its interior is painted with colorful images of the zodiac
studded with gilded stars (Anon n.d.a)
Over a century after its invention, the wrap-around panorama experienced a
final efflorescence at the turn into the twentieth century. At the 1900 Paris Exposition, the Celestial Globe was only one among many panoramic spectacles. Over
100 years after the first painted panoramas, the panoramas at this event demonstrated changing techniques as they met with the emergence of cinema (de Vries
1971, Friedberg 1993). Many boasted scrolling canvasses and mobile scrims, situating viewers on mechanized platforms that simulated, for example, the visual experience of a train ride, an ocean voyage, or an ascent in a hot air balloon.14 Thomas
Edison also produced some of the first panoramic films at the 1900 Paris Exposition, such as Panorama of the Paris Exposition from the Seine (Edison 1900).
Panoramic films were usually one continuous shot captured from a camera that
either swiveled in place to film a wrap-around view or tracked in a horizontal or
vertical line, often because the camera was ‘riding’ in a boat or train. These films
marked a transition from physical panoramas to the cinematic medium that would
dominate the next century. At the turn of the century marked by the 1900 Exposition, the form of coherence that the wrap-around panorama had constructed ‘at a
glance’ was rearticulated through changing logics of moving images and mobile
views.15
The Celestial Globe at the Paris Exposition used multiple platforms and complex mechanical automations to immerse spectators within an animated model of
the universe as well as to set their own view in motion. Multiple written descriptions of the Celestial Globe offer almost identical accounts, describing a sphere 145
feet in diameter that contained, at its center, another sphere 110 feet in diameter
representing the sun. After paying an additional fee, 100 spectators at a time could
323
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
Early Popular Visual Culture
Figure 7. (a) Poster of Celestial Globe, in private collection; (b) ‘The Eiffel Tower and the
Celestial Globe, Paris Exposition of 1900,’ stereograph published by H.C. White, copyright
mark 1901.
enter a ‘miniature earth’ and travel around the sun ‘from west to east, receiving the
impression of diurnal rotation’. During their ride, ‘the stars appear to rise in the
east and set in the west. The moon moves around the earth, presenting its usual
monthly phases. The phenomenon of eclipses is visible. All these celestial
B. Belisle
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
324
Figure 8. (a) Photograph of the restored Gottorp Globe on exhibit at the Kunstkamera, the
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, in St. Petersberg; (b) Representation of the interior of the Gottorp Globe and enlarged view of stars that mark constellations within the interior.
movements are accomplished with scientific precision’ (Anon 1900b, 184). With
mechanical models moving on fixed tracks, the Celestial Globe operated almost like
a mechanical orrery in which spectators could take a ride.
Representing vast astronomical phenomena, the Celestial Globe could not
promise what was prized in the Georama: the pleasure of seeming to see everything
present at once, or the opportunity to accurately gage ‘relative distances and size.’
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
Early Popular Visual Culture
325
The spectacle unfolded over the duration of the ride on a moving platform, around
a central model of the sun that would obscure any overall view. Relative distances
and sizes of celestial bodies were nowhere near to scale. The special value of the
Celestial Globe was identified, instead, with the presumed ‘scientific precision’ of
its multiple moving parts and its ability to bring together diverse celestial
phenomena into one coordinated, dynamic spectacle.
Spectators riding inside the Earth were integrated into complex, scripted relationships of motion. They could not freely explore on foot, but the mechanized
orbit they experienced may have offered a more profound sense of mobility; it represented at the level of visceral experience a cosmic scale of movement that cannot
be humanly felt – a sense of the relational motion among the body, the Earth, and
other celestial phenomena. Being carried along a fixed track within a moving scene
may have been felt to analogize the actual situation of being carried on a planet
with its own fixed course through a universe in motion.
After the Celestial Globe of 1900, the most influential celestial sphere, sometimes called the first planetarium, was the Atwood Sphere, built in 1913 and currently on display at the Alder Planetarium in Chicago (Figure 9). Almost 700 holes
of varying size are punched into metal surface of the sphere, so that exterior illumination produces pinpricks of light visible from within the interior. About 15 feet
wide, the dome of the Atwood sphere is also geared to allow a slow, mechanical
rotation meant to depict the changing view of the stars relative to the Earth’s rotation. Its shape and motion, and the fact that its exterior was once painted with an
image of the globe, mark it as a transitional instance between nineteenth-century
panoramic enclosures and twentieth-century planetariums. The 1923 invention of
the Zeiss star projector enabled a new generation of spectacles that would use
patterns of projected light to represent star positions.
A clear line of development leads from panoramic enclosures through cinematic
spectacles to today’s digital, projection planetariums (Griffiths 2008). This line
could be seen to pass through World’s Fairs and scientific spectacles – such as the
1969 World’s Fair exhibition of the film To The Moon and Beyond, which was projected on the wrap-around Cinerama screen inside the Moon Dome, and the 2013
IMAX hit Hubble 3D. Using expanded scales, immersive enclosures, and even 3D
glasses, such cinematic depictions of space continued to translate the mobility of
the viewer to that of the image (Friedberg 1993; Griffiths 2008).16
Digital panoramic
When the Reality Deck opened – over a century after the Celestial Globe at the
Paris Exposition, and almost two centuries after the first Georamas – it articulated a
contemporary imagination of how our terrestrial and celestial surroundings might
be staged as walk-in, digital spectacles. Using computational techniques, the Reality
Deck draws on the tradition of panoramic enclosures while finding alternative
forms of immersion and interaction. Like the panoramas before it, the Reality Deck
relies on the active participation of the spectator to produce reality effects that
depend on relationships of scale, relative mobilities of spectacle and spectator, and
coordinations between the apparent whole and its parts.
In a press release, Reality Deck project director Dr. Arie E. Kaufman describes
it as a tool for virtually stepping into, and interacting with, information. He calls it
a ‘display environment’ and ‘a one-of-a-kind exploration theater’. Defining the
B. Belisle
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
326
Figure 9. (a) Atwood Sphere, exterior as displayed in Adler Planetarium; (b) Cross-section
diagram of interior of Atwood sphere.
Reality Deck as an ‘environment’ and ‘theater’ suggests it should be understood
less as a screen or image than as a space where some activity takes place. It evokes
an older sense of ‘theater’ as a site where theories and concepts become enacted,
tested, and displayed – as the spectacle of surgery was performed in operating theaters and as military strategy unfolded across theaters of war.17
The same press release states that the gigapixel display ‘saturates the eye’ and
approximates the resolution of human vision, as if to suggest that it offers a spectacle as visually dense as reality itself. The computer processing power that makes
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
Early Popular Visual Culture
327
the image dynamic and responsive adds to the affordances of its spatial enclosure
and resolution such that the Reality Deck can, according to this account, ‘provide a
life-like, realistic immersion into the data to be explored and reasoned with’ (Anon
2010). Here ‘realism’ is not ascribed to the image, but rather to the ‘immersion’;
and spectators are not described as being immersed in the image, but rather ‘into
the data’. This distinction between data and image appears more stark given that
data is usually considered the non-visual information that is used to produce the
image. For example, when an image of a star appears on the screen during the
Reality Deck’s Milky Way display, that star can be rendered from multiple perspectives, at multiple sizes, and in multiple locations within the enclosure, depending
on the user’s interaction with the display. Each rendering will algorithmically process the same basic data about this star however, such as mathematical information
about its astronomical coordinates relative to other stars in the Milky Way.
Kaufman seems to suggest that by viscerally interacting with the image, users are
able to intellectually manipulate whatever data subtend the representation.
Beyond simply visualizing data such that it might all be perceptually grasped,
the Reality Deck promises to stage data within an interactive theater that allows
information to be ‘reasoned with’. Resonating with claims about the Georama,
this rhetoric surrounding the Reality Deck suggests it is literally a room for
thought. While the Georama claimed to disclose the surface of the Earth (a phenomenon that is visible in principle, even if rarely in practice), the Reality Deck
promises to disclose data that might otherwise be too abstract, complex, or vast
to engage. Georamas and Celestial Spheres allowed spectators to embody imagined vantage points that were embedded ‘inside’ the world and universe, but
nonetheless offered visual mastery. They accomplished this task by implying that
the world and universe were already spectacles coordinated around and by the
spectator’s look according to the same rules that governed their panoramic recapitulations. Offering ‘immersion into the data’, the Reality Deck promises access
to a world and universe that it presumes already discloses themselves as data. By
staging data in a form that affords its embodied, perceptual experience, the Reality Deck not only aspires to transform computational information into a terrain
for scientific exploration; it suggests that our contemporary forms of visual
knowledge already conflate data and reality.18
The assumption that a spectator will engage in scientific reasoning within the
Reality Deck overlooks the ways a spectator is likely to explore the image and display environment for the visual interest they offer in themselves. In my own interaction with the Milky Way simulation, the claim of an ‘endless’ image tempted me
to look for an end, and I found one. Rotating repeatedly to unwind the ribbon of
the image can expose its zigzag edge: a black gap extending for the width of about
two panels. Backing far enough away from the screen zooms and tracks out beyond
the posited limits that map the image to the enclosure. Forcing a mismapping of
the image to the display reveals a representation of the entire image-loop, its virtual
panoramic enclosure appearing on one flat face of its screens (Figure 10). A similar
problem fascinated me within the climate modeling simulation: I became preoccupied with the relationship between the black space between the panels on the grid
of displays and the black lines of grid markings visible on the image of the map
that was projected across the screens (Figure 11). Rather than simply disclosing
‘bugs’ or faults of the representation, these interactions surface some of the algorithmic logics that structure how the Reality Deck renders data as image, maps its
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
328
B. Belisle
Figure 10. (a, b) Images that show the limits of the immersive image, photographed inside
the Reality Deck while running the Milky Way simulation.
picture to its spatial display, and harnesses its dynamic representation to user
interaction.
The algorithmic logics that govern how the Reality Deck stages reality also
structure many other algorithmic, interactive spectacles that promise us panoramic
views today. Google™’s cartographic projects Google Earth and Google Sky offer
much more popular examples of how the pairing of terrestrial and celestial globes,
and the history of immersive maps, carry forward in digital culture (Figure 12).
These virtual models of the globe and the universe can be accessed on personal
computers with keyboard and mouse interaction or on mobile devices with touchscreens. While each program can run separately, Google Sky also can be mapped
onto the globe of Google Earth or run as its backdrop, recalling the way that
Georamas were once painted with interior and exterior representing earth and sky.
A strange hybrid of old and new imagery was produced when David Rumsey
allowed Google to scan a pair of terrestrial and celestial globes made in 1792 by
Jean-Dominique Cassini; a user can now digitally navigate a virtual earth and sky
spatially mapped with models that were painted just five years after the panorama
was patented (Figure 13). Porting this historic imagery into a new, digital platform
makes it available to new and wider audiences. But the interaction metaphors that
guided the original representation do not translate to the digital model: using
Google’s tools for zooming and navigating is not at all the same as rotating a
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
Early Popular Visual Culture
329
Figure 11. (a, b) Global Climate simulation in Reality Deck and close-up showing
latitude/longitude lines.
physical globe with your hands. The blown-up celestial imagery becomes a
cluttered wallpaper around a terrestrial globe that appears as a miniaturized bauble.
The Cassini globes were not meant to scale as the digital platform requires, and
their limitations expose the specific scalability featured by digital, panoramic spectacles. Accounts of the Georama emphasized the ability to observe either its overall
image or its details, but moving between these scales required either a deliberate
shift in attention by the spectators or physical movement toward and away from
the surface of the painted canvas. The Celestial Globe expressed scalar relationships
in terms of time and motion, and the perception of the spectators, as they rode on a
moving platform, was dynamically embedded within these relationships. Simulations such as Google Earth and Google Sky allow the spectator to observe the
model overall or in its details by resizing the image on the display screen. They tie
the mobility of the spectacle to the deliberate motions of the spectator: for example,
the speed at which a spectator swipes her finger across her screen will determine
how quickly the Earth appears to spin.
If the painted images of Cassini’s globes look egregiously decorative running
within Google’s platform, this incongruity highlights the reality effects we accept
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
330
B. Belisle
Figure 12. Screenshot of Google Earth with backdrop of starry sky and Milky Way.
Figure 13. Screenshot of a video demonstrating Google Earth running with a Cassini
Terrestrial Globe overlaid on the Earth and the Cassini Celestial Globe projected to surround it.
when looking at Google’s ordinary mosaic of highly manipulated satellite imagery.
The concatenation of images sutured together to form the smooth globe of Google
Earth or the illusory depth of Google Sky articulates an updated panoramic strategy
of digital representation, a way in which parts are algorithmically made to cohere
into the appearance of a ‘total view’. What implicit assumptions about nature,
representation, and perception are performed through such digital techniques of
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
Early Popular Visual Culture
331
coherence? What potentials of knowledge and agency are expressed by the specific
forms of engagement and interaction such digital models afford?
When a new display format like Stony Brook’s Reality Deck promises a bigger
picture and better way of visually grasping information about our world, it repeats
a promise that has echoed through centuries of scientific spectacle. Persistent rhetorics of panoramic verisimilitude suggest that innovations like the Reality Deck are
most important for the progress they make toward more accurate, immersive, and
educational recapitulations of reality. But changing modes of immersive display
and interactive spectatorship do not bring spectators closer to the world they represent; rather, they reframe terms of engagement, expressing changing techniques of
visibility, knowledge, and control.
The visual mastery offered by wrap-around panoramic paintings in the nineteenth century correlated with structures of imperial control, as if a ‘total view’
could be anchored by one central perspective. The mechanical motion that integrated a viewer into the panoramic spectacles of travel and consumption at the
Paris Exposition suggested one might be just as safely integrated into broader forms
of circulation and mobility that were restructuring knowledge and experience at the
advent of the twentieth century. Today’s digital panoramas also perform and produce ideas about how nature is ordered, how aesthetic representation should recapitulate that order, and how a spectator might perceive and know not only a
recapitulation of reality, but also the construct of reality itself.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Oliver Gaycken for valuable editorial suggestions and to the American Council of Learned Societies for support during the research and writing of this article as a
2013–2015 New Faculty Fellow.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The Reality Deck was one reason I came to Stony Brook as a postdoctoral fellow in
2013. Colleagues teaching film and media art were not aware of its existence, and
demonstration tours seemed only available for corporate visitors investigating potential
commercial applications. After six months of seeking access, I eventually managed an
extended visit when a Computer Science postdoc who had helped program the screens
opened the door as a favor to musician colleagues who had composed music for some
of the visualizations. I share this anecdote to thank Kal Petkov, Meg Schedel, and Dan
Weymouth, and to point out how potentials of emerging media are often limited by the
distinct funding streams and research cultures dividing academia. Aside from the possibility of joining a guided tour, the Reality Deck remains largely inaccessible to faculty
and students working in the Arts and Humanities at Stony Brook.
2. The Reality Deck’s model of interactive immersion follows the use of CAVEs (cave
automatic virtual display environments), multi-screen projection spaces that offer interactivity through 3D Virtual Reality (VR) headsets. CAVEs have been used for VR
experiments in art since the early 1990s; but more recent versions, such as the KeckCAVES at UC Davis, have been developed specifically for scientific visualization. See
Anon. n.d. UC Davis KeckCaves; Dumit et al. 2012.
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
332
B. Belisle
3. For more on the history of the wrap-around panorama see Comment 1999; Oetterman
1997; Oleksijczuk 2011. On the relationship of the panorama with the visual culture of
science see Bigg 2007; Lightman 2012. On the relationship of the panorama to digital
virtual reality, cinema, the planetarium, and the broader history of visual culture, see
Grau 2003; Griffiths 2008; Miller 1996; Huhtamo 2013, 2014.
4. For the full text of Barker’s 19 June 1787 patent, see Repertory of Arts and
Manufactures 4 (London, 1796), pp. 165–167, as quoted in Oetterman (1997,
358–359). Oetterman and others suggest Barker may have been influenced by publications in which Jeremy Bentham described his ‘panopticon’, as the two structures seem
closely associated, and the two names were coined around the same time.
5. London Times, 10 January 1792, as quoted in (Oetterman 1997, 101).
6. For example, Vanessa Schwartz has described the special interest that nineteenthcentury audiences placed on forms of re-enactment that were less concerned with
optical verisimilitude than with a performative mimesis; see Schwartz 1998.
7. See, for example Walter Benjamin’s discussion of panoramic literature in “Daguerre, or
the Panoramas” (Benjamin, 2002), and early photographic panoramas such as the multi-panel images of San Francisco produced by Carleton Watkins between 1864 and
1877.
8. Delangard is said to have innovated the use of curved iron bars for his georama. Walter
Benjamin points out that the architectural strategy of iron supports used in the panorama also became the shared signature of the Crystal Palace and the Paris Arcades. See
(Benjamin 2002, 5).
9. French Patents 1779, filed 25 March 1822, and 2555, filed 3 February 1825, as cited
in (Mannoni 2000, 184).
10. His comments on the Georama coincided with the publication of the first volume of
Cosmos, which attempted ‘to give a grand and general view of the universe’, offering
‘a general picture of nature which contains a view of all the phenomena comprised in
the Cosmos as one integrated system’ (Humboldt 1871). Humbolt also collaborated on
plans to expand Wyld’s Great Globe (discussed below) into a ‘Cosmos Institute’, with
artifacts representing places and peoples from around the world; see (Lightman 2012,
30).
11. On Wyld’s Great Globe see for example Anon. 1851a; Anon. 1851b; Anon. 1851c;
Anon. 1852; Lightman 2012.
12. Wyld, ‘To Field-Marshall H.R.H. Prince Albert’ (1851), as quoted in (Lightman 2012,
27).
13. (Guiliana Bruno 2007, 161–2) describes the imaginary inversion of interior and exterior performed by the georama as a ‘prefilmic route’ that cinematic spectacles would
later develop.
14. For extensive details of moving panoramas see Huhtamo 2013.
15. See for example, Wolfgang Schivelbush on the moving panorama (Schivelbush 1979),
Raymond Fielding on Hale’s Tours (Fielding 1970), Nana Verhoeff on phantom rides
(Verhoeff 2006: 200-202), and Tom Gunning’s recent work on the movement of moving images (Gunning et al. 1999).
16. A slightly different lineage appears, however, in recent digital media with astronomical
themes, such as the WorldWide Telescope game for Microsoft Kinect and the Star
Walk™ app for mobile devices. Digital interactive games and apps use databases of
astronomical positions and dynamic, computational rendering to redraw an onscreen
map of the universe based on gestural inputs from the user. Like the Celestial Globe,
they combine aspects of early panoramic enclosures and later panoramic spectacles,
correlating the physical mobility of spectators with a mobilization of the image itself.
17. Although the press release suggests the Reality Deck might “revolutionize Hollywood,” official descriptions tend to emphasize its value as a scientific tool and do not
reference how it might be seen within other lineages such as that of expanded cinema,
IMAX, 3-D cinema, and immersive gaming. See for example (Papadopoulos et al.
2015).
18. My argument here is influenced by Hannah Arendt’s elaboration of Martin Heidegger’s
ideas in relation to modern astrophysics, in The Human Condition (1998), and to
Wendy Chun’s arguments about the ideology of code in Programmed Visions (2011).
Early Popular Visual Culture
333
Notes on contributor
Brooke Belisle is Assistant Professor of Visual Culture at Stony Brook University, SUNY in
the Department of Art and in the Consortium for Digital Art, Culture, and Technology. She
is also an editor at the Journal of Visual Culture. Her work focuses on emergent, experimental, and expanded media formats from the nineteenth century to the present. This article
relates to her two current book projects, one of which addresses the conceit of the ‘bigger
picture’ and another that explores the problem of representing the universe. You can find
her at metonymy.net.
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
References
Altick, Richard. 1978. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
Anon. 1827. “Georama.” The United States Literary Gazette, vol. 1. Boston, MA:
Cummings, Hillard & Co.: 72.
Anon. 1842. “On Cosmoramas, Dioramas, and Panoramas”, The Penny Magazine of the
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. London: Charles Knight and Co.
Anon. 1846, May 2. “Le Georama De Champs-Élysées: Rapport sur le Géorama de M.
Guérin (The Champs-Élysées Georama: Report on Mr. Guerin’s Georama).” L’Illustration XIX: 904–909.
Anon. 1849. “The History and Construction of Maps.” In Littel’s The Living Age, vol. 21.
Boston, MA: Little and Co.: 355.
Anon. 1851a. “Wyld’s Model Globe.” In Littel’s The Living Age, vol. 30. Boston, MA:
Little and Co.: 116.
Anon. 1851b. “Mr Wyld’s Model of the Earth.” Illustrated London News, June 7.
Anon. 1851c. “The Great Globe Itself.” In Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, vol. 16, 399
vols. Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers: 118–119.
Anon. 1852. “Geography: Artistic and Scientific.” In The British Quarterly Review, vol. 15.
London: Hodder and Stoughton: 383.
Anon. 1899. “The Celestial Globe.” Paris, 1900: The American Guide to City and Exposition, 85–86. New York, NY: Baldwin and Eastman.
Anon. 1900a. “The Panoramas of the Paris Exposition.” In Scientific American Supplement,
Vol. 1287: 20631. September 1.
Anon. 1900b. “The Celestial Globe.” Harper’s Guide to Paris and the Exposition of 1900:
Being Practical Suggestions Concerning the Trip from New York to Paris. New York,
NY: Harper and Company: 184.
Anon 1929. “Panorama of Milan” in The Mirror Feb 18 1929 p.393 as reprinted in Stephen
Herbert A History of Pre-Cinema vol. 2, 2000 p.51
Anon. 2010. “Stony Brook University Receives NSF Grant to Design Revolutionary Reality
Deck.” Jul 13. On Stony Brook University. http://commcgi.cc.stonybrook.edu/am2/pub
lish/General_University_News_2/Stony_Brook_University_Receives_NSF_Grant_to_Des
ign_Revolutionary_Reality_Deck.shtml#sthash.4FR5vu8F.dpuf
Anon. n.d.a. “Greater Academic (Gottorp) Globe-Planetarium.” On Kunstkamera. http://www.
kunstkamera.ru/kunst-catalogue/items/item-view.seam?c=LOMONOSOV&id=96461&cid
=1716252
Anon. n.d.b “The Reality Deck Immersive Gigapixel Display.” On Stony Brook University.
http://labs.cs.sunysb.edu/labs/vislab/reality-deck-research/.
Anon. n.d.c. “UC Davis KeckCaves: W.K. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth
Sciences. http://keckcaves.org/
Arendt, Hannah. 1958 [1998]. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: Chicago University
Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 2002. “Daguerre, or the Panoramas” section of “Paris, Capital of the 19th
Century.” In The Arcades Project, edited Rolf Tiedemann and translated by Howard
Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, 5. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press.
Bigg, Charlotte. 2007. “The Panorama, or La Nature A Coup d’Oeil.” In Observing Nature Representing Experience. The Osmotic Dynamics of Romanticism 1800-1850, edited by
E. Fiorentini, 73–95. Klagenfurt, Austria: Dietrich Reimer Verlag GmbH.
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
334
B. Belisle
Boyd, James Penny. 1900. The Paris Exposition of 1900: A Vivid Descriptive View and
Elaborate Scenic Presentation of the Site, Plan and Exhibits. Philadelphia, PA: P.W.
Ziegler & Co.
Bruno, Giuliana. 2007. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New
York, NY: Verso.
Chun, Wendy. 2011. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Comment, Bernard. 1999. The Panorama. Translated by Anne-Marie Glasheen. London:
Reaktion.
Delangard, C. F. P. 1828, July. “The Georama.” In The London Magazine, 501–504.
London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy.
Dumit, Joseph et al. 2012.”Collaborative Visual Interpretation of Large Datasets” Abstract.
Astrobiology Science Conference, Atlanta Georgia. April 16-20. http://abscicon2012.arc.
nasa.gov/abstracts/abstract-detail/collaborative-visual-interpretation-of-large-datasets/.
Dunbar, G. 1973, April. “Élisée Reclus and the Great Globe”. Scottisch Geographical
Magazine 90 (1): 57-66.
Friedberg, Anne. 1993. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: UC
Press.
Grau, Oliver. 2003. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Griffiths, Alison. 2003, March. “‘Shivers down Your Spine’: Panoramas and the Origins of
the Cinematic Reenactment.” Screen 44 (1): 1–37.
Griffiths, Alison. 2008. Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums and the Immersive
View. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gunning, Tom, E. Degrada, and A. Gaudreault. 1999. “Composition en profondeur, mobilité
et montage dans “Cabiria” (Pastrone, 1914).” Cinémas Fall: 55–78.
Herbert, Stephen, ed. 2000. A History of Pre-Cinema Vol 2. London: Taylor & Francis.
Huhtamo, Erkki. 2003. Illusions in Motion: Media Archeology of the Moving Panorama
and Related Spectacles. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Humboldt, Alexander. 1871. Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe.
London: Bell & Daldy.
Jullien, M. 1829. “Letter to the President of the Central Commission of the Society of
Geography. December 18. BNF.” Cartes et Plans, Manuscrits de la Société de
Géographie, Colis n° 19 bis: 3282.
Lightman, Bernard. 2012. “A Spectacle in Leister Square: James Wyld’s Great Globe 1851–
1861.” In Popular Exhibitions, Science, and Showmanship, 1840–1910, edited by
J. Kember, J. Plunkett, and J. Sullivan, 19–39. London: Pickering and Chatto.
Mannoni, Laurent. 2000. The Great Art of Light and Shadow: An Archaeology of the
Cinema. Translated by Richard Crangle. London: University of Exeter Press.
Miller, Angela. 1996. “The Panorama, the Cinema, and the Emergence of the Spectacular.”
Wide Angle 18 (2): 34–69.
Morley, Henry. 1851. “The Globe in a Square.” In Household Words, edited by Charles
Dickens, 370. London: Bradbury & Evans.
Nead, Lynda. 2007. “Earthly and Astral Bodies.” In The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c. 1900, 224–226. New Haven, CT.
Oetterman, Stephan. 1997. The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium. New York, NY:
Zone Books.
Oleksijczuk, Denise. 2011. The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism.
Minneapolis, MN: University Of Minnesota Press.
Papadopoulos, C., K. Petkov, A. E. Kaufman, and K. Mueller. 2015. “The Reality
Deck – Immersive Gigapixel Display.” IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 35
(1): 33–45.
Reclus, Élisée. 1898, October. “A Great Globe.” The Geographical Journal 12 (4):
401–408.
Rothstein, Edward. 2008. “Looking at the Stars from Angles Old and New.” The New York
Times, February 16. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/16/arts/design/16plan.html?page
wanted=all&_r=0.
Schivelbush, Wolfgang. 1979 [1986]. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time
and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: UC Press.
Early Popular Visual Culture
335
Downloaded by [Brooke Belisle] at 18:00 03 February 2016
Schwartz, Vanessa. 1998. Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-d-Siecle Paris.
Berkeley: UC Press.
Stevenson, Edward. 1921. Terrestrial and Celestial Globes: Their History and Construction
Including a Consideration of their Value as Aids in the Study of Geography and
Astronomy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Tarantola, Andrew. 2012. “The Holodeck Is Real and It’s in Stony Brook, NY.”
Gizmodo, November 21. http://gizmodo.com/5962319/the-holodeck-is-real-and-its-instony-brook-ny
de Vries, Leonard. 1971. Victorian Inventions. London: J. Murray.
Wyld, James. 1851.”To Field-Marshall H.R.H. Prince Albert.” Notes to Accompany
Mr Wyld’s Model of the Earth, Leicester Square. London: Model of the Earth.