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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). 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