Film Criticism. Spring/Fall2013, Vol. 37/38 Issue 3/1, p117-137. Reconsidering the stereoscope, we see that the way a stereograph synthesizes two photographs into an impression of spatial relief closely relates to the way cinema synthesizes film frames into an impression of temporal relief In related experiments that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, these two modes of synthesis intersected, and strategies for visualizing spatial and temporal relief interconnected, overlapped, and complemented one another. This is especially evident in the work of Eadweard Muybridge and ÉtienneJules Marey and in visual technologies that now appear to function, hinge-like, to connect photography and cinema. The hybrid formats of this period such as Stereopanoramas and time studies drew on stereoscopic approaches to synthesis and anticipated the virtual continuities cinematic representation would eventually delimit and consolidate. However, the strategies of depth they explored open out onto other possibilities as well; indeed, as I will argue, these nineteenth century precurors to 3-D anticipated important ideas regarding space, time, and depth that now appear "new" as they are rediscovered through digital technologies. Temporal Depth Looking back from cinema to the stereoscope, we can now see that stereoscopic depth has temporal contours that are inseparable from its re-articulation of spatial cues. Performed afresh with each act of seeing, the spatial depth of the stereoscopic image was always, also, a temporal effect. The paired images of a stereograph were captured from slightly different vantage points meant to coordinate with the perspectival difference between each of a viewer's two eyes. The stereoscope prompted its user to coordinate two photographs perceptually into a compound impression of visual depth, taking advantage of her embodied efforts to grasp the world through both eyes at once. In this respect, the stereoscope relied on the dynamic temporalify of vision, and it produced an effect of presence, linking the present-tense experience of the perceiver with apparent presence conveyed by the image. In a popular 1859 essay on stereoscopy, Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed the stereoscopic effect as a sense that "the mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture. The scraggy branches of a tree in the foreground mn out at us as if they would scratch our eyes out. The elbow of a figure stands forth so as to make us almost uncomfortable" (57). In his description, the stereographic 118 image is a place of potential interaction, a scene of shared space where other agents impose themselves to an almost violent extent. Nineteenth century Holmes-Bates style stereoscope with stereograph. Private collection; photograph courtesy of Emily Carpenter. The perceptual effect of stereoscopic depth has a temporal dimension, and formal properties of stereoscopic representation also entail temporal effects. Before the advent of the snapshot and the shutter speeds that supported the experiments of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne Jules Marey, stereoscopic photography was considered the first form of "instantaneous" photography (Newhall 115; Prodger 76; Rosenblum 167). The small negative size and short focal length of double-lens stereo cameras allowed photographers to use wide-open apertures for very quick exposure times, sometimes seeming to arrest figures in motion. This is one reason that Muybridge used stereo cameras for his early motion studies (Tosi 49). Not all stereographs were produced with dual-lens cameras, and because negatives were sometimes composited from different takes, the viewer perceived impressions of motion. In attempting to perceptually coordinate the two images of a stereo pair in terms of simultaneous depth, a slight temporal difference between the images did not uncouple the spatial illusion as much as lean upon it and infiect it to suggest an illusion of duration that anticipated cinema. Oliver Wendell Holmes claims that in viewing a collection of stereographs, "[i]t is common to find an object in one of the twin pictures which we miss in another; the person or vehicle having moved in the interval of taking the two photographs" (58). He describes a particularly haunting example, a "gliding shadow" of a woman who passed through what was intended as a typical tourist view: "In the lovely glass stereograph 119 of the Lake of Brientz, on the left hand side, a vaguely hinted female figure stands by the margin of the fair water; on the other side of the picture she is not seen. This is life; we seem to see her come and go" (58). Holmes is seduced by the illusion that the woman passes through just as he looks, each time—that what he sees is not just a static scene but a difference actively happening. He suggests that the compound image of the stereograph accomplishes what cinema would later attempt—the unfolding temporality Mary Ann Doane terms contingency and Siegfried Kracauer describes as the world caught "on the wing" (Doane; Kracauer xlix). Holmes' mention of a vehicle that may have moved in the interval between the taking of the two photographs anticipates a legend surrounding the origins of cinema. Georges Méliès claimed he stumbled upon cinema's potential for "trick" effects when he viewed film footage in which a bus seemed to magically transform into a hearse, the vehicles having changed position in a pause when his camera purportedly jammed.' This origin story constructs the invention of an effect that may not have needed such invention, as it had been long remarked in stereoscopic representation. After noticing effects like the one Holmes describes in the Lake of Brientz view, stereo photographers began deliberately staging differences across the two frames of a stereo pair to suggest movement and ghostly presences, anticipating what would develop into the double-exposure strategies of "spirit photography" (Danah 3; Gemsheim 258). Looking forward from the stereoscope toward cinema, we can see that perceptual elisions involved in stereoscopic depth anticipated those of cinematic time. Synthesis in Relief The overlaps between stereoscopic and cinematic modes of representing spatio-temporal continuity are evident in myriad optical instmments that proliferated in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary argues that both the stereoscopic and cinematic effect rely on perceptual principles that animated an anay of "optical devices that represented the illusion of movement" (116). If the stereoscope is seen as a "precinematic device," however, it is important to remember that such devices were not aiming for cinema as we came to know it; they aspired equally toward spatial and temporal illusions. Immediately after Charles Wheatstone announced his 120 invention of the stereoscope, those most directly involved with the new device—such as Wheatstone himself, Antoine Claudet, and Jules Duboscq—attempted to combine it with other optical devices that relied on the principle of the afterimage (Brockman 78; Zone 25-7). Soon, many others imagined and attempted to create a hybrid device that would combine persistence of vision with the stereoscopic effect to create the impression of three-dimensional, moving images. By 1867, an article in the bulletin of the French Society of Photography broadcast common speculation about the "perfect combination of the stereoscope, phenakistiscope, and photography, with which it would be possible to produce the extraordinary phenomenon of moving figures, with all the illusion of natural relief (Tosi 31). A ñurry of inventions with echoing names attempted to christen a new -scope and -trope hybrid: animated stereoscope, stcreo-phenakistoscope, stereo-zoetrope, zoetropic stereoscope, stereotrope, stereophoroskop, kinimoscope, kinematoscope, fantascopic stereoscope, stereoscopefantascope, bioscope, photobioscope (Zone; Foster; Gosser). Each device took its own approach, using multiple drums or complex mirrors, cartridges of cards, scrolling bands of images. Thaumatrope cl824 which relies on persistence of vision; Phenakistoscope cl832; and Zoetrope cl833 both of which use slotted apertures a cinematic shutter. Left: Simplified diagram of Wheatstone stereoscope 1839; Right: Praxiniscope cl867, which combines stereoscope's use of mirrors with phenakistoscope's rotating drum. The -scope and -trope fervor in the second half of the nineteenth century formed the context of Eadweard Muybridge's experiments with projection. On the way to his zoopraxiscope. 121 Muybridge invented a stereo-zoetrope in order to animate the double images captured by the stereo cameras he used in early motion studies. In the preface to Animals in Motion, Muybridge describes how he divided the paired images of the stereo negatives and placed them in two zoetropes that were geared together: "the respective halves of the stereographs were made simultaneously visible, by means of mirrors— arranged on the principle of Wheatstone's reflecting stereoscope— successively and intermittently, through the perforations in the cylinders of the instmments, with the result of a very satisfactory reproduction of an apparently solid miniature horse trotting, and of another galloping" (2-3). Though his later zoopraxiscope projections are celebrated as a critical step in cinema's emergence, their use of hand-rendered and single, rather than stereo, images was in some ways a regression from the dimensional verisimilitude of the "solid miniature horse" Muybridge claims to have conjured with his double zoetrope. While assisting in the chronophotographic experiments of Étienne-Jules Marey, Georges Demeney patented something close to Muybridge's double zoetrope, which Demeney called a "zoetropic stereoscope" (Demeney). This device used "two concentric circles of images on a disc provided with two concentric series of windows passing before the eyes in such a manner that the images.. .which are taken in stereoscopic series, are seen at the same time" (3). Over ten years earlier, at the same time that Muybridge claims he was gearing together his double zoetrope, Marey undertook a similar experiment. Building on the two images of a stereograph, Marey photographed a bird in flight from three perspectives in an attempt "to photograph the wing's movement in three dimensions" (Braun, Picturing 136). He used these photographs to cast plaster models that he placed in a zoetrope. Looking into this spinning zoetrope, the spectator saw a three-dimensional figure of a bird in flight, a result Marey described as "synthesis in relief (136). Marey's sculptural moving image echoes Muybridge's "apparently solid miniature horse trotting." And, like Muybridge, Marey's efforts to represent motion in all its dimensions drew on experience with stereoscopic photography. During the year prior to his first multi-camera images, he had used a dual-lens stereo camera to photograph the geometric shapes and volumes articulated by thin rods, chords, and bands vibrating in space (Braun, Picturing 124). Though 122 these stereographs now appear to lead away from the main path of his experiments, they reveal how he interwove techniques of spatial and temporal juxtaposition. Although the monikers of "motion studies" and "chronophotography" carry different emphases and name different approaches to framing movement in space and time, they both explore related possibilities for translating the continuous dimensions of perceptual experience into the disjunctive framings of technological inscription. In the historical period between the emergence of photography and cinema, what we would now consider the spatial strategy of stereoscopic representation and the temporal strategy of cinematic representation were not clearly differentiated. These strategies overlapped and blended in experiments exploring how discrete images could, themselves, be made to overlap and blend into compound coordinations. Stereopanoramas Eadweard Muybridge's decision to use stereoscopic cameras for early motion studies was influenced by his extensive experience as a stereoscopic photographer (Tosi 49). Along with the motion studies he produced for Leland Stanford in 1872 and 1873, Muybridge completed a number of stereographic projects: he photographed Yosemite in stereo; he produced a "Pacific Northwest Series" of stereo views; he created stereo sets documenting railroad lines; and he made at least two stereopanoramas (Braun, Eadweard 12). A cross between a serial set of stereographic views and a linear, photographic panorama, stereopanoramas represented a spatially continuous scene as a series of stereographs. The influence of the panorama, and of Muybridge's serial photography on the emergence of cinema, is well established (Clegg; Friedberg; Huhtamo). But stereopanoramas offer an underexplored link between stereoscopic photography and cinema: they uniquely blend the mode ofjuxtaposition that creates stereoscopic depth and the mode of juxtaposition that produces cinematic time. By the time he made the serial photographs of Occident and the panoramas of San Francisco for which he is best known, Muybridge had produced at least four stereopanoramas (Solnit, River 158). Several were only recently discovered, nested within a larger 1873 series of stereographs Muybridge made documenting the Modoc Wars (Solnit, "Tangles" 184). Anticipating his San Francisco panoramas, the Modoc Wars stereopanoramas present a series of images that frame 123 a continuous, extended view of a landscape as they scan from left to right. They picture the area of Tule and the lava beds that geographically centered the Modoc people, an indigenous tribe living on the California-Oregon border that was decimated by a series of attacks as United States settlers moved west and displaced them (Thompson). Eadweard Muybridge, "Panorama of Lava Beds, from Signal Station at Tule Lake, South" (1873), stereographs no. 1603-1607 in "The Modoc War" series published by Bradley and Rulofson. Held in the Lone Mountain Collection of Stereographs by Eadweard Muybridge, 1867-1880, BANC PIC 1971.055, at The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Like the 1877 panorama of San Francisco, one of Muybridge's Stereopanoramas of the Modoc lava beds repeats details at the edges of successive views, such that the curving boundary of Tule Lake appears both at the right edge of the first stereograph and then again, as a fragment, at the left edge of the second stereograph. Three white tents appear at the right edge of a military encampment in the third stereograph and then appear again, alone, at the left edge of the landscape in the fourth stereograph. In this fourth stereograph one tent disappears, however, between the left and right image, revealing how the apparent doubling of images on each stereocard actually presents a smaller-scale shift in perspective. Viewing a series of stereographs as a panorama seems to undermine panoramic coherence, pulling the viewer in and out of multiple views rather than opening one overarching view. Each 124 stereograph coordinates a unique depth effect that locks into place through a discrete, perceptual act. Muybridge's Stereopanorama seems to assert a compensating conceit of a panoramic view by framing, in the last stereograph, several men perched high on a hillside, looking to the left and down at the same view the stereopanorama recapitulates. These embedded spectators look from a point of view that recalls the elevated vantage of early, painted panoramas and which serves, retroactively, to frame and coordinate disjunct stereographs as the coherent and simultaneous "view" these men share with the viewer of the stereopanorama. The explicit visual continuity that Stereopanoramas staged across stereographs compressed the temporal and spatial relationships that conventionally organized a set of stereo views as a "tour." Rather than present the "sights" of Egypt or "views" along a railway joumey, the serial images of a stereopanorama often aimed to reconstitute the contours of one continuous geological feature (Danah 94). Survey photographers used Stereopanoramas for sites deemed interesting both for their scale and in their details, capturing specific information in each close-up view and showing how these details coordinated in the overall view. Of course, as it attempted to bring a geological feature that exceeded a single photographic view into expanded, perceptual relief, a stereo panorama multiplied and fragmented something materially continuous into a series of spatially and temporally discontinuous representations. The spatial confabulations of the stereopanorama prefigure the temporal deceits Henri Bergson would critique as cinematographical (Bergson). Though they occupy an important position in the emergence of cinema, stereopanoramas may be largely forgotten today because they were not particularly popular even in their own time. Martha Sandweiss claims they paled in comparison with more popular panoramic spectacles because it was impossible "to make a series of these pictures scan as one continual whole" (60). The very characteristics of the photographic medium—the "fixed edges of the pictures and the fleeting moments of time they fixed forever"—worked against the panoramic effect that stereo-panoramas hoped to achieve (60). Sandweiss' point is particularly well taken when stereopanoramas are seen today in museums or galleries, displayed on a wall in a flat, linear sequence. Moving a stereoscope from left to right across the series is awkward: the edges of the photographs and the 125 white space between them interrupt the continuity of the represented scene. The view is further interrupted by the need to repeatedly pull back from the stereoscope and re-align it over the next stereograph in the series. It is unlikely, however, that any nineteenth century viewer would have experienced stereo-panoramas this way. They were accustomed to viewing stereographs in series, flipping through a stack of cards placed in the tray of a stereoscope or cranking through views placed in the cartridge of a stereoviewer designed just for this purpose. Emphasizing that stereographs were most often viewed as series, Rebecca Solnit identifies the stereopanorama with a shift from the spatial effects of panoramic representation to the temporal effects of cinema. She imagines a viewer would, "while keeping the stereoscope clapped to his or her eyes, change the cards in sequence to create what cinematographers call a 'pan' of place" ("Tangles" 184; River 157). She claims that while ordinary panoramas invite a spatial exploration, stereo panoramas are "temporal panoramas" that prompt viewers to traverse the image "in time": "Their makers already understood some of the ways that time and space become one another, how the eye could travel through individual places joined either in proximity or in sequence" (River 157-8). In other words, the spatial merge of the two photographs that constituted one stereocard did not compete with, but instead blended with and supported a temporal merge across stereocards. Extrapolating from the temporal effect of stereoscopic depth and the effects of motion seen in examples such as Holmes' Lake of Brientz image, spatio-temporal relationships across stereographs in the serial views of stereopanoramas demonstrate complex forms of continuity that exceed the conventions of cinematic representation that they would come to underwrite. Motion Studies, Time Studies Producing stereopanoramas may have inspired strategies of juxtaposition that Eadweard Muybridge used in his motion studies. The best-known motion studies present successive phases of action across brief moments in time. But Muybridge also produced series of images that construct a simultaneous view of multiple spatial perspectives. They show one static moment from a wrap-around view. Following Solnit's suggestion that stereopanoramas could be considered a temporal variation of the more typical spatial panorama, we might consider the static-moment anomahes among the motion studies as time studies. Like stereopanoramas, these time studies 126 synthesize panoramic and stereoscopic strategies of continuity to ofîer a disorienting hybrid that both anticipates and exceeds the conventions of cinema. Muybridge eventually made almost one hundred time studies, mostly during his work at the University of Pennsylvania in 1884 and 1885. Marta Braun points out, however, that the technique originates earlier. She cites an article in the San Francisco Examiner that clearly describes an 1879 demonstration at Stanford's ranch where Muybridge "arranged five cameras in a semi-circle and concentrating upon one point" to capture "a perfect picture of a horse at fijllest speed, as seen from five different points of view all at the same instant of time and while, of course, the horse was in one and the same position" (Braun, "Animal" 274). Muybridge would retum to this strategy for surprising number of motion studies published in Animal Locomotion. In most of the series in Animal Locomotion, each frame in a row shows a different moment in time, and the subject photographed appears to move while the point of view stays relatively stable. Geometric markings in the background offer set spatial coordinates as time shifts. But some series, such as those on plates 520 to 522, show only one moment of the action they portray. The difference between each frame in each horizontal row is spatial: one moment in time is seen from multiple points of view arranged around a 180- or 360-degree radius. Plate 520 shows four series, each depicting a pair of wrestlers caught in an embrace. Plate 521 shows Muybridge himself: walking, ascending a step, throwing a discus, shoveling, using a pickaxe. Plate 522 is titled: "A: Jumping. B: Handspring. C, D: Somersault. E. Springing over a man's back." In rows C and D, a man performing a flip is suspended in mid-air and each photographic frame from left to right pivots to reveal this moment from a different angle. Marta Braun explains that this plate, and the other anomalies like it, were made "with five or six cameras placed in a semicircle" around the subject, "the shutters triggered simultaneously." In her description, this produces "not a sequence of motion" but "a single frozen gesture seen from six different points of view" ("Animal" 274). Associating this technique with a cinematic tracking shot, in which the camera shifts through space, she claims that the "effect is that of walking around the model, each picture adding to the view of thefigurein three dimensions" (274). Invoking the notion of spatial exploration, Braun's comment also points to how the time studies draw on stereoscopic strategies; 127 rather than anticipating how film frames would be juxtaposed to constmct cinematic time, these images juxtapose spatially adjacent perspectives to produce the impression of spatial depth. Plate 522 of Animal Locomotion 1887, Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge's multiple images of one moment assume an idea of temporal depth that corresponds to the stereoscope's principle of spatial depth. They are authorized by the assumption that the multiple aspects of an object cohere in the simultaneity of its own presence. Across multiple moments the same kind of spatial difference would coordinate, instead, as motion. The photographic series of most motion studies correlate the progress of time with that of a physical action, linking the coherence of agency, act, and time's forward march. The time studies, however, expose spatially distinct points of view as aspects of an assumed coherence of presence itself Most of the motion studies set a pictured object into virtual movement, relying on the viewer to integrate, at the time of viewing, the difference between images in terms of duration. The time studies reverse the valence of the effect; they virtually displace and mobilize the viewer as if to distribute spatially his/her point of view beyond embodied limits. Showing multiple views of the same moment extends the stereoscopic conceit past the binocular model of human vision that the stereoscopic camera's two lenses analogized. Instead, it constmcts 128 a point of view that could only correspond to an abstraction; it technically supplements vision toward an ideal of total visibility that, if not a god's-eye-view, could only be a machine's. The viewpoint this produces is so distributed that we cannot sustain it; instead of imagining ourselves flying around a man in midair, we imagine he spins in midair before our eyes. Muybridge's motion studies offer ways of seeing that transcended human vision; his images of Occident were celebrated for revealing phases of the horse's gallop that are imperceptible at the temporal scale of ordinary vision. The time studies also construct an otherwise impossible way of seeing, expanding the human take in spatial dimensions. As temporal panoramas, the time studies offer expanded views of a single "now." Braun claims they "focus on the spectacular nature of that single frozen moment only the camera can capture, that instant in which the laws of gravity no longer seem to prevail" ("Animal" 254). The acrobatic gestures of plate 522 seem to testify to this, communicating photography's overcoming of both time and space with the mutual impossibility of time standing still and bodies hovering weightless. Bullet Time, Liquid Time The potential glimpsed in Muybridge's time studies—to visualize temporal depth through the register of spatial dimensions— was rediscovered with the advent of computer-aided effects. When The Matrix was released in 1999, Muybridge's photographs anatomizing one moment resurfaced as precursors of the "bullet time" effect. John Gaeta's custom built shooting environments for the bullettime sequences combined photographic, cinematic, and digital modes of capture to construct a virtual, mobilized gaze that could rapidly traverse space while time stood still or progressed very slowly. In the film, characters hover, suspended in gravity-defying postures while, given stable background cues, the spectator's point of view seems to spin unmoored around the periphery of the action, taking it in from every angle. In an essay that relates the bullet time effect to Muybridge's experiments and the "attractions" of early cinema, Eiivind R0ssaak describes the bullet time effect as a "fabulous" form of 3-D. He claims that in this effect "space and time seem to switch places. A slice of time is extended spatially and space (a body) is explored temporally. 129 Time is opened up and explored outside time" (324). The effect directly recalls Muybridge's time studies, but also the way that stereopanoramas crossed dimensions of space and time, temporally linking views from multiple and coordinated perspectives. In Rjassaak's argument, the bullet time effect retums to the origins of cinema in order to update cinema for our era, finding "a way of surviving as a medium of attraction" in a moment when the spatio-temporal effects of cinema itself no longer appear spectacular and digital technologies now carry the promise of the spectacular and sensational (333). In other words, cinema reimagines its future by rediscovering its past. Updating stereoscopic ambitions with new capacities of computing, imaging one moment from all angles has been explored as a specifically digital aesthetic. The bullet time effect not only suggests a point of view that would be humanly impossible, but a point of view that is also impossible within the ordinary parameters of film and photography. Stitching together images captured from different devices and positions at different temporalities, the coordinated effect constmcts a virtual camera movement that would have been impossible even for a camera. This opens a way of seeing marked as computational, as digital, as a new coordination enabled by computers. It updates the aspiration that the stereoscope and cinema also articulated, picturing the world in a new way. In the margins of mainstream cinema, digital media art has also explored the potential computers offer for spatio-temporal experiences that move toward the future of cinema by way of its past. Sergio Prego's digital video installation Black Monday (2006) offers a viewing experience that draws on strategies of stereoscopic depth but tums away ftom a digital conceit of seamlessness. Using a wraparound anangement of still, digital cameras that recalls both John Gaeta's set-up for the bullet-time effect and Muybridge's technique for the time studies. Prego captured over one thousand photographs of over one dozen small explosions triggered inside an abandoned factory in Bilbao, Spain (Gennochio). Like Gaeta, Prego used a custom algorithm that fired each camera around the ring successively, in extremely fast rounds. The still images were then digitally sequenced to construct whirling point of view in which plumes of smoke appear as suspended, sculptural forms slowly expanding and dissipating. Quickly flickering images from different spatial and temporal vantages in the succession of adjacent film frames produce complex 3-D effects, 130 reworking stereoscopic depth through a digital permutation of cinematic time. Sergio Prego, Black Monday (2006) Stills from single channel video (3:33min). Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York. As with the bullet-time effect, the virtual point of view produced by Black Monday appears to circulate around the central action at a faster temporality than this action itself unfolds. Because the viewer's perspective is anchored in the shifting camera positions, the clouds of smoke seem to move in slow motion relative to the viewer's sense of virtual movement, as if the explosions take place in slow-motion or suspended animation. Unlike the bullet-time effect. Prego's film transfers the sense of explosion to the spectator's point of view, fracturing and destabilizing the vantage point from which the event can be seen so that we seem to have less access rather than more, even as the images and perspectives are multiplied.-^ Rather than suggest that new media open new modes of mastery. Black Monday suggests that different technologies only reframe the ongoing paradox of framing experience through perception and representation. Camille Utterback's series of digital, interactive installations titled Liquid Time (2000-2002) also use tools of new media to construct a hybrid of stereoscopic and cinematic depth. A viewer interacting with one iteration oí Liquid Time triggers changes in a digital video of a street scene by moving his body left and right, and toward and away from, the projected image. A camera tracks the viewer's position in actual space and an algorithm maps this to effects in the virtual space of the image. Vertical bands in the image register the viewer's position as he moves from left to right, and those bands advance forward or rewind through the recorded time of the video when the viewer moves forward or back from the projection. So, by stepping to the left and toward the projection, the viewer advances the left edge of the image 131 forward in time: the acttaal, spatial depth between the viewer and the image is linked to an imagined temporal depth of the image. Camille Utterback, ÜLiuid Time Series - Tokyo, (2001) and New York (2002). Interactive installations, installation view and screen details. Photographs courtesy of the artist. The vertical bands in Liquid Time recall video color bars, but they also resonate with the slatted cut-outs of the phenakistiscope and zoetrope, and the physical interaction reimagines the physical operation of those devices. More particularly. Liquid Time invokes the disorienting illusion of stereopanoramas, suggesting a spatio-temporal continuity that is intemally fractured at the level of representation and yet coordinated by the viewer's visceral engagement and the formal conceits of specific media formats. The stereopanorama relied on the implicit mies of stereoscopic and panoramic representation to organize the viewer's assumptions and prompt her response. The framed projection oí Liquid Time asks the viewer to assume that what looks like a cinematic image does represent a continuous expanse of time, and the lighting effects suggest a "stage" of interaction in front of the image that awaits a visitor's performance. A context marking this as a work of interactive art alerts visitors that sensors await activation, inviting them to solicit visual effects through bodily gestures. The emphasis on the viewer's body in Liquid Time exposes ways the body has been increasingly instmmentalized and virtualized in 3-D effects carried forward from the stereoscope. As visual spectacles rely on embodied, perceptual processes they also efface the body's actual dimensions. The stereoscope disciplined the body of its user to produce depth effects that could not actually be stepped into. As film spectators are offered the visceral effects of digital 3-D, their bodily experience in the theater is highly constrained: 3-D glasses cut off peripheral vision and the 3-D effect is dismpted if a spectator looks at the wrong place on the screen, looks from the wrong angle, or moves her head or eyes too quickly. Jonathan Crary has argued that the stereoscope instmmentalized vision in ways complicit with 132 imperialist and capitalist imperatives; Kristen Whissel has explored how the digitally constmcted vantages of bullet time and the exaggerated spatial dimensions of computer-aided effects may correlate new modalities of depth with new ideological impacts (Crary; Whissel). Leaping off the Screen Walter Benjamin wamed that fashion's historical jumps are not neutral, but guided by the interests of the present moment. Driven by the intertwined profits of technology producers and entertainment conglomerates, the current revitalization of 3-D entertainment calls for the same Foucauldian critique that Jonathan Crary offered of the stereoscope. The fantasy André Bazin called the "myth of total cinema" is alive today in advertising campaigns for "3-D images that virtually leap off the screen" of home entertainment systems (Bazin; "Samsung"). Scholarship can unwittingly play into this imperative, and its propaganda, when it aligns the history of 3-D with the promise of more perfect visual representation, a future always arriving. As an altemative to fashion's leaps, Benjamin described a historiography that takes place less as a form of prédation than as a form of rescue. Rather than search the history of visual culture for seeds of the present already lurking in the past, we might instead look for potentials that have been obscured by the apparent cultivation of progress, finding possible futures lost in the overgrowth. Digital effects that appear new to cinema, or appear to renew cinema, invoke potentials that existed before cinema and alongside its emergence, but were not absorbed into mainstream cinematic practice. New media may retum to hybrid strategies that appeared at earlier intersections between emerging technologies and shifting formal conventions. The contours of stereoscopic representation were situated within the broader context of experiments with visualizing time and space that took place between the emergence of photography and cinema in the nineteenth century. Similarly, the contours of digital 3-D today are situated in a transition away from the analog formats and technical strategies of photography and cinema. Rather than asking how contemporary 3-D is anticipated by the history of 3-D, we might ask how nineteenth century efforts to represent spatio-temporal depth overlap with our own, and open a zone of possibilify that remains open. 133 Notes ' Tom Gunning has explored the apocryphal aspects of this tale, and its impacts (Gunning). ^ Given Prego's interest in the philosophy of history, the arrested temporality of this violent explosion may also invoke what Walter Benjamin described as the suspended explosion of the present, history's ongoing crisis (Benjamin). Works Cited Bazin, André. "The Myth of Total Cinema." 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