Pan-Orao and historical necessity : adjusted frames and optical settlement

Abstract

Large horizontally formatted images have frequently been preferred for urban portraiture. Totalizing and comprehensive such compositions depict an environment as landscape or prospect. In rendering an all-encompassing view they attempt an expansive topographic virtuality that warrants participation. As a fictive world modeled on a surface they allow the perceiving faculties to enter places where our bodies cannot follow. By securing and seaming the edges of multiple frames, by engaging peripheral vision, they extend the limits of normal vision. This thesis has chosen to study such images giving them the title Pan Orao. By considering them a phenomenon it invests them partially the status of a mode of expression and at same time acknowledges their role as apparatus. The latter also suggests that they serve as mechanical requisites, as machinery for viewing the expansive condition of urban portraiture. The research cuts are taken across boundaries of place, time, medium and type to speak of unbroken views or serial images passing before the mind and the eye. Distinctions of 'high' and 'low' old and new therefore are not entertained. Rather a wider scaffold is suggested. The project sustains two broad conceptual themes; immersion and mobility, which are used to organise the material which ranges from Wide Screen 3D Cinema to 17th century urban views. Detailed discussion of particular cases occurs with a simultaneous interest in the technology of the changing view, its sociological and cultural impact, and the spatial-visual component of the media and their role in providing immersive environments.