Panoramas: from immersive media and colonial propaganda to interactive play

An evening investigating the visual culture format of the panorama and its artistic impact and responses, using Royal Holloway’s Picture Gallery collection. Hosted by the Centre for Victorian Studies, jointly with the Poetics Research Centre and the Centre for Visual Cultures.

Dr Helen Kingstone introduces a form of nineteenth-century 360° virtual reality: the panorama painting, which plunged the visitor into an unprecedented immersive state. In an era of information overload, panoramas could give viewers a sense of mastery. They were originally displayed in huge purpose-built rotundas, but panoramic perspective soon became popular in other media too (landscape paintings, photography, poetry, history), as a way to make sense of news events, to glimpse far-flung places, or to propagandise about colonial encounters.

This talk uses the Picture Gallery’s displays to show how influential panoramic perspective was during the nineteenth century, and to raise uncomfortable questions about its aesthetic, ethical and ideological implications.

Isabelle Masters (graduate of MA Poetic Practice) responds to a nineteenth-century panorama through poetic practice. She presents and reads from her creative bookwork on the topic, and gives attendees the chance to re-construct this for themselves via a Victorian children’s game. Her bookwork traces the history of a Leicester Square building which began life as a nineteenth-century panorama, and later became a church with the circular shape preserved.

Isabelle will begin by talking briefly on the creation of the project, and then will move on to an interactive reading of the piece guided by audience-selected ‘myriorama’ cards. Where a panorama presents a reader with what claims to be a complete view, the myriorama invites a reader to construct that picture.

Admission is free, no booking necessary.