Conference Report: Panoramic Perspectives on Digital Images

Co-authored with Nico Sommerlad

The international conference Panoramic Perspectives on Digital Images took place on July 17–18, 2025 at the University of Marburg and was organized by Jens Ruchatz and Kevin Pauliks as part of the research project Capturing Movable Images. Screenshots as Theorizing Media Practice. The conference explored how the panorama can serve as an analytical tool for understanding digital image cultures. Scholars from across Europe, North America and Australia came together to examine how panoramic perspectives shape media practices ranging from Google Street View to video games and virtual reality.

Reframing the Panorama

In his opening remarks, Jens Ruchatz traced the panorama’s history from nineteenth century immersive paintings to contemporary digital media formats. He emphasized its enduring practices such as overcoming fragmentation through an extended view, producing an immersive experience for the viewers and connecting the moving spectators to the still images. He showed how these characteristics remain central to today’s digital environments, however today not the spectators but rather the images move around. This historical framing set the stage for two days of lively discussion in which the panorama was not understood as a relic of the past but as a conceptual lens for media theory.

Day One: Theoretical and Artistic Perspectives

The day moved from theory to artistic practice and into a capstone keynote. The first panel on the “Panorama” opened with Winfried Gerling, who traced the shift from single images to interactive panoramas that were understood as “images to be moved” by the users. In the following “Art” panel, Bethany Berard examined Google Arts & Culture’s panoramic tools as instruments of digital preservation and the potentials of virtual or rather “impossible exhibitions.” Berit Hummel explored how VR city tours’ immersive experiences uncover urban histories by reflecting on the contrast between the pictorial environment and the displayed text. The day concluded with Alexander Streitberger’s keynote on the “inverted panorama,” which reframed the bullet-time effect as a contemporary counterpart to chronophotography and photo sculpturing, a form of vision that is later frequently used in music videos, commercials and movies such as The Matrix.

Day Two: Applied Perspectives on Street View, Games and VR

Day two opened with the “Street View” panel, where Anna Polze analyzed the forensic use of Google Street View in open-source investigations, raising questions about its evidential reliability and global availability. Yasmin Masri followed with her own art project of collecting screenshots near thousands of McDonald’s outlets to reflect on Street View’s dual role as map, archive and panorama while virtually traveling from fast food restaurant to fast food restaurant. The “Games” panel featured Kevin Pauliks, who examined how players create their own panoramas in titles such as The Witcher 3 and Death Stranding through screenshot practices that blur the line between documentation, advertising and criticism.

In the concluding “VR” panel, Annette Urban and Manuel van der Veen discussed the remediation of historical panoramas into virtual reality, highlighting both technical strategies and decolonial criticism. Jasmin Kermanchi closed the conference with a study of documentary VR projects like 6×9 and Saydnaya, showing how techniques of immersion and disimmersion can make immersive experiences of imprisonment affectively graspable while preserving critical distance.

Emerging Themes and Insights

Across the discussions, the panorama was consistently reframed not as a historical curiosity but as a flexible conceptual tool for analyzing contemporary media. Presentations highlighted the shift from passive viewing to active interaction by users navigating, moving and reshaping images rather than merely observing them. Immersion remained central to panoramic media, yet many speakers stressed the importance of exposing mediation or interrupting immersion to encourage critical reflection. Ethical and political questions also came to the fore, particularly in the case of surveillance and forensics by using Google Street View. The panorama’s ability to blur boundaries between still and moving images, photography and cartography and physical and virtual spaces proved a recurring point of interest.

The presentations broadened the perspectives of media theory, art history, game studies and digital preservation. The conference demonstrated how panoramic perspectives can illuminate the dynamics of digital media cultures by reframing the panorama as a conceptual approach for analyzing digital images of Street View, video games and VR. The event not only advanced theoretical debates but provided a platform for future collaborations, offering fresh insights into the panoramic dimensions of the digital image.