Conference Program: Panoramic Perspectives on Digital Images

Organized by Jens Ruchatz and Kevin Pauliks, Projekt Capturing Movable Images. Screenshots as Theorizing Media Practice, Institute of Media Studies, University of Marburg

Day 1: Thursday, July 17, 2025, DDK (Pilgrimstein 14, 35037 Marburg)
Time slot	Panel
13:00 – 13:15	Registration
13:15 – 13:30	Jens Ruchatz: Introduction
13:30 – 15:00	Panorama Chair: Kathrin Yacavone Winfried Gerling: Pan and Zoom – Images to Move Stefanie Diekmann: The Utopia of Co-Presence. Three Panoramas by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
15:00 – 15:30	Coffee break
15:30 – 17:00	Art Chair: Alexander Streitberger Bethany Berard: Google Arts and Culture’s Panoramic Preservation Berit Hummel: Navigating Precarious Urbanities: Image and Text in Virtual Reality
17:00 – 17:30	Coffee break
17:30 – 19:00	Keynote Alexander Streitberger: Frozen Moments and Motion Flow. The Inverted Panorama within Digital Media Culture
20:00	Conference dinner

Day 2: Friday, July 18, 2025, DDK (Pilgrimstein 14, 35037 Marburg)
Time slot	Panel
9:00 – 10:30	Street View Chair: Jens Ruchatz Anna Polze: Forensic Street Views. Soft Images and Hard Facts Yasmin Masri: Inside the Extended Panorama: Google Street View Screenshots Near 7,551 McDonald’s Outlets
10:30 – 11:00	Coffee break
11:00 – 12:30	Games Chair: Alice Morin Victoria Mummelthei: Arresting the Panoramic Flow: Virtual Photography as Temporospatial Negotiation in Digital Games Kevin Pauliks: Scenic Screenshots. A Praxeographic Perspective on Panoramic Views in Video Games
12:30 – 13:30	Lunch break
13:30 – 15:45	VR Chair: Kevin Pauliks Alexander Becker: Formatting the Virtual Image: Production Logics and Reflexive Practices in VR Annette Urban and Manuel van der Veen: Panoramic Translations. Stitching Panoramas, VR and 360°-Views together Jasmin Kermanchi: Between Immersion and Disimmersion. Making Imprisonment Experienceable through Digital Documentary Panoramas
15:45 – 16:00	Conclusion

If you are interested in attending the conference, please register by contacting Nico Sommerlad: sommerln[at]students.uni-marburg.de

Abstracts

Winfried Gerling: Pan and Zoom – Images to Move

The accelerated ubiquitous production of images interacts with the aesthetics of the images, their modes of reception (primarily on displays), their distribution and storage via platforms and the (photographic) devices with which they are produced. The potentisation of photographic production has been accompanied by a move away from the decisive single image.

This phenomenon can also be observed with the spread of camera technologies that produce 360° spherical panoramas. In general, a spherical image is calculated from the images of at least two photographs.

In these spherical panoramas, the partial image temporarily visible on the screen is always dependent on the activity with the image. It must therefore be moved in order to unfold its meaning.  Conversely, even the creation of the image is often an act of movement, for example when the smartphone is moved in a pan across the landscape to take a 360° panoramic shot.

The more recent aesthetic products of 360° cameras in the context of art, film and journalism regularly advertise with the same commonplaces: They talk primarily about immersion and empathy, which is problematic in many respects.  

Google Street View directly follows on from this 360° aesthetic and takes it to the extreme: a seemingly infinite ‘ to be moved’ still image is moved millions of times a day in order to supposedly make a place more accessible. The movement of these images creates a strange experience of ‘liveness’ that often makes us forget that these are images that may be several years old and are anything but a current representation of the space shown.

The introduction of Quicktime VR in 1995 (Qicktime version 2.5) and the excessive use of this technology in the almost forgotten medium of the interactive CD-ROM are part of the revealing prehistory of these technologies.

Quicktime VR combined spherical panoramas with a zoom function and interactive ‘hotspots’ that made multimedia information available. Two modes of this VR technology were available, the panorama mode and its inverse, the object mode, which made it possible to freely move an object photographed from all sides.  The QuickTime VR Object Movie mode appears like the negative to the panorama as a “centrorama”. In my contribution, I will use Quicktime VR to trace the ‘early history’ of digital panoramic images and discuss the distinction between moving and to be moved images. Pan and zoom are the central movement modes here. In addition, I would like to use this history to take a critical look at the question of involvement and empathic immersion.

Bio

Winfried Gerling is Professor of Concepts and Aesthetics of New Media in the Department of Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam where he works in the European Media Studies Program jointly run with the University of Potsdam.

Stefanie Diekmann: The Utopia of Co-Presence. Three Panoramas by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Among the planned explorations of panoramic environments and their structures in contemporary digital culture, the lecture outlined here will be an exceptional case insofar as it deals with a series of panoramas in which constellations and references are re-transferred from digital to analog space.

The 180-degree panoramas exhibited by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster in 2021 at the Secession Vienna (VOLCANIC EXCURSIONS) and in 2022 at the Serpentine Gallery London ALIENARIUM) and at Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin (PANORAMISM AND THE ABSTRACT SECTOR), are presented in material spaces that are themselves part of specific institutional and urban settings. At the same time, these large-format image arrangements, which integrate various elements of the historical panorama, are unmistakably products of a digital image culture. This applies both to the origin of the motifs (all three panoramas foreground the aesthetic paradigm of copy & paste) and to the principle of an associative, eclectic linking of the pictorial elements, in which epochs, contexts, events, historical and fictional figures, human and post-human protagonists are invoked and placed in a relationship of immediate proximity.

From the design principles of the historical panorama, Gonzalez-Foerster adopts, among other things, polyfocality, the faux terrain with specially created objects, the multiplication (and potential de-hierarchization) of figures and pictorial elements and, last but not least, the modelling of an equally contemplative and mobile gaze, to which the pictorial environment becomes accessible only by way of a repeated change of position and perspective. Other principles are developed into a utopian concept of co-presence, in which the many who have always populated the panorama are reconfigured in a “fictitious trans-feminist and anti-racist group meeting”.

On the one hand, the lecture is interested in the cut & paste dimension, in the latent digital operations and the net-savvy organization of Gonzalez-Foerster’s panoramas. On the other hand, it is of interest to what extent the analog exhibition space is treated here as the setting in which the unfulfilled promise of digital emancipation and complicity is provisionally realized.

Bio

Since 2012 Professor of Media Culture at Hildesheim University and chair of the Media Studies section. 2010 to 2012 Professor of Media and Theater Studies at Munich University. Senior Fellow at IFK Vienna (2023/24), IKKM, Bauhaus University Weimar (2018), and the College of Cultural Studies, Constance University (2016). Visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin (2206), Université Catholique de Louvain (2015 ff.), Université Paris 8 / Saint-Denis (2022/23), and Aix Marseille University (2023). Current research interests: secondary characters; intermedia; interviews and audiovisuality; comics.

Bethany Berard: Google Arts and Culture’s Panoramic Preservation

Established in 2011 to “make museum artwork more accessible” (Sood, 2011; 2021), Google Arts and Culture (GAC) offers free virtual access to premiere cultural institutions and their collections (Proctor, 2011). GAC saw a rapid adoption by museum partners, garnering 151 museums across 40 countries in its first two years (Knowles, 2012).This paper takes three elements of Google Arts and Culture’s digital platform: 3D objects, museum views (similar to Google maps inside individual museums allowing users to explore galleries and objects virtually), and the “Zoom In” feature of digital renderings of great artworks to consider how panorama functions as an assumed “value add” in digital cultural preservation not just in terms of width, breadth or scope, but detail as well.

This paper considers what the panoramic imaginary offers to cultural preservation as the detail available becomes far greater than what one could see if one was at the museum in person, viewing the object or artwork oneself, similar in a way to the wide view or the view impossible to see from every angle at once. The engagement GAC facilitates with cultural objects and artworks is, some would argue, unnatural as the level of detail is not possible with the human eye. Indeed, this is how GAC positions these features, as a way to “see culture like you’ve never before.” However, one is not seeing culture, rather a digital rendering of the objects, artworks, or spaces in which art and culture have existed for centuries. How does the digital image change and challenge our idea of engaging with art and culture? What are the theoretical implications of how we understand both art and photography if digital photographs become a primary medium through which we engage art? Archives and museums have long held photographs (Edwards, 2001; Edwards & Ravilious, 2022) and photographic archives exist in both analogue and digital formats (Dalziell & Genoni, 2015; Drotner et al., 2020). However, the photograph has held a contested place as both a document and visual record, and an aesthetic art form in its own right, which, has blurred its position in the hierarchy of museum objects “between art and information” (Edwards & Morton, 2015). Increasingly, the move to digitize physical collections presents a hybrid space in which items’ physical existence co-exists with photographic representations of it, as the digital photographic display can be used to stand in for the object itself. As Ian Milligan (2020) argues, “we are all digital now” and the digital photograph is significant in reshaping both preservation, archival, and institutional informational practices. I suggest panorama may provide a theoretical concept to consider the digital-first approaches to preservation as they currently exist on GAC.

Bio

Bethany Berard is a recent PhD graduate in Communication and Media Studies from Carleton University, and from 2024-2025 was a program and policy analyst for the Office of Academic Programs and Strategic Initiatives at Carleton University. Her work brings together the history of photography and media theory to consider the role of technology in the production of visual culture. Her current book project, Photography Uncertain: The Technical Production of a Modern Certainty tells a history of photography that suggests a modern visual certainty was produced through technical shifts and advances and imposed and standardized practices in various administrative, scientific, and civic contexts. Bethany is the assistant editor of the Canadian Journal of Communication, and an affiliate researcher with Re.Climate (Carleton University), and the Practitioner Media Lab (Western University).

Berit Hummel: Navigating Precarious Urbanities: Image and Text in Virtual Reality

Text-space relations, employed as an artistic strategy by the avant-gardes, acquire renewed relevance in the context of VR as they intervene in the medium’s paradigmatic mode of immersive reception. By introducing friction into the viewing experience of panoramic cityscapes, the multimodality of these formations can draw attention to the constructedness, and layered histories of represented urban environments.

To explore these dynamics, I examine two VR-based artworks engaging with historically and geographically defined urban contexts through image-text constellations: The city was asleep and it had a dream (2021) by Mariam Natroshvili and Detu Jincharadze, and Scanning the Horizon. An Immersive Archive (2021) by Benjamin Busch. Natroshvili and Jincharadze’s work takes viewers on a virtual tour of a multi-layered Tbilisi, where elements of post-socialist architecture intersect with the ideals of modernist urban planning. While the decidedly CGI-rendered aesthetic evokes early media art and foregrounds the constructedness of the panoramic image-space, the embedded textual fragments appear within and across these spaces as poetically charged narratives. These texts reinforce the modernist conception of the city as a narrative and highlight the textual nature of urban space and its relation to memory. In contrast, Busch’s Scanning the Horizon uses LiDAR scans to document sites of queer life in Berlin. Navigating these spaces, users can access interviews with protagonists from the scene, thus juxtaposing the spaces construed from point clouds with lived experiences. The LiDAR-based images, constantly shifting depending on the viewer’s position while exhibiting a visual dominance of data structure, present the city not as a fixed, static space but as a complex, ever-evolving structure.

These rule-based, navigable VR panoramas evoke precarious spaces, based on negotiation due to their volatile positioning. With communication being introduced through on-screen inscriptions and voice-over narration, text functions as both a destabilizing force, challenging the spatial coherence of the panorama, and as a narrative being an integral part of a seamless cinematic experience. Thereby a hybrid reception between physical immersion and reflective, distanced perception is rendered possible, suggesting a porousness of the categorization into moving image and moveable image-space.

Bio

Berit Hummel studied Art History, Psychology, and Fine Arts at Freie Universität Berlin, Universität der Künste Berlin, and Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst/Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig. Dissertation (Art History) at the University of Münster in 2021. Participation in interdisciplinary research contexts: 2012 to 2016 in the Research Training Group 1705 “The World in the City” (Institute for Art History and Historical Urban Studies, Center for Metropolitan Studies, TU Berlin), 2018 to 2019 in the Collaborative Research Center 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces” (TU Berlin). Teaching experience as research associate at the Institute of Architecture, TU Berlin (2016–2022), as well as teaching assignments at TU Berlin and Freie Universität Berlin. Several years of work experience outside academia in cultural institutions in Berlin, including KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Occasional curatorial and freelance projects. Since winter 2023/24 substitute professorship (50%) for Prof. Dr. Ursula Frohne at the Institute of Art History, University of Münster.

Alexander Streitberger: Frozen Moments and Motion Flow. The Inverted Panorama within Digital Media Culture

For the 1999 film The Matrix, John Gaeta created a new visual effect, known as “bullet time.” This effect, also called frozen moment, dead time or flow motion, is based on a series of photographic cameras arranged around the subject in a 360-degree circle and triggered at the same moment or sequentially. Stitched together and processed through a computer program, the still images are then animated by the introduction of a virtual camera that orbits around the frozen scene. In terms of production and reception, the bullet time can be described as an inverted panorama. While digital panoramas, such as QuickTime VR, Google Street View and Photosynth, provide 360-degree image environments that are captured and explored from a central viewpoint, bullet time places the cameras – and thus the viewer – around the subject, enabling the eye to examine it from all angles and positions.

Technologically, theoretically, and historically, such images actually have a lot in common with the panoramic formats mentioned above. Composed of numerous still photographs they offer the experience of an overall space through which one navigates virtually in order to create what Walter Benjamin called the panoptic view: “Not only does one see everything, but one sees it in all ways.”

The hovering between frozen time and motion flow, the combination of photographic fragments and continuous movement as well as the simulation of visual control in the form of an all-encompassing perception, locate the bullet time in a complex historical framework including chronophotography, panorama, photo-sculpture, film and, more recently, digitally produced videos and immersive environments.  Situating the bullet time at the core of this (inter-)media history, I propose to understand this special effect as both an example and a touchstone of the various uses, techniques, and purposes of panoramic images within digital media culture.

Bio

Alexander Streitberger is professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain). He is director of the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art, and Visual Culture and editor of the Lieven Gevaert Series. His research interests are focused on the relationship between language theory and art, photography and intermediality, the encounter between the still (photographic) image and the moving (filmic) image, and panoramic and dioramic images within contemporary art and visual culture. His recent publications include The Photofilmic. Entangled Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Leuven University Press, 2016), Staged Bodies. Mise en scène du corps dans la photographie postmoderniste (Gent, Snoeck, 2020), Psychical Realism. The Work of Victor Burgin (Leuven University Press, 2020), The Grid (Brussels, Racine, 2023). He also curated exhibitions at Musée L, Louvain-la-Neuve, such as Peter Downsbrough / Artists and Photographs (2009), Passages. La photographie dans l’art vidéo (2015), Real Fiction. Le livre d’artiste entre histoire et fiction (2019), Staged Bodies (2020), The Grid (2023/24).

Anna Polze: Forensic Street Views. Soft Images and Hard Facts

My contribution examines navigable image spaces from the perspective of their forensic application. Searching for crime scenes by painstakingly pointing and zooming through Google Street View or Google Earth, locating anonymous image sources, or investigating geographically remote zones of climate injustice, the methodologies of so-called open source investigations (OSINT) make use of a variety of panoramic images in digital media culture. OSINT encompasses investigative intelligence beyond the ‘secret services’, using freely accessible tools as well as sources and information available online (Bielska 2020; Dubberley, Koenig, und Murray 2020). I will present examples such as OSINT- tutorials (esp. the YouTube channel „OSINT at Home“ by open source researcher Benjamin Strick alias BenDoBrown), and the methods of the London-based research agency Forensic Architecture, to reflect on how the gesture of “geobrowsing“ (Abend 2013) is appropriated and adapted in the context of forensic evidence production. I will focus on how OSINT uses the special deictic positioning of users browsing through Google Street View.

Descriptions of the cartographic platform Google Street View use a superlative gesture to understand its imagery. Street View is considered a “world image archive” (Bergermann 2016) or the “largest photomontage in the world” (Siegel 2018). Following Farocki’s term of the “operative image“ (Farocki 2004), Ingrid Hoelzl and Remi Marie present the notion of the “softimage“ to describe the panoramic image aggregates of the platform, where not only the boundaries between single images and their operability blur (Hoelzl und Marie 2015) but also a new image space combining photography and cartography is presented. According to Steffen Siegel, what is innovative in this cartographic form of image compilation is not so much the aspect of cumulative montage as such, but rather the step from the individual view to the experiential space, in which Google Street View unfolds as an intermedial dispositive and praxeological terrain (Siegel 2018, 11). What makes these ‘soft‘ images so attractive for a ‘hard‘ evidential paradigm of clues and traces (Ginzburg 1989) that guides forensic research? Is the navigable gaze that browses through Google Street View already a forensic gaze? How are the panoramic views of Street View embedded within the overall methodologies of OSINT? And what problems lie in the often positivistic and uncritical use of the platform?

Bio

Anna Polze is a PostDoc Researcher in Media Studies. She works at the Collaborative Research Center „Virtual Lifeworlds“ at Ruhr University Bochum and is a member of the subproject on “virtual disputes“ (Virtuelle Streitwelten). Anna received her doctorate in 2024. Her dissertation was written within the Bochum-based research training group „Documentary practices. Excess and Privation“. Her areas of interest are digital (moving-)image cultures, forensic media and visual evidence (Forensic Architecture), borders and migration. Monograph: Fragile Evidenz. Videodokumente illegaler Zurückweisungen an Europas Grenzen, Lüneburg: meson press, 2024; two edited volumes on forensic aesthetics (together with Friedrich Balke) and Virtual Landscapes (together with Manuel van der Veen) are forthcoming. Anna is part of the editorial team of the ZfM (Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft).

Yasmin Masri: Inside the Extended Panorama: Google Street View Screenshots Near 7,551 McDonald’s Outlets

I spent four years taking screenshot-photos of the landscape around McDonald’s outlets on Google Street View (GSV). This presentation shares reflections on my time collecting images within the extended panorama.

Captured through a fused combination of car, camera and computer, GSV is image, map and index all at once. While it may seem all-knowing, searchability remains partial and inconsistent. The viewer can intervene through moving and noticing, gathering (through screenshot) moments that would otherwise sit outside of the catalogue.

Although GSV feels endless, it has hard boundaries. Some locations are frozen in time due to privacy disputes or lack of commercial interest. Elsewhere, whole countries are rendered invisible. The GSV panoramic world gives new freedoms, allowing you to be a ‘neutral’ viewer largely free from your body and the physical constraints and identity markers that come with it. Yet bodies remain – both the collectors behind the screen and those captured within.

Bio

Yasmin Masri is a PhD candidate in the Transdisciplinary School at the University of Technology Sydney. She uses art and creative play as a way to think about urban systems. An edit of this project was published as an artist book – Near 2,143 McDonald’s via Google Street View: Looking Elsewhere – with Nearest Truth Editions in 2024.

Victoria Mummelthei: Arresting the Panoramic Flow: Virtual Photography as Temporospatial Negotiation in Digital Games

A neon sign flickers in Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City, its electric heartbeat casting ever-shifting shadows across rain-slicked streets. Above, megabuildings pierce neon-stained clouds, their surfaces alive with massive video advertisements. This is not just a moment in time—it’s a living, breathing panoramic flow of light, movement, and space. In this moment, with a few keystrokes, we activate the photomode, and something remarkable happens: the deluge of sensory information crystallizes. The rain hangs suspended, each drop a frozen jewel. The flickering neon steadies its pulse. Night City’s ceaseless motion arrests itself, yet paradoxically invites us to explore its newly static expanse with unprecedented freedom.

In contemporary digital games, we find ourselves swimming in what might be called a panoramic flow— a continuous, navigable image-space (or space-image?) that surrounds and engulfs us through our avatar-proxy. Yet within this flow exists a peculiar apparatus: the photomode. Unlike its cousin, the simple screenshot, or its distant relative, the diegetic camera, the photomode performs a remarkable temporal and spatial surgery on the game world.

This talk proposes to examine three tensions that emerge when the photomode arrests the panoramic flow. First, there is the temporal paradox: the continuous movement of the game world freezes, yet we retain our ability to navigate through this crystallized moment—a frozen panorama that nonetheless permits exploration. Second, we encounter a spatial rupture: our perspective disconnects from its usual anchor point (the player-character), transforming us from inhabitants of the panoramic space to omniscient observers of it. Finally, we witness an environmental contradiction: through sophisticated photomode tools, we gain the power to manipulate the properties of the space itself— lighting, weather, time of day—becoming co-authors of the panoramic experience.

These tensions reveal the photomode as more than just a tool for capturing images; it represents a negotiation between the paradigms of panoramic immersion and photographic observation. Where historical panoramas required physical movement to experience their totality, and digital games create navigable image-spaces, photomodes introduce a third state: arrested yet explorable, fixed yet malleable, observed yet manipulated.

This talk seeks to open a dialogue about how this peculiar apparatus might inform our understanding of panoramic perspectives in digital spaces. Through analysis of contemporary games and their photomode implementations, I hope to contribute to the broader discussion of how digital media are transforming our relationship with immersive image-spaces.

Bio

My academic journey has been one of defying conventions. After a PhD in Arabic Studies, I pivoted away from philology into what I call “explorative humanities”. In both teaching and research, I seek approaches that transcend academic habitus: meta-science, reader-centric writing, syndicating science, environmental humanities, game studies, data visualization, AI, and virtual photography—all constitute spaces of creative inquiry for me. Rather than confining my work to traditional publication venues, I share my explorations openly via my “No Discipline” blog or Zenodo (also as part of the collective “c:hum”), including abstracts of conference papers, applications for unapproved third-party funded projects, slides, and video essays.

Kevin Pauliks: Scenic Screenshots. A Praxeographic Perspective on Panoramic Views in Video Games

Video games are a prime example of the movable image. By moving the joystick, the player can control the virtual camera to look around, navigate the player character through virtual environments, and act on image objects on the screen. In this regard, the 360° space image of video games is similar to digital panoramas that can be explored by panning the virtual camera. In contrast to the digital panorama, 3D video games can be explored further by moving the player character through vast virtual environments. By taking scenic screenshots, players can produce their own panoramas in video games and share them online. How are scenic screenshots made in video games and shared on social media? What insights does the panoramic view provide about the video game as a movable image?

This talk will give an overview of the scenic screenshots that are part of the project Capturing Movable Images. Screenshots as Theorizing Media Practice. Therefore, three different phenomena of scenic screenshots will be presented: First, how so-called Ciri Sunset Panoramas document the world of The Witcher 3 (2015). Second, how the Death Stranding Year-Round Photo Mode Campaign advertises the players’ favorite sceneries of Death Stranding (2019). Third, how Gaming Memes criticizes the game graphics of Dragon’s Dogma 2 (2024) by comparing it to Dark Souls 2 (2014).

Bio

Dr Kevin Pauliks is a research associate in the project Capturing Movable Images. Screenshots as Theorizing Media Practice within the Priority Programme The Digital Image at the University of Marburg. His dissertation Meme Marketing in Social Media was published by Büchner in 2024. From 2017–2019 he was a research associate at the Chair of General Sociology at the University of Wuppertal. He researches digital media, in particular memes, screenshots and video games.

Alexander Becker: Formatting the Virtual Image: Production Logics and Reflexive Practices in VR

Immersion is widely regarded as a defining characteristic of virtual reality (VR). The image spaces constructed within this medium situate the user in virtual environments that render the very notion of an ‘outside’ to the image obsolete (Grau 2003; Sherman/Craig 2019; Pinotti 2020). At the same time, these spaces become navigable, as the visual perspective is continuously updated in response to the user’s movements.

An image that both envelops the user and responds dynamically to their movements entails specific conditions. Within technologically oriented approaches to VR, the interface frequently serves as the initial point of reference for explaining the emergence of immersion – particularly the head-mounted display (HMD), which has gained prominence in this context (Heim 1998; Grau 2003). This presentation shifts focus to a component that has received comparatively little attention, despite its fundamental significance: the format, understood as an indicator of the image’s structural properties – such as size, aspect ratio, and shape. For 3D computer graphics commonly employed in HMD-based VR, it is the format that determines the image’s capacity to both envelop the user and remain navigable. The format thus emerges as a constitutive element of the VR dispositif which, in conjunction with the interface, provides preconditions for immersion.

A distinction can be made between two image formats, each drawing differently on the legacy of the panoramic image: the spherical format, used in 360° video, which generates a panoramic visual field; and the 3D format, deployed in interactive applications, which renders the image in real time from 3D data structures. These formats also correspond to varying degrees of freedom (DoF): While the spherical format is tied to 3DoF systems that only allow for head rotations from a fixed position, the 3D format is tailored to 6DoF systems that enable both rotational and translational movement, thereby allowing free navigation within the virtual environment.

The presentation first approaches these two VR-specific image formats from a production-aesthetic perspective. Examples from 3D modeling software illustrate how image formatting unfolds during the production process. Several formatting stages establish key parameters for an image that will later be perceived as an environment. Notably, the virtual camera, initially introduced as a production tool, follows the same operational logic as the HMD worn by the user: both enable navigation and continuously update virtual elements. Subsequently, the presentation turns to VR works that not only employ these formats but also foreground them through explicitly self-reflexive strategies. While VR conventionally aims to obscure its own processes of mediation, predominantly artistic works develop aesthetic procedures that render the conditions of the enveloping and navigable image visible. By exposing formatting steps, staging transitions between 3DoF and 6DoF systems, or thematizing acts of navigation, they subvert the illusion of seamless immersion. An analysis of selected case studies reveals that the image format in VR is not merely a technical prerequisite for immersion but also serves as an epistemic instrument that problematizes the very conditions of the image.

Bio

Alexander Becker has been working as a Research Associate at the Institute for Theatre and Media Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg since 2017. His research interests include film, photography, and virtual reality. In the field of media practice, he focuses on video editing as well as 2D and 3D animation. He is currently completing his doctoral dissertation, entitled Grenzenloses Bildformat? Über umgebungserzeugende und autothematische Strategien in gegenwärtiger Virtual Reality [Boundless Image Format? On Environment-Generating and Self-Thematic Strategies in Contemporary Virtual Reality].

Annette Urban und Manuel van der Veen: Panoramic Translations. Stitching Panoramas, VR and 360°-Views together

Both virtual reality experiences and the panoramas of the 19th century have been incorporated into a shared art history of immersive media. During our research regarding the representation of contemporary art works that use virtual reality (VR), we were also able to identify various interactions between the related procedures. For example, in the search for suitable documentation methods, techniques such as “in-game” photogrammetry, the stitching of individual views into 360° views, the creation of walkthroughs as well as screenshots enhanced with action buttons were used to communicate VRs through other media. In our contribution to the conference, we would like to systematically trace these translation practices in three steps: from the panorama to VR and from VR back to the panorama.

In a first step, the exhibition “Panorama of Congo: Unrolling the Past with Virtual Reality” (CONGO VR, FilmEU RIT) at the National Museum of Natural History and Science in Lisbon will be examined in more detail. For this project, on the one hand, various stitching techniques were developed to digitize the existing panorama. On the other hand, a virtual faux terrain was created. The virtual faux terrain consists of artistic VRs embedded in the digitized panorama to show the panorama’s entanglement in colonial and war history as well as to introduce decolonizing perspectives on the historical artefact.

The second step is then taken from the opposite direction, because we would also like to observe how panoramic practices are implemented in VR and are used for its mediation. In this step, both rotating cameras, which are used in walkthrough videos and are reminiscent of moving panoramas, and the compressed imagery of 360° views transmitted in 2D are informative in this regard. Additionally, the reentry of the panoramic within VR becomes particularly clear with regard to the spheres or virtual globes, which can act as portals between different 360° views. What specific practices and modifications of imagery are involved in these cases? And what kind of access to the spherical worlds do they allow?

We would like to focus on these questions, which arise in panoramic translations like the digitization of a historical panorama and panoramic techniques used in VR. To put these questions into practice, it could be useful to present the panorama as a tool and conceptual background foil for the communication of interactive and physically accessible VR works through other media. We will therefore conclude with a third step and brief insights into the documentation as well as re-presentation techniques for VR works that we have developed in our research center.

Bios

Dr. Annette Urban is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History with a focus on New Media at the Institute of Art History at Ruhr-University Bochum. Since 2022, she is head of the sub-project “Virtual Art” within the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1567 “Virtual Lifeworlds” (RUB). Since 2016, she is a member of the Research Training Group 2132 “The Documentary. Excess and Privation“ (RUB). Her research also focuses on site-relatedness in media art and digital im|material labour in contemporary art.

Manuel van der Veen (Dr.) is a research associate (PostDoc) in the sub-project “Virtual Art“ within the Collaborative Research Center 1567 “Virtual Lifeworlds” at the Ruhr-University Bochum. Previously, in 2022, he completed his doctorate on the art history of augmented reality. His further research interests include the philosophy of technology and space in relation to contemporary digital art, intersections between new media and painting as well as three-dimensional image carriers.

Jasmin Kermanchi: Between Immersion and Disimmersion. Making Imprisonment Experienceable through Digital Documentary Panoramas

“Welcome to your cell. You’re going to be here for 23 hours a day” – these are the first words of the 360-degree video and the virtual reality version of the documentary project 6×9: A virtual experience of solitary confinement (UK 2016) about long-term solitary confinement in the USA. 6×9 places the user in a virtual cell measuring six by nine feet to illustrate the consequences of sensory deprivation. The project is not alone in this approach: a striking number of interactive documentary projects use immersive digital panoramas to make the problems of imprisonment experienceable, for example, Gone Gitmo (US 2007), The Deeper They Bury Me (CA 2015), After Solitary (US 2017), and Saydnaya: Inside a Syrian Torture Prison (UK 2016). Virtual reality projects in particular can trigger claustrophobic effects, which is used as a kind of rhetorical device in documentary projects about prisons. Paradoxically, the potential of these projects lies in the users’ limited freedom of action. However, these projects use different types of digital panoramas, such as navigable, three-dimensional 360-degree models, 360-degree videos, or virtual reality, as well as various practices of producing the (moving) images.

Using the examples of 6×9 and Saydnaya, the contribution explores how the experiences of former prisoners are expressed in the digital panoramas. In what way do people’s memories inscribe themselves into the panoramas and constitute the digital still and moving images? First, a media-praxeological approach is used to examine the co-creative practices of the initiators and the former inmates (Dang-Anh et al. 2017; Kermanchi 2023, 2025). This is complemented by material analyses that examine the digital panoramas in which the practices manifest themselves.   What is interesting about the practices is how distance and disimmersion were used during the interviews in the co-creative production process to avoid re-traumatizing the former prisoners but still obtain relevant information from the people who gave testimony for the design of the digital panoramas. The material analysis focuses on the projects’ strategies to clarify to users that their understanding of the situation of those concerned has clear limits. For this purpose, the analysis draws on the concept of “proper distance” (Nash 2022: 114). Strategies that can be identified in 6×9 and Saydnaya include breaks with perceptual conventions for a “redistribution of the sensible” (Rancière 2006: 43). The digital images move between immersion or affective involvement, on the one hand, and strategies of disimmersion as a critical intervention, on the other (Wiehl 2022, Weidle 2018).

Bio

Dr. Jasmin Kermanchi is a research associate at the Institute of Media and Communication at the University of Hamburg, where she completed her dissertation about the political potential of participation in interactive documentaries in 2024. In 2020, she additionally worked as a research associate in the teaching lab project “Online Course Documentary Film in Digital Transfer” (“Onlinekurs dokumentarischer Film im digitalen Transfer”) funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. In 2023, she supported the research project “The documentary and the digital” (“Das Dokumentarische im Digitalen – DiD”) led by Anna Wiehl with academic and editorial work. Her research interests include new documentary forms, especially in digital media cultures; theories of documentary film; theories of participation; digital media technologies and social change; artificial intelligence in documentary. More information: https://www.slm.uni-hamburg.de/imk/personen/kermanchi.html.

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