[ISEA2010] Paper: Roderick Coover – The Digital Panorama in Cultural Representation

Abstract

This paper considers how uses of scrolling and panoramic interface in interactive filmmaking can integrate visual research and cultural representation in ways that draw viewers into the media arts/scholar’s process. The technique I have been developing in the use of panorama is found in Cultures In Webs (2003), Something That Happened Only Once (2007), Outside/Inside (2007) and Voyage Into The Unknown (2008), and in my latest project, CANYONLANDS: Edward Abbey In The Great American Desert. In Another Way of Telling (1982), in which John Berger and Jean Mohr develop text-image works that are part exposition, part narrative, and part poetic evocation, Berger describes the kind of viewership or image-reading that using photographs in sequences provides:
Eisenstein once spoke of “a montage of attractions”. By this he meant that what precedes the film-cut should attract what follows it, and vice a versa… In a sequence of still photographs, however, the energy of attraction either side of a cut does remain equal, two-way and mutual…. The sequence has become a field of co-existence like the field of memory.

  • Roderick Coover (US) makes interactive environments, and electronic poems. Titles include Unknown Territories (Unknownterritories.org), Cultures in Webs (Eastgate Systems), and Something That Happened Only Once (RLCP) among others. roderickcoover.com

Full text (PDF) p.  169-170