Page 203 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 203/206
Lumiere Bros: Photorama Lumière at the Paris Exposition 1900
Another grand exhibit for the Paris World Fair of 1900 - then the most modern city in the world, as proclaimed by the glorious Eiffel Tower. The grand exhibition features at least three immersive cinematic/audio-visual experiences, Grimoin Sanson’s Cineorama, Louis Regnault’s Mareorama, and this - the Lumiere’s Photorama. This was a process for immersive screenings of still images onto a circular wrap-around screen 20 metres or more in circumference, and 6 metres high - imagine an iMax theatre where you’re sitting in the middle of the circling screen...Photorama used a delightful panoramic projector of 12 revolving lenses to project the 70mm images, which were captured by a similar multi-lens camera. The idea of immersive entertainment had of course predated the Lumiere’s by some several decades - the photographic inventor Daguerre had made his name with his Dioramas - circular buildings in which giant scrolling canvases could be hung, upon which were painted scenes - battle-scapes, townscapes, large parades (etc), and shown to the centrally seated public accompanied with music, sound effects, voice-over narrative, fireworks, smoke and spotlights. The Lumieres brought this into the 20th century.
Thirty years before the Photorama-Lumiere, the sadventurous photographer Gaspard-Felix Tournachon (aka Nadar) had astounded Parisians with his aerial photographs of the city, taken from a hot-air- balloon - probably the earliest (1870) commercial aerial photographs. Entrepreneurial as they were, the Lumiere Brothers co-opt Nadar's idea and decide to create an immersive simulation-experience of a balloon flight over the city. They make it an audience-encompassing, immersive experience by inventing a 360-degree panoramic camera-head with 12 lens, and a mechanism for capturing this onto 70mm cine film. By using a similar multi-lens system to project the images taken from the ascending balloon's carousel, the Lumiere's could create a huge, all-encompassing, intensely visceral experience - a kind of augmented-reality, to amaze and delight the audience, very few of whom would have flown before. Effectively, the Lumiere’s are pushing Daguerre’s idea of the Panorama (1820s) into the age of cinema... For useful further reading on the Immersive arts see Frank Rose: The Art of Immersion (2012) - not good on this history, but great on the impact of the block-buster immersive experience.