Page 205 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 205/206
Raoul Grimoin Sanson: Ballon Cinéorama 1900
It is entirely appropriate that the new 20th century should be celebrated by a marriage of old and new media, and of course that the content of this new marriage should be the experience of flight. So three years before the first powered aeroplane flight, Raoul Grimoin-Sanson celebrates the experience of flying in this simulation of a balloon-flight over Paris. Filmed using a set of synchronised 70 mm movie cameras (!), projected using a similarly synchronised set of 10 projectors, Cinéorama provided the first taste of 20th century immersive entertainment. Grimoin-Sanson’s Cinéorama fuzes two media technologies to create a new experience: immersive cinema. He takes the Diorama (the media-art-form of the early 19th century, invented by Louis-Jacques Mande Daguerre, – a circular building in which was hung a 360-degree painted canvas depicting views, great battles, etc, made into a viewer- experience with music & sound fx – and combines it with a very modern and recent late-19th century invention, the cinematograph (1895), in a bravado tour de force of new media experimentation worthy of the Paris World Exposition...
There have been several of the world expos that have made significant contributions to the development of immersive audio-visual media, but four stand out to me: The original Great Exhibition of 1851, New York World's Fair of 1939, Expo67 at Montreal in 1967, and this, the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. Famous for its launch of art nouveau elegance, the Palais de l`Électrique celebration of electric light and power, and the first showings of the telegraphone (the first magnetic audio recorder) and talking film experiments - as well as an international celebration of Lumiere's Cinematographe motion-picture system, it was also the venue for a number of large-scale, immersive media environments, including Grimoin Sanson's Cinéorama. As I have asserted elsewhere, the search for an immersive, sensory and somatically all-embracing medium has been one of the key drivers in new media development throughout history, but with electricity and motion-picture projection technology in the late 19th/early 20th century, these attempts become manifest in large-scale public events like the Exposition Universelle.