Artificial Environments, Virtual Realities, and the Cultivation of Propensity in the London Colosseum

Abstract

T he panorama is routinely identified with the modern attempt to contain everything within a single view or picture—and as such, with one of the earliest steps in a narrative that leads, by way of the diorama and the invention of photography, to the moving images of the cinema. This narrative is often thought to culminate in the digital virtual realities of our own era, which add “navigation, immersion, and interaction to the cinematic representation”; 2 yet this same contemporary development disrupts the narrative it appears to conclude. By recalling the panorama’s immersive virtual realities, digital virtual realities foreground a second narrative, an unruly counterpoint to the first, which is driven by a logic of immersion and participation rather than detachment and representation, is more closely linked to romantic than to Enlightenment thought, and suggests a significantly different relation between nineteenth- and twenty-first-century virtual realities. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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