‘The Viewer/Observer/User: an archaeology of Multimedia’, paper delivered at the Queensland College of Art, and Queensland University of Technology, September, 1995

The promise of multimedia is that it will profoundly change spectatorship. We will no longer be passive viewers, or distant observers, instead we will be users, or players, or the neologism ‘interactors’. The history of technologies of vision and display over the last several centuries has been seen to be one of a continual seduction, a gradual attractive force which the image has exerted on the viewer, drawing the viewer ever closer, until now we seem to be on the brink of being drawn into the image itself. Key scenes from films such as Videodrome or Poltergeist described this fatal seduction even before William Gibson’s final pioneering break through into cyberspace. The imbrication of the body of the spectator and the technology of the display has produced a multimedia/multisensory ensemble of machine and body, a perceptual cyborg. Of course the most dramatic image of this visual prosthesis is the person in the VR suit, but the ensemble is just as complete, if less anthropomorphic, in the computer based ‘multimedia interactive’. From the outside this cyborg looks fairly prosaic, nothing more than somebody siting in a chair in front of a computer with their arm outstretched to a mouse on a mouse pad. People have trouble making this ensemble look as interesting as it is, so in TV shows like the X Files computers are always used in dark rooms so they cast an exaggerated glow onto the face of the users, some of the computer screens seem to be also equipped with lenses that actually project the letters and words of the screen onto the face of the user. The promise of this immersion in the image can have both positive or negative connotations, there has been a spate of ads lately where people drive their cars or burst with their skateboards through billboards into a better life within the image, conversely the fear of cyberporn has gripped the imagination of the press, with some articles even reporting on the physical spiriting away of hapless children by strangers on the Net.

The homunculus of this new cyborg is simple too, a closed circuit system of screen/eyes/hand/mouse/cursor/screen/eyes/hand/mouse/cursor/screen etc. But within this charmed, circular apparatus, of course, there are wonders: an infinite, fluid space without boundaries because it folds in on itself; a world without gravity, or friction, or acceleration, or deceleration, a world whose only horizon seems to be the temporal lacunae when the cursor is replaced by a watch symbol and you can hear the disc spinning in the machine. A world without perspective, where distance is contained within the limits of a given resolution.

The viewer is immersed, but they also travel: they fly over terrains, follow branching pathways, move through rooms, navigate through labyrinths, explore rhizomes, etc. The viewer interacts. The new multisensory computer/user cyborg is dependent on immersion and interaction.

In this talk I want to do two things. First of all want to examine the precise nature of the ‘newness’ of multimedia. I want to historicise its newness. Secondly I want to examine the relationship, and possible tensions between immersion and interaction in multimedia.

In the 17th and 18th centuries the figure of the camera obscura was used in a very similar way to the ways in which multimedia or new technology are used today. The camera obscura was certainly a particular technology, a series of objects which were developed and refined during those centuries, the camera obscura also defined a series of specific cultural and social practices, artistic styles and ways of looking, but the camera obscura was also a philosophical model, a scientific and metaphysical metaphor for states of being and ways of knowing. The camera obscura was an assemblage, both a technical object and a discursive model. It is the fact that multimedia is also such an assemblage that makes it fascinating.

At the beginning of the 17th century Kepler used the camera obscura as a model for the functioning of the eyeball. The lens was like the pupil, and the retina was the piece of white paper or ground glass screen. He couldn’t work out, however, how the two images made their way from the retinas into the mind to produce a single image of the world. Later Descartes developed Kepler’s model of vision into a model of visual cognition by introducing intellectual understanding as a crucial complement to the cold image projection of the iris, the perceiver read the mini-movies that were being continually projected inside the skull in an equivalent way to the way they read the other signs of the world which were brought by the other senses, or which could be induced by thought. Descartes therefore elevated the camera obscura to a model of understanding itself. But in the camera obscura the viewer’s body is bracketed out, because the viewer is inside the machine the machine can take no regard of the viewer, all that matters is the punctal lens and the objective image which the viewer perceives with sober, detached scrutiny. As Descartes said “perception, or the action by which we perceive, is not a vision … but is solely an inspection by the mind.”(Crary 43)

Jonathan Crary, in his book Techniques of the Observer, claims that there was a monumental shift to this paradigm in the early 19th century. The body, which was bracketed out of Cartesian perception, became the very site of perception for 19th century scientists. The eye, which had been a cold dead optical instrument in the 16th and 17th centuries suddenly flowered into a febrile, quivering organ in the 19th century. Scientists and philosophers like Goethe, Schopenhauer introduced a temporal dimension into perception with their investigation of the phenomena of the persistence of vision (on which the apparatus of the cinema depends), others desperately tried to draw and catalogue the various varieties of afterimage before the faded, one blinded himself staring at the sun, other scientists furiously rubbed their eyes to create impressions of light and colour with no optical stimulus, others discovered the blind spot, other scientists discovered that any given nerve will give the same sensation no matter what the stimulus—optical, electrical, chemical or physical

Perception is not the sober inspection of some inner cinema, instead inside and outside mix so intimately that the cannot be distinguished. Perception is incarnated.

A whole range of apparatuses were developed as simultaneous amusements, tools of scientific investigation and epistemological models. Examples like the Thaumatrope, phenakisttiscope, zootrope and kaleidoscope are well known. I want to concentrate on the stereoscope and the phantasmogaoria.

There is no stereoscopic image, it is never stably projected anywhere for sober contemplation, instead it is formed by an exertion of the mind, nor is the stereoscope a replication of natural vision, it is an artificial simulacra of vision. It gives the temporary illusion of b binocular vision, not binocular vision itself. The virtual stereoscopic image is like a stage set, the planes appear recede like flat disjointed cardboard cut outs with a vacuum between. The stereoscope also announced for the first time the prosthetic interlocking of body and machine, though artificial, it is a thoroughly corporealised vision. But it also had the effect of taking vision out of the body, which is left behind, and producing a kind of phantom, body which travels through a virtual space.

Oliver Wendell Holmes writing in 1859 described this new form delirious navigation through virtual reality: “The first effect of looking at a good photograph through the stereoscope is a surprise such as no painting ever produced. The mind feels its way into the very depth of the picture. … Oh infinite volumes of poems that I treasure in this small library of glass and pasteboard! I creep over the vast feature of Rameses, on the face of his rockhewn Nubian temple; I scale the huge mountain-crystal that calls itself the pyramid of Cheops. I pace the length of the three titanic stones of the wall of Baalbec — mightiest masses of quarried rock that man has lifted into the air; and then I dive into some mass of foliage with my microscope, and trace the veinings of a leaf so delicately wrought in the painting not made with hands, that I can almost see its down and the green aphis that sucks its juices. I look into the eyes of the caged tiger, and on the scaly train of the crocodile, stretched on the sands of the river that has mirrored a hundred dynasties, I stroll through Rhenish vineyards, I sit under Roman arches, I walk the streets of once buried cities, I look into the chasms of Alpine glaciers, and on the rush of wasteful cataracts. I pass, in a moment, from the banks of the Charles to the ford of the Jordan, and leave my outward frame in the armchair at my table, while in spirit I am looking down upon Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives” (The Stereoscope and the Stereograph)

Stereoscopy, not surprisingly, quickly became associated with pornography in a similar way in which the Net and VR have instantaneously suggested porn to today’s press. Baudelaire railed against it in his famous diatribe against photography of the same year: “The love of pornography, which is no less deep rooted in the natural heart of man than the love of himself, was not to let slip so fine an opportunity of self-satisfaction. And do not imagine that it was only children on their way back from school who took pleasure in these follies; the world was infatuated with them. I was once present when some friends were discretely concealing some such pictures from a beautiful woman, a woman of high society, not of mine—they were taking upon themselves some feeling of delicacy in her presence; but ‘no’ she replied. ‘Give them to me! Nothing is too strong for me.’ I swear that I heard that but who will believe me?”(Salon of 1859)

The stereoscope was a kind of corporeal/visual labour on the part of the user, who is no longer a passive cartesian viewer, but an active observer, quite aware of the nature of the apparatus, which was transparent to them, and willingly submitting themselves to the surprise of the illusion, the production, within their corporeal selves, of a artificial shock, as Baudelaire’s scandalous lady say ‘nothing is too strong for me!”

The stereoscope was primarily a domestic technology, for armchair travellers or masturbators. Other technologies produced corporeal illusions in a public space, to observers who were logged into the cybernetic visual system, not through stereoscopes attached to their faces, but through having their bodies immobilised in auditorium chairs. These were dioramas, wax works, phantasmogaorias,  magic shows and early pre-narrative cinema.

It is one of the founding myths of cinema that the first audience for the Lumieré’s Arrival of a Train at a Station in 1896 caused panic amongst its audience because they thought they were about to be run over by an actual train. However recent film historians such as Tom Gunning have disputed this seductive myth. For one thing, audience in Europe were used to being astonished by mechanical and optical apparatuses. They were not a naive audience who assumed the apparatus to be transparent, Gunning claims that the astonishment of early audience was at the apparatus itself, and not at what it purported to represent. The apparatus tested the limits of an intellectual disavowal: I know, but yet I see, and that was its pleasure. This pleasure is an aesthetics of astonishment, where the viewer does not get lost in the fictional world of the film’s dram, but remains aware of the act of looking. Films with great titles like The Railroad Smash-Up, Photographing a Female Crook, Demolishing a Wall, and Electrocuting an Elephant, were exactly what the said they were. Safely ensconced in their seats the audience experience the pleasure of a discontinuous series of bodily shocks, which they know is being brought to them by the technology of cinema—a cinema, which in its structural logic is similar to the machinery of the factory, or the experience of a tram-ride through city streets. Critics in the 1920s and 30s, such as Benjamin, Kracauer and Jünger saw these shocks as a kind of training of the body, a hardening of it, to be able to accept the increasing jolts of modernity

This cinema of attractions persists throughout the history of cinema, even when another kind of psychological absorption into the diegetic narrative of the cinema is developed by DW Griffith and Hollywood through the combination of 19th century narrative modes and shot/reverse shot psychological identification with characters. Again, pornography is the most obvious examples of the sub-subterranean persistence of the cinema of attractions, but even Hollywood cinema retains elements of it. Recent mainstream films contain elements of the Ride Film, where the viewer’s body is subject to a series of vertiginous affects, optically and directly, not through psychological identification. Often, as in batman, these films are associated with real theme park rides, and the technologies of actual transport of the audience through real space, along a roller-coaster, and their virtual transport, via projected imagery, have been merging. Again this has precedents in the dioramas and panoramas of the 19th century where audience seating were mechanically moved from scene to scene.

My reason for elaborating all of these precedents to multimedia immersion is not simply to point out that it is all not such a new thing after all, and definitely not to celebrate multimedia as the inevitable culmination of centuries of striving for a ‘better’ vision. Rather I want to shift attention from the newness of the particular technologies—computers and their programs—to the ensemble of viewer/machine. I want to look at what is happening in the two feet or so of space between the user and the screen, and for that a kind of archaeology of the interface may be useful.

Within today’s interactive user of a computer interface there sits another historical figure, the corporealised observer of astonishing optical phenomena which are produced, or perhaps incarnated, within the observer themself, and within that figure lies another figure, the decorporealised cartesian viewer, soberly understanding the language of the outside world. I think we need to call upon all three—viewer, observer and user—to understand what is going on.

One of the most popular films of the ‘cinema of attractions’ was the phantom train ride where, instead of the train threatening to come out of the screen at the audience, a camera was mounted on the front of the engine and the audience was endlessly plunged through space along the camera’s central perspectival axis. The audience seemed to be carried forward not by the train, which was invisible, but by the thrust of vision itself.

Today, of course, the connection between lines of sight and ballistic trajectories has been firmly established by smart bombs. And in today’s VR environments or multimedia interfaces, it is not the train which is a phantom, but the user themself has a phantom double, which is recognised by the machine. The key rupture between old and new immersive environments is that in new immersive environments, the apparatus recognise us, as much as we recognise it. This can extend all the way from the computer responding with a new window when we point and click at a button with our simple cursor arrow on the screen, which is our punctal double in the program’s interface, to the shoot-em-up VR games where if your opponent sees you before you see them…they gleefully shoot you. Between are all the possibilities of interactivity, and all the possible architectures of the virtual environment: the hierarchical, the labyrinthine, the rhizomatic.

However the two qualities of today’s multimedia seem to have an inverse relationship to each other. Maximum effects of immersion rely on minimal interactive choices, more complex choices and hypermedia pathways rely on dense and complex interfaces which demand more of a sober Cartesian intellection than a spasmodic corporeal reaction. For instance most flight simulators, although being highly immersive, only allow the viewer to gradually inflect the trajectory, the paths are quite tightly constrained, and the machine needs time to process new data. In any case, how can more complex, meditative, cartesian decisions be made in a complex labyrinthine interface when the body is hurtling through virtual space. When there is no split between mind and body, when they are vertiginously thrust together by the G forces of immersion, can cartesian ‘choice’ be exercised in the same way? In real situations the body’s reactions are a matter of the somatic memory of relentless training and habitual corporeal drilling.

Most information rich multimedia actively work against the natural immersive seductions of the medium, interfaces which are discussed in terms of being user friendly, or ‘transparent’ seem to me to be on the contrary to act as speed humps. The provide a series of already recognised objects signifying sober selection, books on the shelf, doors along a hallway, pictures on the wall, on which the user must click. Acting like a virtual sphinx these interfaces say, pause before you choose.

There may be a very fundamental metaphoric flaw here. All the hypertext/hypermedia hype rotates around the metaphoric figure of exploration, the breath taking discovery of a new fact. The sudden, unprecedented surprise. The instantaneous enlightenment of dark continents. The Eureka! But all our post-colonial writers have told us that exploration was never like that, frontiers never moved across the face of the globe with the inexorable certainity of the dawn. Exploration was always preceded by speculation, myth, hypothesis, the new was always read through established models of what otherness should be. And of course, on the other side, the side of darkness there is always resistance, evasion, dissimilation and mimicry. Quite simply exploration is never simply spatial or territorial, it is also textual, incremental, layered, accumulative and a process of exchange, however out of balance.

I think that the tension between immersion and interactivity must be a very delicate one to balance, because, from my position solely as a user, multimedia producers seem to very often get it wrong. Astonishment fails, information exchange does not take place between computer and user, the user skims over the interface, checking to see that something, it doesn’t seem to matter what, happens as buttons are clicked. They interact with the interface, rather than the program. The multimedia exhausts itself when its interface, rather than the program itself, has ‘played itself out’. Boredom and impatience are spectres that haunt every multimedia developer.

Is this why the most psychologically engaging immersive interactivity practices are text based, not image based. MUDs and MOOs have a low data bandwidth, but a high informational bandwidth, courtesy of the English language. To my knowledge the only reported psychological trauma from a rape in cyberspace was textual and occurred in LAMDAMOO (?).

‘Generating a new sense of place in the age of the metaview’, Journal of Australian Studies, Volume 35, Issue 4, 2011. With James Steele

A new sense of place in the age of the metaview

In the period since its invention, photography has become one of the main means through which we create and maintain our sense of place. For a long time photography has grounded our human evocations of a site’s cultural, historical or natural significance to its actual physical location. As Joan M Schwartz and James R Ryan put it, ‘Photographs shape our perceptions of place … photographic practices — from tourist photography to domestic photography — play a central role in constituting and sustaining both individual and collective notions of landscape and identity. Moreover, photography has long played a central role in giving such social imagery solid purchase as part of the ‘real’.’[1] For many of us it is our prior understanding of a site’s significance through seeing photographs of it that we feel to be so strongly confirmed by our own eventual experience of its actual material reality. For instance we understand the significance of the Tasmanian wilderness through all the photographs of it by Peter Dombrovskis and Olegas Truchanas. And we process our experience of the sheer physical presence of Uluru through all the thousands of photographs of it we have seen.

If photographs have been turning spaces into places for such a long time, what can be said about that process now after two revolutions, the first being the digitisation of the film-based imaging in the 1990s, and the second being the explosion of online uploading, archiving, access and distribution of photographs on the web in the 2000s. How have these revolutions affected the framing, sharing and experiencing of places?

THE FRAME

With the invention of photography the convention of the wooden frame around a painting, which had been developing in the West for a thousand years, became technologised and internalised into the camera itself, first into the glass-plate holder, and then into the viewfinder which punched a rectangular ‘picture’ out of the circular image thrown by the lens. Before photography frames were wooden artefacts that separated the art from the architecture in order to, in Immanuel Kant’s words, ‘stimulate representation by their charm, as they excite and sustain the attention directed to the object itself’.[2] After photography, however, framing became a more instrumental act that concentrated and directed the eye of the viewer. In the case of landscape photography this framing act incorporated the conventions already developed in landscape painting. The succeeding planes of mountains and hills, the compositional vectors of valley and rill, led the viewer’s eye into the virtual space of the picture. Many subsequent critiques of European imperialism have also seen this act of scopic framing and penetration as emblematic of the commandeering and domination of the land itself.[3]

In the case of stereo views the narrativization of the enframed space almost became violent as the viewer seemed to be virtually jolted out of their chair and phenomenologically drawn into the 3D illusion of the picture. As the essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes enthused to his readers in 1859: ‘The first effect of looking at a good photograph through the stereoscope is a surprise such as no painting has ever produced. The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture. The scraggy branches of a tree in the foreground run out as if they would scratch our eyes out.’[4]

Photography brought to the forefront the frame’s capacity for not only gathering up, concentrating and organising the viewer’s attention, but also for — again almost violently — cutting what was inside the frame off from the reality that continued to extend beyond it. By the mid twentieth century to compose was also to crop. As John Szarkowski remarked in 1966 ‘The Photographer looked at the world as though it was a scroll painting, unrolled from hand to hand, exhibiting an infinite number of croppings — of compositions — as the frame moved onward’.[5] Szarkowski’s conventional art-historical analogy is certainly well chosen as a means of acknowledging photography’s close historical relationship to both Western and Oriental painting traditions, but it misses the full agility of the camera as the photographer swooped the camera up and down and zoomed in and out. The slicing edge of the photograph added a graphic intensity to the spatial drama of the view, boxing spaces up with shapes that were amputated and truncated by the frame. Frames were particularly good at giving monuments and landmarks a graphic iconicity. For instance the conventional postcard framing of Uluru sitting on the horizon has a flag-like recognisability.

METADATA

Photography had always been a medium of quantity. From the beginning photographs were packaged into albums to be circulated, or reproduced in books to be published. The digital revolution and the rise of the internet exponentially accelerated that old order. Almost five billion images have been uploaded to the photo-sharing site Flickr since it began in 2004[6]. Over two billion photos go up onto Facebook each month.[7] The central object of the medium, the photograph as artefact — be it daguerreotype, stereograph, print or book – is disappearing under the weight of the simplicity, accessibility and reach of the new, digital form. New possibilities opened up by the online digital environment have changed the way images communicate and audiences are moving to new virtual environments to experience images. New methods of finding, sorting and viewing images are being developed. Ease of access to these images is creating new technological opportunities to assemble and present transient collections of related images. Such collections can be easily shared so others can experience them, or in their turn actively reorder, expand or limit the images, how they see them, and what meaning they derive from them.

Although algorithmic recognition software, such as face recognition software, is beginning to be developed to search for images by directly matching the features in the images themselves (colour, faces, shapes and so on), the most common way of locating images on the internet is still through simple text searches. [8] To find an image through a text search the text a user seeks to match with a photograph must have somehow been previously associated with the image in a way that makes sense to a search engine. Typically, the title of the photograph, its description or text surrounding an image embedded in a web page is used to make the match with search terms. This associated text is metadata: data (text descriptions) about data (the image) that makes access to the image possible through text-based searches. There are other sorts of metadata as well, for example, librarians catalogue photographs with a range of descriptors, while whenever a picture is taken digital cameras automatically save data about such things as the shutter speed, aperture, camera type, lens type, and the date and time the exposure was made.

Search engines can use this extended metadata to aid user searches. Specialist sites like the National Library of Australia’s Trove allow users to search catalogue data to find items that interest them in the collections not only of the National Library itself, but also other institutions across Australia and even beyond: books, newspapers, journals, maps, music, oral history, paintings, photographs and more besides.[9] Items are indexed by Trove to help searchers find items on Australia and Australians. Trove is a portal or metasearch engine, providing access to items using data provided by a range of sources, many of which are external to the National Library and out of its control.

Flickr uses a similar approach in its Commons Project.[10] Flickr Commons exposes the photography collections of a number of large institutions, including the Australian War Memorial, State Library of New South Wales and Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum. In a process known as crowdsourcing, Flickr encourages its community of users to add their own tags and comments about the photographs they see in the Commons. The tags and comments become part of the public data associated with the photographs, discoverable through searches by other users.

Another type of metadata that can be attached to items like photographs is the location where the photograph was created. With digital photographs, this information can be embedded electronically in the image file itself, along with other standard metadata like the date and time the photograph was taken, any keywords associated with the image, copyright information and so on. As the digital photograph is shared across the internet, so too is the embedded metadata. Digital photographs with location data embedded in them are said to be ‘geotagged’.

When the Panoramio layer is turned on in Google Earth, small icons, or the images themselves, appear on the surface where geotagged photographs were taken. Clicking the icons or images displays the photograph. Icons also appear for other geotagged photographs that were taken nearby, and can be similarly displayed.

[INSERT PHOTO1 HERE]

Panoramio layer on Google Earth showing the presence of geotagged images along the Champs-Élysée

As more and more photographs have location metadata attached, it becomes easier to find different views of a place, or even the same view but taken at different times. Currently about eight million geotagged photographs are uploaded to Flickr every month.[11] These pictures can be searched and reconfigured to create other pictures, for instance in 2009 over 35 million geocoded photographs were harvested from Flickr to create a ‘heat map’ of the world showing where the photographs had been taken[12].

[INSERT PHOTO 2 HERE]

World Heat Map: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~crandall/photomap/, used with permission

METAVIEWS

What is emerging is the possibility of software applications within online environments creating an enhanced sense of a place by using the increasing numbers of photographs available of a particular location. A single photograph is one moment in time, while the more photographs there are of a place, the greater the possibility of capturing the events, the structures, and the beauty of the place that provides meaning and defines it as something worth experiencing. An even richer sense of place can be further revealed through the comments added by the user community.

Before digital photography, snapshot photographs circulated in different spheres to official photographs, and historic photographs were kept in different collections to contemporary photographs, but now they are all just a hyperlink from each other. Different images of the same place taken at different times can help us build up a more complete ‘picture’ of the activities and events that happened there, giving us a new sense of the place that would be impossible to extract from any one image. Traditionally, different photos were looked at individually, on the wall of a gallery, in the pages of an album or book, within a pile of holiday prints back from the chemist, or at a slideshow on a Saturday night. Just as the Renaissance picture frame was remediated into the camera, these old forms of viewing have been remediated into the internet, with its document, page, slide-show and album metaphors. But computers are also capable of previously impossible forms of display: using software, similar images can be combined, stitched together in panoramas, used to create tone-mapped images, or laid out in three-dimensional space so that viewers can navigate through them almost at random.

Through the use of these online technologies viewers now have the opportunity to experience extended views of landscapes that grow beyond the rectangular frames of cameras. These views can be called ‘metaviews’ for several reasons. Firstly because they are not framed by a rectangular boundary cropping a composed scene out of an infinitely extensive reality, rather they are ‘enframed’ by search terms applied to the metadata attached to each picture in an online archive. This sifting of the metadata may gather together pictures that share a common locality established by proximate GPS co-ordinates for instance, or a similar compass direction, or a similar time of the year, or the same key word in the caption. The viewer’s eye composes a sense of a view by travelling through a sequence of photographs that erase the frame. Just as the eye was led through traditional landscapes, or the viewer apparently entered the very depths of the stereographic view, in the metaview the user navigates through a contiguous collection of images.

The experience of the view they get is therefore a second order view, a metaview in a second sense because it is constructed from first order components — photographs. It is not, however, a slide show or a cinematic or paginated sequence because it is not a deliberately authored enunciation, rather it is a technological enframing which in and of itself ‘excites and sustains’ the user’s attention which is directed to the metaview. These enframed views are ‘meta’ in a third sense because they become a virtual place within the space of the web, a place that, often, users can navigate themselves. They are another ‘site’ on top of the website the viewer is using. As William J Mitchell noted, increasingly ‘the places we frequent have IP addresses as well as geographic coordinates.’ [13]

Computer software currently exists where individual photographs can be stitched together to extend the frame by creating panoramas, or gigapixel images[14], where the viewer can pull back to see the whole scene or zoom in to any part for fine detail. High Dynamic Range (HDR) images are created using computer software by combining several photographs of the same scene taken with difference exposures, to bring out details in the shadows and the highlighted areas that normally would not be able to be distinguished with film or digital photography. QuickTime VR images[15] are spherical images that can be viewed in a web browser. They can show a full 360 degree view of an object or space, allowing the viewer to choose the perspective from which they want to see the scene. Google’s free SketchUp software[16] is a 3D modelling application that allows users to skin their 3D models with actual photographic images, providing the viewer with more angles to view the subject of the model than would normally be possible using individual images.[17] Microsoft’s Photosynth[18] and AutoDesk’s Photo Scene[19] place photographs taken of the same subject or scene from different perspectives in a three-dimensional space and provide the viewer with tools to navigate through the scene on the computer screen.

Currently, most metaviews are created from the collection of a single photographer, although there are some examples where online communities contribute images of a particular place or event, and the metapicture is created from the contributions of many people[20].  Unlike the traditional ‘decisive’ moment, these metaviews have the potential to span time, from microseconds to more than a century, giving viewers insights, for example, into the impact of human activity on the environment; insights that would be harder or impossible to achieve with individual photographs. Different points of view may reveal information hidden in the single framed photograph. In his article Walls of Light – Immaterial Architecture, Scott McQuire refers to ‘cumulative knowledge established by the series or set’[21]. Collections of images related by time and place add a dynamic dimension to the individual photograph, transcending the original frame and allowing us to peer outside it into space the original photographer was unable or unwilling to let us see, giving us a wider perspective and greater insights than would otherwise be possible. Multiple perspectives on the same place or event may provide viewers greater opportunities to be witnesses rather than consumers of packaged stories, allowing them the sense that they are informing themselves and making up their own minds.

A SENSE OF PLACE

If individual photographs of somewhere give us evidence of what happened or exists there, then many photographs, say of different events at that location or of the location through time, might provide more of the resonance that turns space into place. Previously, photographers have always sought to encapsulate the significance of a view in a single frame. The paradigmatic example in Australia is Peter Dombrovskis’ picture of Rock Island Bend on the Franklin River, reproduced in full-page colour in Australia’s newspapers on election eve 1983 with the slogan ‘Could you vote for a party that would destroy this?’, it was arguably responsible for  electing Bob Hawke’ Labor government.[22]  Other significant parts of Australia, such as Uluru, have become widely experienced through their amenability to iconic, graphic iconicity. The metaview is now available to be used to contribute to the material experience of more Australian places, perhaps those not so immediately amenable to spectacular encapsulation.

The first signs of this movement are beginning to appear. For example Picture Australia is the National Library of Australia’s service that allows users to search the pictorial collections of many of Australia’s collecting institutions.[23]  Individuals can also contribute photographs to the Picture Australia pool using Flickr: simply by joining a Picture Australia Flickr group, tagging their photos and contributing them to the group, those user-contributed photographs on Flickr with metadata matching a user’s search criteria will be returned to other users searching Picture Australia. The National Library also uses the Flickr groups to identify contemporary images that may be added to its own collections. With the sheer deluge of images coming available on the internet, the utilisation of Flickr contributors’ own efforts to tag and nominate photographs that fit the Picture Australia criteria gives the National Library a mechanism to cope with the flood.

A recent project with the Kosciuszko Huts Association (KHA) is an example of how the National Library has been able to harness the power of the internet to augment its limited resources for accessioning images. The National Library had previously accepted over 2 000 photographs, negatives, and slides contributed by KHA members, but the Library was not in a position to accession further photographs. Keen that all these additional images not be lost to the community, the Library suggested to the KHA that its members upload the images to Flickr and contribute them to the Picture Australia ‘Ourtown’ Flickr group. While the number of photographs actually shared by the KHA on the group remains relatively small, projects such as this nonetheless indicate the potential for groups with their own idiosyncratic histories and private collections to form larger searchable archives.

On 23 July, 2010, at Whites River Hut in the High Country a skier threw spirits into a pot-bellied stove to light it, not knowing that there were still glowing embers there. The resulting fire quickly took hold inside the hut, but a party of passing skiers extinguished it before the hut was completely destroyed[24]. The KHA sent out a call to its members to contribute photographs of the hut before the fire to its photography website so that a 3D model of the hut, outside and in, could be developed using Google’s SketchUp application, and plans drawn up to repair the damage. The metaview afforded by the 3D model allows the viewer to experience something that has been lost, to get a sense of the place as it was before a destructive event. The purpose is not only to help give viewers an appreciation of the value of the structure in its environment, but to provide the information necessary to support a reconstruction project.

In this case, despite several year of effort before the fire to collect them online, sufficient photographs of the hut were not immediately available to create the 3D model, but a call-to-action among KHA members immediately after the fire saw sufficient photographs for the 3D model to be made contributed to the KHA photo website. Had the photographs scattered across the internet in, for example, KHA members’ Flickr accounts, on Panoramio or in the online collections of cultural institutions, contained location metadata the call-to-action may not have been required.

[INSERT PHOTO3 HERE]

Whites River Hut, Kosciuszko National Park, February 2010 [ Photo: James Steele]

Finding geotagged photographs easily remains difficult. A Google Image Search for Whites River Hut returns 1.35 million results but, in fact, few of the images are relevant. If, for instance, these images were geotagged, it could be possible to search just for images within the immediate vicinity of the hut, and building the metaview would have been a much easier project.

It is clear from examples such as these that the technology to search images by location, essential to the creation of a metaview of a particular place, is still nascent. For instance a name-based search for a location on Trove returns not only photographs, but a range of other sources including books, journals, magazine and newspaper articles, oral history recordings and maps, not all of which may relate to the particular location under investigation. What does not yet exist is an effective search engine for images from across the internet that returns results based on the unique location where the image was captured. Online photo collections services Flickr, Panoramio and Picasa have map-based interfaces to their own collections that allow visitors to browse for photographs taken in particular locations, but as yet there is no over-arching search engine that would return all the photographs from a particular location across all three services and the rest of the internet at once. Limiting the results of a Google Image Search by location would be an important feature, but it requires the images to have the necessary and accurate metadata encoded along with the image; an ability for the search engine that located and interpreted the image file to understand the embedded location data; and an interface to allow the user to limit their search to a particular location, or to have the results grouped by location if the searcher was unsure of where the place they were searching for actually was.

Building new means of navigating the found set of co-located images is also a challenge. Microsoft’s Photosynth provides a better experience of a place than the scattered icons and picons of Google Earth’s Panoramio layer. However the experience is still one of moving between the flat, framed rectangles of the original photographs that have been digitally stitched together into the synthetic view. In one sense this effect is a salutary, but constant, reminder for the user of the origins of the view as disparate photographs. However a more seamless, immersive, and perhaps visually exhilarating experience of a place could also be generated through the amalgamation of games technologies like Epic Games’ Unreal Engine which could recreate real-world environments in 3D with photographs harvested from the internet. [25] [26]

In any case crowdsourced metaviews, as they become more accessible in the future, potentially offer a much richer experience of the place, drawing on different points of view of different visitors at different times. These representations may provide resonances that enrich the viewer’s experience of a place beyond the framed, well-executed, single image. Even now experiencing Uluru via Google Earth allows a far more complex and complicated interaction for the casual viewer than that available through the iconic but flat picture postcards or Australiana picture books. There is the potential through this sense of ‘virtual fly-through’ to provide the user with an exhilarating sense of access to significant places that is a more materially based experience than the iconic image can ever provide. It may even replace the commanding monocular imperial gaze with one that is more engaged and enmeshed in the place.

[INSERT PHOTO 4 HERE]

Uluru on Panoramio[27]

However, currently iconic views of iconic places still dominate Google Earth’s metaviews. Maps of the distribution and concentration of photographs on Google Earth demonstrate that the Opera House, Bondi Beach and so on are all places where the crowd still gathers to take their own photographs, just as the professionals have stood there before them to make their postcards. However metaviews which incorporate additional images taken from different perspectives, at different times of the day, showing fleeting visitors or transient events offer at least the possibility of an enriched understanding of these already famous places. Other places, for instance those shrouded by difficult terrain, property laws, prohibitive cultural taboos and so on may also become accessible through metaviews when enough sufficiently tagged images become available.

This may take some time however. There are still many factors restricting the scope and scale of geotagged images being collected and navigated. For instance Panoramio, the source for Google Earth’s picture layer, has strictly enforced rules about what can and cannot be contributed to the site, and what will or will not be selected for viewing on Google Earth. Actual people manage the selection process manually, and the rules exclude (with some exceptions, interpreted by the people making the decisions), among other things: portraits of people, or photos of people posing; cars, planes or any machine; pets or animals; flowers and details of plants; close-ups, details, inscriptions, or signs; events, such as exhibitions, concerts, and parades; interiors; anything under a roof. [28] These exclusions prevent many examples of culture from being displayed alongside other images of a place. The excluded images may contain evidence of activities and details that help viewers interpret the place. While Google (which owns Panoramio) has every right to set its rules for users of the site and to control the process by which images are displayed on it, the rules and processes limit the opportunities for the service to enrich viewers’ experiences of the place. By its restrictions on what can and cannot be displayed, Google Earth is not a service where place can be explored. Evidence of space and location are available, but not the human activity and artefacts that make a space a place.

The metaview has the potential to give us a new sense of place if we can overcome the barriers to images being contributed and made available to the community. Crowds are capturing images with digital cameras and libraries are scanning older images, but we are not yet sharing them easily. Perhaps we are afraid of being ripped-off or the images being somehow misused. Metadata is being added to images, but it needs to be more accurate, more extensive, and using generally agreed language and standards. Search engines continue to improve and provide extra dimensions to finding photographs that exist on the internet, but the display of the results largely continues to be limited to outdated and two-dimensional, using page, document and book metaphors and logics in their interfaces, rather than image based or scopic metaphors and logics.

And of course the geopolitics of wealth, religion, culture and class define the geography of World Wide Web, just as they define our real world. As is so starkly revealed by the world heat map of photographs uploaded to Flickr, the technologies that are being developed to record the images, store them, share them and display them, and the people with the resources to access the technologies and the skills required to use them, are the richer and more educated people of the world. It is they that determine the direction of the technologies and the uses to which they are put, defining the perspective we take through the metaview.

Nonetheless it is clear that we are at the threshold of the age of the metaview. In Australia, libraries and ordinary people are beginning to collaborate in an unprecedented way to allow us an enhanced scopic access to Australian places. What remains to be seen is whether or not these new modes of experience will change the nature of the places we collectively decide to value as our national heritage. Will it continue to be those places that are most amenable to being encapsulated into a single frame as a vista, or will other places, where perhaps multiple layers of experience lie embedded, also now rise to national significance?