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At the turn of the last century,? the 6,300-mile trip from Moscow to Beijing along the Trans-Siberian Railway took 14 days to complete. Visitors to the 1900 Paris Exhibition were given the unique opportunity to condense the journey into roughly one hour, thanks to the scrolling panorama of Pawel Yakovlevich Pyasetsky. From Wikipedia:

The installation included three 70-foot-long luxury railway cars, complete with saloons, dining rooms, and bedrooms. The audience would sit in the railway cars, and view the panorama through the windows. Additional spectators could watch from rows of seats placed alongside the cars. The moving panorama was a stage-like area with multiple layers of moving objects and scrolling paintings. The nearest objects were sand, rocks, and boulders attached to a horizontal belt that moved at a speed of 1000 feet per minute. Next was a low screen painted with shrubs and brush, which moved at 400 feet per minute. Behind that, another screen with paintings of more distant scenery moved at 130 feet per minute. The final screen showed mountains, forests, and cities; it was 25 feet tall and 350 feet long, and moved just 16 feet per minute. The net result of these four layers was to produce a simulated perspective of great depth, via motion parallax.

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Pyasetsky’s scrolling panorama still exists in the Hermitage’s collection in St. Petersburg.

* More in Panorama by Bernard Comment and The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium by Stephan Oettermann. Also, perhaps the greatest of all scrolling panoramas, John Banvard’s half-mile-long depiction of life along the Missippi River, is described in Paul Collins’s Banvard’s Folly.
* More obsolete virtual reality from the Proceedings: Morton Heilig’s Sensorama.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 8:02 am and is filed under art, photography, time-lapse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.