: aesthetics :

p a n o p t I c o n ∞ is  
                                            a Digital Cabinet of Unnatural Curiosities, a travelogue featuring photos I took while dreaming. 
                                              a visual chronicle of the things I've witnessed during my expeditions through uncharted,
                                               previously undocumented territories, recordings of events where light and time get bent...
​​                                                 a journal about a journey, thousands of pictures and thousands of words about pictures. 

es.thet.ics - noun:

1. the branch of philosophy dealing with such notions as the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the comic, etc., as applicable to the fine arts, with a view to establishing the meaning and validity of critical judgments concerning works of art, and the principles underlying or justifying such judgments.
2. the study of the mind and emotions in relation to the sense of beauty.​

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/aesthetics

early  exposure                                                                                        

My interest in photography began on my 7th birthday when I got my first camera, an Instamatic. Soon I was developing B&W film and making prints. My increased fascination into my late 20's, but slowly waned. I got a digital point-and-shoot but only used it - literally - "occasionally' on birthdays, holidays, documenting but without my old passion.​

Luckily, I finally realized I'd been missing my old creative outlet for far too long  - and furthermore, that the ​solution was conveniently right at hand.   ​
Viz., Photography + the camera on my phone.  ​
Nothing left to do then but take it out and shoot something.  
​Use a digital instamatic to scratch my creative itch. ​

For me, photography is equal parts adventure, experimentation, compulsion and therapy.
​I take pictures because I want to stop time, to capture a specific moment, decisive - or otherwise.
​I take pictures because the light is reflecting off a surface in a way that releases dopamine.
I take pictures seriously, and with bad intent. I'm eager for the next photo op, excited by the potential.

Can't you just be in the moment, remember it? Why are you always taking pictures?
​Because it's my profession. And yes, I'm 'in the moment '  - and often in the picture too. 
I'm fully engaged in the moment I'm capturing. When I'm in the picture, it's proof that I existed, that I was there and present. Also, I'm a willing subject.

I stop time. I create a record, these coordinates on this date at this time, this is exactly what happened, so help me photographic evidence. 

Taking a picture is an act that freezes time, taking a panorama freezes time repeatedly.

I started to think of myself as a capital-P Photographer again. 
And if I was going to step out of the red-light darkroom,
and identify myself as ​an Official  Photographer carrying an Artistic License 
– then I should-oughta be taking pictures. ​​As many as possible. ​​   Because digital. 

Is it Art yet?
I also started thinking about Photography ​in a capital-P Philosophical Questions kind of way.
Deep questions like;
"Who, Me?" and “What is Art?” 
“What makes a photograph Art?” 
​"Is this photograph Art?" 
​"What does 'Fine Art Photography' even mean any more, especially now, when billions of photos are taken daily".
​"What makes this particular picture worth taking?" ​
"How will consumers interface with my ART
vs how I'd prefer it were viewed?"

​But mostly, I found I was asking myself “What If?" and ​"Why not?" instead of "...Should I...?"

As I continued thinking, experimenting, shooting from the hip, I became increasingly possessed with the possibilities of panoramic photography.
A Panorama is an oddly cobbled concept, an aberrant mashup of steam+cyberpunk, and just begging to be messed with. 
​
As an avid advocate of Accidental Photography, I appreciate the errors and glitches, and intentionally ​do things to cause them.
​The results are uncontrollable - only a small percentage make the cut. 

I look at things from multiple perspectives, try to show reality warped in new, unexpected ways. ​  I push my creative process by pushing the media itself beyond reasonable limits.   
What can I force the machine to do? What happens if I do it this way?
​
​I want to take pictures of things that did not happen, could not have happened, show you photos like you've never seen before. 

​[ a man,  a plan,  a camera :  P a n o r a m a ] 
I still enjoy taking "normal" pictures, but I've gradually become more focused on the panoramas. It's not that I think they're more more interesting vs other forms ​of photography -  I just don't have the time to explore all the photographic rabbit-holes that interest me. 
​
I also think it's a vastly underrated and under-explored area. Like the ocean floor, panoramic photography is still mysterious, filled with undiscovered possibilities ​and frightening creatures.  Also, I expect there aren't many other people taking messed up pictures like these. Yet.

​A quick primer 
"Photography" is nearly two centuries old. And changed somewhat since
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce froze time for the first time when he took a ​heliograph with a camera obscura  in 1827.

The first Panorama camera patent was granted in 1843. Hand-cranked, it used curved Daguerreotype plates up to 24" long - yet only covered a 150º arc.  ​  But hey, respect. For sure, it was an impressive analog work-around given the steampunk tech available.   
​
The history* of the panorama is interesting, and the apparatus to produce panoramas has evolved significantly - essentially from an analog hack to a digital hack, steampunk to cyberpunk.

But now (fast-forward 170 years) - Computers! 
Sorry, no jet-packs yet, but wow, photo-stitching robots to simplify tedious tasks. Just select "Panorama" mode on your phone to engage an Artificial Intelligence who's software “stitches” together overlapping images, choosing how and where to splice, based on algorithms, using code to make a visual mash-up, ​translating a 3-D image taken over shifting space and time, into a static 2-D image - struggling to make its best guess as to ​​what the final photograph “ought to look like.”  Which is a pretty damn impressive bit of digital hoodoo - even if the results can look like a bad acid trip.

OK, impressive - yet this digital magic is still stuck in the Victorian era with it's “cylindrical”* model (quite literally "self-centered"), and limited to a single-axis 360º outward-facing arc  [as though rotating around the outside of a pillar with your back to it]. 

The cylindrical model is still in use because it can render a 3-D field of view wider than you can normally see
(that is, without moving your head) in 2-D.
​In effect, a panorama allows you to experience "chameleon vision"
- to see a full 360-degree field of view as if you had eyes in the sides and back of your head.
But it's 2022 now - time to think outside of the cylinder...

W T F :  Warped Time Fields and Panoramas
The AI is very impressive when you take a “regular” panorama - as long as you follow the on-screen instructions ( “Move Up/Down,  Slow Down” )
- and as long as all the elements remain still, and you hold the phone steady as you turn in a circle. 

But if you ask the computer to work beyond its capabilities, force it to render the impossible - that's when it gets interesting. 
​Glitches and visual stutters appear when the software can't cope.

The way that the computer interprets the data-set of light values delivered from lens and captured CCD is the absolute truth of the event as far as the AI is able to tell it, to the best of its limited abilities. The image generated is a compromise, ​the computer's best guess of the photographic reality as it thinks we'd want to have it rendered.

 I perform thought experiments - but let machine intelligence do the thinking for me.

parsing time and motion, and the technology used to record and manipulate them

a Movie is cleverly called a “Movie” (aka "Motion Picture") because it looks as it moves.  But of course the image doesn't actually move 
– it just changes from one image into another one. ​It's only “slices of a view,” taken in sequence, over time and displayed in a row ​​– over time – each one after the next – within the same frame. 
Then persistence of Vision hoodwinks our sensory apparatus, creating the illusion of time and motion. 
'The cinema can give the illusion of reversing time, by showing events happening backward, or of holding time still, by showing the same image again and again.'  < https://www.britannica.com/art/motion-picture/Cinema-time#ref508597

​a "Movie Still" is a single frame from a movie, a single moment of space-time, captured and preserved in cellulose ​- no different really than a conventional “Photograph” - except for its relationship to the photos taken just before and immediately after. ​

a Panorama therefore, can be thought of as a “Still Movie”
​It is actually a sequence of movie frames continuously spliced together ​- “slices of a view,” multiple pictures, recorded over time, and displayed in a row - each one side-by-side   (vs each one replacing the next like traditional film) - over distance, but absent time, experienced in a flash, at the speed of LCD light. 

a Panorama can be thought of as the shortest movie possible.
A panorama is a single frame of a movie - that also contains the entire film.   To view a panorama  is to watch a movie in the briefest instant (usually faster even than the time it took to film it). 
At mere fractions-of-a-second, a normal photograph is time-stunted.  A panorama however, records more visual/time data, can capture multiple decisive moments, more little details that tell a more complete story - and give more context - with a longer,
more complex arch ​than any limited field-of-view snapshot can. 

a Panorama is a unique hybrid medium ​that combines elements of both Photography and Film.
Like a Movie, a Panorama takes the viewer on a visual trip.
The camera's POV starts here, ends there - a document,
a record of space and time traveled.
But a panorama is more like a photograph, experienced
​in 2-D and “time-frozen” - a kind of Live Movie.

Selfie Obsessed

Selfies have been popular since the Renaissance (see “Portrait of a Man” - Jan van Eyck, 1433, and "1st selfie" - Robert Cornelius, 1839 daguerreotype).* Shout-outs to Rembrandt, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Lucas Samaras (a big hero of mine - above)...     from: http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/art/reviews/n_9545/

---

Occasionally, I appear in my pictures. I make a convenient and willing subject and I'm often the only one available. ​I'm there as a witness. But even when I'm not in the image, my presence is implied. I consider any image i'm in to be a selfie, even if I'm only visible in a small reflection or it's my shadow, or just part of my shirt.
​
My self-portraits (aka selfies) are verifications, documenting my existence in those places and moments. Plus, images with human figures in them are inherently more interesting to me than those without.

"Traditional" Selfies are close-ups with a bit of background for context. When I take a selfie panorama, the picture is about the environment - I'm not trying to be the main point of interest. 

I crop 99% of all my pictures.  So I might try a tight-crop version of my head (traditional selfie format) - and another version where I crop myself out of the panorama because the composition is better off without my "photo-bomb" distraction. 

* Universal Principles of Depicting Oneself across the Centuries: From Renaissance Self-Portraits to Selfie-Photographs  https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00245/full

I take panoramas with other people in them too - but I've learned that most people don't like to see themselves disfigured.   I think because the software sutures the slices so seamlessly that it looks like it could maybe be real. And (aside from photoshop) pictures can not lie.

It's discomforting and disconcerting, like a premonition. "Don't make that face – it might freeze that way."    
​But I'm willing to take the chance, to risk painful pixelation and temporal flux. I put myself out there to see what happens in the name of Physics.

spoiler
Some people claim these digital artifacts are the result of a rip
in the fabric of time and space, in which time becomes a loop. 

And some believe these photos expose the truth, that the black voids show where the Matrix was disrupted [and the glitches
couldn't be repaired in time].

Yet others claim that it's evidence of the paranormal, or worse,
the devil, and portals perhaps to the very depths of hell itself. ​
Brimstone stinks. Or so I've heard. *smelled.   

Of course, much more research is needed.
Also, Birds Don't Exist. A flight of fancy footwork.

But what if these glitches are caused by infinite parallel universes briefly overlapping - and the software glitch-stitches images
from across dimensions like a double exposure of 
like two haves of a Black Whole, a situation of some gravity.

​Whatever it is, I have the photographic proof, evidence of what exactly I'm not sure. Enjoy the show

​Please support my research into paranormal panoramas.
​Thank you.
Jon

  [ Be careful what you think; <whispers> they’re always listening... ]