On the trail of building immersive sensory experiences for audiences, Waller invented this three-projector system (3x35mm synchronised projectors), and a curved screen offering 146 degrees of wrap-around viewing. This immersive visual technology was complimented and reinforced by a ” high-quality, seven-track discrete, directional, surround-sound system”. Waller’s search for an immersive audience experience, was trumped some seven years later by a young cine-engineer called Morton Heilig and his Sensorama simulator (1957), though in this case the audience was a single user-participator-viewer-activator.

Gance was the genius of innovation in twenties cinema, producing this epic biopic using triple-screen projections, embedded cameras, colour tinting, and much more. Abel Gance was a singular genius of the silent film era, a director who, according to silent film historian Kevin Brownlow “covers every aspect of motion-picture production”. And Napoleon is his masterpiece. It is significant in film and media history: it contains a wealth of innovative camera shots (chest-mounted cameras, saddle-mounted cameras) including big closeups, and three-screen panoramas and montages. And it is most modern in its rapid cutting. According to Brownlow: “Gance wanted to hurl the spectator into the action” – and the scene that exemplifies this is the chase across Corsica where the camera is extremely mobile, intercutting pans and big-closeups as well as tracking shots, to create a tremendously engaging sequence. Apparently Gance did not have the benefit of a Moviola (film-viewer) for editing, and would stick his film clips to a large window in order to edit his tryptich sequences. This is probably the first multi-screen film – creating a fascinating technique for non-linear story-telling that was not to be revisited until the late 1960s (The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), and Woodstock (1970). Eisenstein is said to have thanked Gance for his inspirational cutting technique (Brownlow at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ2kRzJajyo).

While teaching at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, along with Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, Moholy Nagy developed his ideas for a Theatre of Totality – the Mechanised Eccentric is an attempt to provide a kind of automatic multimedia theatre – dispensing with conventional scripts, with actors, and reducing the performance to basic elements colour, light, sound, shape. The Patritura is a score for this abstract ‘performance’ or stage installation. As such it qualifies Moholy Nagy as one of the prototypical electronic media artists…his Light-Space Modulator of 1932 is another attempt to express and embody this idea of the Theatre of Totality. It also places him as a pioneer of the algorithmic arts – the Partitura is a graphic script – a program.

By the 1880s, at last the 19th century fascination with phrenology, physiognomies and typologies of the human face found a outlet. In this system, dubbed Bertillonage after its inventor, we have a true anthropometrical approach, with the frontal and profile portraits (later called ‘mug shots’), being just one part of a complete system of photo-identity.

Raoul Grimoin-Sanson’s Cinéorama at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair was the first cinematic panorama, opened scarcely five years after cinema came into being. An early step in immersive experience and simulation, Gromoin~Sansion’s feature for Paris World Exposition of 1900, was a simulated balloon ascent over Paris. With this user-illusion in mind, the audience were seated in a vast gondola, while the illusion of aerial ascent was provided by 10 synchronised 70mm projectors, mounted under the gondal and projecting their images, taken from a real balloon ascending 400 metres over the Tuileries Gardens, onto a panoramic circular screen.

This Austrian invention kick-started a wave of innovation in cameras designed to rotate through 180 degrees while the shutter was open. The great grandfather of the motion control camera, the Quicktime VR stepped camera mount, this camera was superseded by a smooth-panning camera by Friedrich von Martens. After the invention of Wet-Plate Collodion process (Frederick Scott Archer 1851), ordinary cameras could be positioned manually and several prints made, to be mounted together into a panorama.

The photograph is a combination print, assembled from 30 individual negatives printed onto one large piece of paper. First exhibited at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, the image proved controversial for its depiction of nude men and women in the same image. Queen Victoria, however, bought a copy for Prince Albert.

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This is an attempt at creating a chronofile (Buckminster Fuller’s word for a timeline-cum-archive) that is also a concept map (Joseph Novak’s term for a graphical tool for the representation of knowledge) linking important developments together into a narrative tracing the evolution of 21st century media.