On panoramic narratives, the More-Than-Human, and the Geology of Istanbul
The cracks
In some ways, I have always been attuned to the more-than-human. I remember traveling to Oulu with my father when I was maybe nine years old. While we were going around the city, I was less interested in the actual sights than I was with the cracks in the tiling on the street. I am sure most can remember playing some variation of this “don’t step on the cracks” game when they were kids. As I kept looking down and hopping from one tile to the next, my dad began to question why we had driven for eight hours from Tampere. “I am sure the tiles here are interesting, but maybe that is not all you should be looking at?” he remarked.
When traveling, I find myself often coming back to those words. What exactly should I be looking at, and how?
Taking it all in
Panorama is a neologism invented in the late 18th century by Irish painter Robert Barker, combining the English “pan” (all) and the Greek horama (view). The first panoramic painters such as Barker or the Dutch Hendrik Willem Mesdag created landscape paintings meant to be experienced in purpose-built cylindrical rooms. The painters relied on a projection technique known as conical anamorphosis (Araújo, 2013). This allowed them to create the illusion that the viewer is enveloped inside the landscape, immersed in what we would nowadays call a virtual reality.
Displaying Mesdag’s panorama from 1880 on a flat two-dimensional plane does it no justice, but it does reveal an important feature of this novel way of painting. Remarkably, in this seaside view of the Scheveningen village, the village is only in roughly 10% of the surface area of the painting. 50% is taken up by the sky, and 40% by sand.
While artworks created before the Age of Enlightenment have been posthumously coined panoramic, they were more akin to collages than true attempts to “view it all”. The vistas depicted in the murals of Pompeii or in the scrolls by 17th century Chinese painters still privileged the human perspective, placing the people in the scenery as part of a harmonious whole. In contrast, the first panoramic painters had to forsake all anthropocentric aesthetic aspirations to achieve the desired illusionary effects. In this regard, their approach was almost algorithmic.
The thing-power of assemblages
In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Jane Bennett describes her encounter with an assemblage of objects in a famous passage that I believe deserves to be quoted at length:
On a sunny Tuesday morning on 4 June in the grate over the storm drain to the Chesapeake Bay in front of Sam’s Bagels on Cold Spring Lane in Baltimore, there was:
one large men’s black plastic work glove
one dense mat of oak pollen
one unblemished dead rat
one white plastic bottle cap
one smooth stick of wood
Glove, pollen, rat, cap, stick. As I encountered these items, they shimmied back and forth between debris and thing — between, on the one hand, stuff to ignore, except insofar as it betokened human activity (the workman’s efforts, the litterer’s toss, the rat-poisoner’s success), and, on the other hand, stuff that commanded attention in its own right, as existents in excess of their association with human meanings, habits, or projects. In the second moment, stuff exhibited its thing-power: it issued a call, even if I did not quite understand what it was saying.
What originally drew me to panoramas was the surprising affective power of the material world that it brought to the forefront. I initially took panoramas with my phone, delighting in the unexpected assemblages of human and non-human entities that it captured. Even if one centred the initial framing like a typical touristic photo, featuring a person or a landmark, by the time the camera had been turned around the full 180 degrees, usually something much more interesting had been caught in the frame. In this picture taken during my trip to Istanbul, it was this motley trio of a fluorescent light, a shoehorn, and a pink umbrella:
A major part of the affective allure of this technique was that it had a choreographic element: the speed and direction of turning the camera shaped the result as much as the functioning of the in-built algorithms of the mobile phone. It added a physical and temporal element to still images that, having a background in film, resonated with me.
Images with DoG
Panoramic photographs are created by joining several images. To give a short overview of the technical process, they are stitched together by finding a set of points from each image, and then overlapping the images so that the points match. Many methods for identifying these points can be used, the most common one probably being the Scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT), invented by David Lowe (Lowe, 2004). The SIFT algorithm blurs the image at multiple resolutions with Gaussian filters (Rey-Otero & Delbracio, 2014), and then calculates the DoG, the difference of Gaussians between the different scales. In practice, the method extracts the details that remain the most distinct throughout the consecutive blurrings.
This spring, I travelled to Istanbul to aid my colleagues, Begüm Çelik and Ayşegül Yapar in their project, the mobile installation metr.cube. As I was also presented the opportunity to have some time to explore the city on my own, I was once again faced with the existential dread of not knowing where I was supposed to be looking at.
I began to take panoramas, but this time stitching them with code instead of my phone. I wanted to relinquish my power as the human intermediary between things and the point-detection algorithm and see what kind of more-than-human assemblages the machine would create without me. Instead of using the points to match the images, the images were overlayed so that all the points would match.
The only issue with this approach was that I found the resulting images aesthetically displeasing. I took most of my photographs in an “organize sanayi bölgesi”, a concentration of car repair shops. Sprawling several city blocks, this area is filled with shouting men, twisted metal, and cars in various stages of disrepair and decay. Traversing through that place challenged my narrow Western notions of what is considered waste and what can still be repurposed or driven. However, the panorama algorithm cared very little for these things. Instead, it gave centre stage to a horn at the side of a building. More often, it portrayed a surprising interest toward the even surfaces that people consider to be between focal points, like walls or roads.
Like my father before me, I found myself being annoyed at it for just looking at the ground instead of all the interesting things I had hoped it would see. However, my reaction exposed my own vanity in cherry picking what elements to include in my artistic practice. What is the point of incorporating the more-than-human if I disregard it every time it doesn’t fit my human sense of narrative? So, I decided to look where the algorithm was pointing me toward: the ground. Doing so eventually lead me reconstruct the entire narrative I had of my journey, recontextualizing the pictures I had taken.
The Underground Istanbul
In A Geology of Media, Jussi Parikka (2015) paraphrases the methodology of the psychogeophysical dérive. It is a variation of Guy Debord’s technique of thinking while wandering, dérive, that places special emphasis on the things below ones feet:
“Take a walk… Derive and drift, fuse fiction with the places that you visit, frequent, or just pass by… …But don’t think what you see is the only level of reality — there is also the invisible and the underground. The underground might open a different way of investigating the notion of affordance: what enables things to be perceived as they are designed to be perceived so as to sustain our habits.”
Wandering in Istanbul, the gaze of the unaccustomed Westerner is pointing downward already, on the lookout for cracks in the pavement, cats or gaping holes in the ground left by unfinished construction projects, ready to swallow you. The challenge lies in truly seeing these things, and not just sidestepping them. It is at times difficult to pay attention to the things that are in between, to that which is already within our cone of vision but still averts our focus.
Istanbul is situated on a narrow stretch of land, squeezed between the Marmara Sea and the Black Sea. The two seas are connected by the Bosphorus strait that divides the city in half. The location has drawn people like moths to a flame, likely for almost as long as humanity has existed. While Istanbul’s geography has made it a historical and geopolitical focal point (Lom et al. 2016), it’s also what is currently limiting its expansion, rendering it overcrowded and unaffordable. Apparently, instead of spending three hours in traffic, the elite fly from the airport on the European side to the one on the Asian side.
In a city as crowded as Istanbul, going underground is the only way to travel longer distances. During my waking hours, I spent the most time riding the subway. Eager to see superterranean focal points, I overlooked how I already was at the core of Istanbul: the ground.
The Marmaray subway line that connects the two sides of Istanbul is a relatively new project, and perhaps one of the less controversial ones built during Erdoğan’s reign. In the past few decades, trees, parks, and collective spaces have had to give way to massive urban development projects, among them a cell phone tower. Maybe because it overlooks the entire city like the central tower in the panopticon, the denizens have monikered it “Erdoğan’s tower”. The rampant development projects and the violent treatment of the citizens opposing them sparked the Gezi Park protests of 2013. It is no coincidence that Jussi Parikka wrote Geology of Media in Istanbul. In the introduction, he acknowledges the impact of the Gezi Park protests had on the book:
[Istanbul] is a city branded by massive geologically significant building projects… a lot of the projects are reminiscent of the national engineering of modernity but also now the corporate capital investment in this geopolitically important region. But the protests were also highlighting the aspects that tie location to politics, the life of the earth with increasingly authoritarian ruling powers with corporate interests in the construction business and other businesses.
One of the side effects of the rapid urbanization is deforestation, contributing to the issue of deadly flooding in the area. This has been mitigated with constructing concrete flood control channels. Plans have also been made to revive the ancient underground system of several hundred cisterns that were built during the Byzantine era.
A mythical sand dune rests between the skyscrapers of the rapidly developing area of Fikirtepe. Said to be formed by the incessant digging of the construction companies, it is symbolic of the constant loop of construction the city is caught up in. Turkish law allows for the eviction of residents from areas declared as earthquake risk zones. In Fikirtepe, this has been the excuse for displacing of 65 000 low-income residents (Güney, 2022).
The terrain of Istanbul is diverse, ranging from Precambrian volcanic stone to various types of sandstone (Lom et al. 2016). Frequent tectonic activity has upended the order of geological stratas, meaning that the consistency of the soil varies greatly from place to place. Living in an area with good soil is a matter of status, because everything that collapses (or can be ruled as being in danger of collapsing) can be rebuilt by the rich and the powerful. In the end, nothing stays intact for very long. Istanbul rests on a fault line between the Eurasian and Anatolian tectonic plates. Earthquakes are a question of “when”, not “if”. As Orhan Pamuk (2007) wrote in 1999:
After perusing a few books and encyclopedias, we were reminded that over the past 450 years, the Cihangir Mosque (that “symbol of continuity”) had twice been destroyed by earthquakes and fires, and there was no trace of the original mosque in the dome or the minarets standing across from us. A bit more research, and we discovered that most of Istanbul’s historic mosques and monuments had been destroyed at least once by earthquakes (including Hagia Sophia, whose dome collapsed in an earthquake that struck the city twenty years after it was built) and that quite a few of them had been destroyed more than once and later rebuilt “to withstand more pressure.”
Many disparate visions of the things I had experienced but not noticed, among them the underground cisterns, the Marmaray, came together, forming an interconnected narrative out of my disparate impressions. The way in which they fused together was, dare I say, panoramic.
Sharing my frustrations
In a recent game jam organized by Dada ry, me and Jonna Eloranta built a crude prototype of what I conceive as the continuation of this exploration: a fully autonomous panorama-taking robot. In the future, we plan on attaching a camera to a robotic arm and giving the algorithm the ability to not only join images together but also control where to point the camera. To me, this feels like the logical conclusion of the trajectory that began with Barker’s desire for immersing viewers in the scenery.
I suspect that most of the time, the robot will point the camera at the ground. I am inclined to believe that as these “digital” algorithms are made from copper, lithium, and other materials from deep beyond our feet, when given free reign, that is where they turn their gaze. By doing so, the robot would probably frustrate viewers who would have wanted themselves to be captured in its images. While it is harder to make viewers discover geological reinterpretations of personal narratives, at least I will be able to make them share the frustrations I had, and perhaps to look down at their feet.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the Department of Art and Media in Aalto University for the travel grant, and Begüm Çelik for the accommodation. Thanks go also to Lucy Davis, and our Story Ecologies class in Aalto, as well as Lù Chen, with whom I have been developing this panoramic ideology.
Sources
Araújo, Antonio. Anamorphosis: Optical games with Perspectives Playful Parent. Proceedings of Recreational Mathematics Colloquium v- G4G (Europe), 2013.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter : A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, 2010.
Güney, K. Murat. Earthquake, disaster capitalism and massive urban transformation in Istanbul, The Geographical Journal, 2022.
Lom, Nalan. Ülgen, Semih Can. Sakınç, Mehmet. Şengör, A. M. Celâl. Geology and stratigraphy of Istanbul region. GEODIVERSITAS • 38, 2016.
Lowe, David G. Distinctive Image Features from Scale-Invariant Keypoints, International Journal of Computer Vision, 2004.
Pamuk, Orhan. Other Colors, Borzoi Books, 2007.
Parikka, Jussi. Electronic Mediations, Volume 46 : Geology of Media, University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Rey-Otero, Ives, & Delbracio, Mauricio. Anatomy of the SIFT Method, Image Processing On Line, 2014.
