Pan & Zoom: reflections on panoramic practices

The oscillation of local and global, stasis and movement, expansion and inversion, and human and nonhuman collaborations, suggest how personal and collective movement experiences are in fact the result of mediated spatial practices. In this paper we draw on our interactive and participatory installations PAN & ZOOM, exhibited at the 2015 PSi event in Melbourne, to discuss how creative research processes reflect current media practices and generate new performative practices of mediated “panoramic” movements. A panorama makes perceptible the ways in which we stitch together our experiences of place and space and collectively modulate our experience of internationalism. Rethinking internationalism through participatory artwork is what shifts the panorama from artefact to performative practice. Discussing the context of the artworks, the paper explores how collectively constructing panoramas activates a performance that traverses international aesthetics and media. The idea of an inverse panorama, which zooms in amplifying the construction of personal experience and showing how creative techniques and activations can be understood as expanded collaborative practices. We suggest that a contemporary panoramic aesthetic is indicative of creative practices that respond to internationalization and new modes of collective existence.