Panorama 2024

Panorama reconfigures the rotating mechanism of a panoramic film camera from roughly seventy years ago into a pared-back sculptural form. To activate it, a participant sets the dial, presses the release and waits through the spring-driven rotation. Sound and vibration accompany the movement. The mechanism is then rewound by hand, preparing it for another activation. Each step gives the participant a different task within the same sequence.

The work isolates a physical operation that can disappear from attention once a finished photograph exists. A panorama carries a history of movement within it: a lens turns, a mechanism runs and time passes. Matsuura brings that duration forward as something a person can operate and observe. Setting and rewinding matter alongside release; the end of one movement becomes the preparation for the next.

Within Active Memory, Panorama concerns the actions that surround a record. It asks what we participate in when we make an image, and what an interface can make easy to overlook. The older mechanism supplies a concrete way to approach that question through a hand, an interval of waiting and a movement that must be started again.