360˚ Film: a multiplicity of perspective
‘Perception lies between perceiver and perceived. A creature’s perception is directly proportioned to its action upon the thing. In fact, perceptions are its actions in a latent state.' (2002:90) Brian Massumi: Parables for the Virtual
To make research with young children who do not yet talk requires, as far as I am concerned, a methodological approach that strives to deal with things beyond words: processes, movement and relation. To make visible these things, to draw them forth.
Following Bergson, Massumi considers movement, passage and process to be the first order of reality; they constitute the field of emergence (ibid:8) and that through movement, passage and process emerge positions, concepts of positions, measurements, concepts of stability, the individual, collectivity.
What first occurred to me when encountering 360˚ was the absence of the frame or the infinite potentiality of multiple framing of an event, or a movement.
The camera allows a complete sphere of view around its single point. This sphere of view can be manipulated so that everything within its view can be seen on a flat plain. Possibly like an insect or rabbit sees. Definitely beyond human vision – but made accessible through this technology. This ‘tiny world’ can be rolled around so that different parts of the spherical field of vision are foregrounded around the outside or backgrounded in the middle. Suddenly textures and qualities take on a very different quality.
This made me question how I actually experience my own vision. While I can’t see through the back of my head like a 360˚ camera, I am not sure that I experience my own vision like a TV or phone camera either. As I look at the world, things jump out at me and grab my attention and much before my eyes is not seen. Consider the road training film that is played on driving awareness courses. 7 or 8 players in black or white perform a fast complex number of basket ball passes. The viewers are asked to count how many passes the white players make. During this sequence a man in a gorilla suit walks obviously through the frame. Most people do not see him.
The 360˚ technology allows all kind of things to become ‘foregrounded’ so that the viewer is immersed within the texture or distance or quality of something. It reminds me of something I can’t quite put my finger on. For instance the floor can become the world that surrounds the viewer, encasing them. I wonder how infants experience floor?
I am reminded of Donna Haraway’s thoughts in Staying with the Trouble on being a creature of earth or a creature of sky. The earth creature is enmeshed, entangled and up-close in the minutia of the composting world. This is a relation of multiple sensing and feeling in many directions. A creature of the sky looks upon the world from a great height, distanced, overseeing, godlike, singular. The tiny world function on 360˚ allows both these worlds to become. A single photograph can bring forth either reality; they can be slid into each other like a Klein’s bottle. Skylord to Earthmother no longer separate but always becoming each other.
What interests, attracts, is all that is perceptible. The rest is just background.
See Petra Vakova's article on 360˚technology and research with children