Stereotowns
By
Miriam Ross
Published on/by
Accompanying text
[Please note that Stereotowns should automatically play in 3D on a 3D television or monitor. It can also be viewed with anaglyph (red and cyan glasses) by opening it in YouTube and choosing the 3D option in the settings cog]
Although there has been a long history of scholarship on stereoscopic photography and a significant expansion of investigations of 3D cinema in recent years, they are often seen as separate fields of study.[1] We are interested in the way that the stereoscopic view – a depth rich, unique phenomenological expression that generates but does not quite complete the reality effect of feeling present at a scene – repeats visual themes across stereoscopic photography and cinema.[2] The little work that has considered the recurrence of motifs across stereoscopic media has noted the ethnographic gaze prevalent in the depiction of rural landscapes (particularly the ezoticization and othering of distant lands and their peoples)[3] and the way twentieth century IMAX films were able to draw upon stereocards in their presentation of urban views.[4]Stereotowns updates this scholarship by dealing with the continuities between nineteenth century stereoscopic urban landscapes and more recent Hollywood blockbusters to make suggestions about how we are encouraged to engage with urban settings. While it might be argued that the nineteenth century stereocards documented a pre-existent reality and are thus at odds with the fantastical narratives and characters posed in many Hollywood blockbusters, both modes offer highly constructed and carefully framed views of the urban at the same time that they try to convince us we are viewing a reliable representation of streets, buildings and monuments in well-known cities. In this context, Stereotowns is particularly concerned with a point made by New Zealand film critic Dan Slevin in various reviews of contemporary action blockbusters: that Hollywood is obsessed with destroying landmarks and locations that are familiar to us in increasingly bombastic ways. We wanted to question what happens when stereoscopy uses its extra depth cues to bring us closer to and make us feel in touching distance of urban locations before destroying them in front of us. How do we feel this process differently compared to our experience of engaging with these urban settings in traditional 2D media? And equally importantly, is there precedence for this in the long history of stereoscopic works?[5]
In creating Stereotowns, we felt it was important to be able to show rather than describe the phenomenological qualities of stereoscopy that ask us to engage with, feel around and sense images in unique ways. This involved using digitised stereoscopic photographs from the nineteenth century and editing together clips from recent 3D films.[6]Although it means that audiences for this work will be limited to those with access to 3D TVs/monitors or anaglyph glasses (and we would suggest that the full stereoscopic experience on a 3D TV/monitor is preferable to the anaglyph viewing mode), it does ask viewers to interact with the stereoscopic subject through stereoscopic means so that the full perceptual experience is made available. Due to the quality of nineteenth century stereocards this often becomes an ‘imperfect’ experience in which the marks, stains, tears and degradation of the images create artefacts that confuse and muddle binocular perception but, rather than reducing the phenomenological impression, we see these as reminders of the optical illusion and the powerful hold it has on our eyes’ muscular workings. Similarly, the veracity of the audiovisual experience has been modified due to our decision to strip back the sound from the Hollywood movie clips so that we could add a score (generously created by Mike McGuill) that would unite the still and moving images. In order to maintain the intense impression of Hollywood’s destructive aesthetic, particularly the ostentatious hyperbole so common to Hollywood’s climatic action scenes, McGuill recreated the sound effects in each scene. Combined, these processes allowed us to sense and sensually work with the media to understand how they correspond with each other and how traces of their affective modes can flow from one form to the next.
To present the arguments of this videographic work, we chose to use titles rather than voice-over to guide viewers through the ideas that we wanted to impart. By doing so, we were able to make decisions about how our ideas could operate as depth-rich subjects in their own right. Not merely acting as subtitles beneath images or as intertitles between them, we gave our titles unique parallax placement and movement within the 3D field screen so that they could contribute to the spatial configurations of stereoscopy’s exclusive visual place.[7] In this way we have hoped to create spatialized arguments in order to analyse and understand a hyper- spatialized visual form and its connection with urban landscapes.