Brooke Belisle

Dissertation: "The Bigger Picture: The Panoramic Image and the Global Imagination"

The desire to “see the bigger picture” aspires toward an expanded view that could only be pictured, because it exceeds direct perception. This project traces how new media aesthetics have conjured this expanded view from the nineteenth century to the present. It focuses on panoramic, stereoscopic, and algorithmic strategies for coordinating multiple images into the provisional coherence of an overarching view. It shows how these strategies resurface in periods of technological and cultural transformation to visualize alternative ways coherence itself could be conceived. By engaging examples that range from popular visual culture to computer programs and works of contemporary art, the project demonstrates how efforts to articulate a bigger picture not only reflect, but also help produce shifting potentials of visibility, connection, and control.