Proboscis | SoMa | Endless Landscapes

Endless Landscapes
a device for storytelling with myriad combinations

The Endless Landscape, polyorama or myriorama (meaning ‘many views’) was a popular 18th and 19th century storytelling game also known as a tableau polyoptique. It consists a series of paintings of fragments of a panorama that can be arranged in billions of combinations to form a continuous landscape for creating stories – each card extending, adding to or changing the narrative. A neverending journey of imaginary landscapes.

Proboscis' first Endless Landscape, by Alice Angus, depicts 21 fragments of a panorama based on London and was part of Social Tapestries – a 5 year project about mapping and sharing knowledge, storytelling and public authoring using cutting edge mobile and internet technologies and revisiting traditional paper based methods. The flow of ideas from Social Tapestries has increasingly emphasised the importance of storytelling and narrative as a living, everyday process that underpins how people co-create and inhabit culture and society. Part fact and part fiction, the Endless Landscape alters geography and connects events across the timeline of history. Its panoramas are littered with improbable landscapes, curiosities, ghostly evocations, historical anomalies and architectural conundrums.

Endless Landscapes is of several Proboscis projects seeking to enable and reflect this 'public authoring' of people's knowledge and experience using visual, three dimensional and spatial techniques. Others include StoryCubes, Urban Tapestries, Bodystorming and DIFFUSION eBooks.

London Endless Landscape
The paintings in this landscape were created by artist Alice Angus as part of Social Tapestries. This Endless Landscape takes its inspiration from Social Tapestries’ innovative exploration of communication, mapping and sharing knowledge. The paintings are also inspired by London’s history of communication and connection with the world. They explore the city’s present mixed up with the traces, shadows and spectres of its past.

The paintings in this Endless Landscape depict fragments of a panorama based on London. Part fact and part fiction, the Endless Landscape alters geography and connects events across the timeline of history. Its panoramas are littered with improbable landscapes, curiosities, ghostly evocations, historical anomalies and architectural conundrums.

Erno Goldfinger’s 1966 Trellick Tower has been moved to the riverside where it might be neighbour to The Tower of London, begun by William the Conqueror in 1078. The phantom of a WW2 Barrage Balloon has drifted through time, denying airspace to enemy aircraft, while the Montgolfiers’ 1783 hot air balloon floats by. An apparition of the 1903 Spencer Airship No2 shimmers over the city as people hurry into the Underground. A shadow of the de Havilland DH60 Gipsy Moth in which Amy Johnson flew from England to Australia in 1930 shares the skies with helicopters, Concorde, airliners and geese flying south for winter.

People flit from place to place, in groups or on their own, shifting between stories. Memories of London’s inhabitants linger in places like the 1834 Buxton Memorial Fountain commemorating the Emancipation of Slaves. The Port of London was pivotal in the African slave trade and 2007 will mark 200 years since William Wilberforce’s Parliamentary Bill was passed, abolishing the slave trade in the British Empire. The landscape is inhabited not just by people but by those other citizens of London; pigeons, rats, seagulls and swans. Ravens hop from painting to painting recalling the legend that should they leave the Tower of London, the Tower, the Monarchy, and the Kingdom will fall.

Haunting the Thames are spectres of its maritime history: the spirits of sailing boats and steam barges drift by along with the hulk of the SS Great Eastern. Built in 1858 by Isambard Kingdom Brunel to carry 4000 transatlantic passengers, it ironically heralded the dawn of telecommunications by laying 4200 km of the telegraph cable that connected Britain and North America in 1865.

Order
The London Endless Landscape is used in two Proboscis publications: as a set of 18 fridge magnets (December 2006), and as part of the forthcoming A Case of Perspectives.

Magnet Sets: buy online from the Proboscis Store

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