Panorama

The installation consists of two main parts:

on the left, a motor-driven backdrop continuously scrolls horizontally;

on the right, a live camera captures this moving backdrop.

The image is processed by a Raspberry Pi, where a Python program extracts a small portion of the frame and moves this cropped region left and right. Whenever it reaches the boundary of the capture range, it reverses direction, creating an endless oscillating motion.

The projected image is therefore not the entire camera feed but this “cropped and constantly shifting” window, producing the illusion that the camera itself is panning horizontally.

The piece employs a counteraction between physical motion and digital manipulation: the backdrop moves in real space, but the digital system neutralizes this motion so that the background appears still. When the viewer stands in front of the projection, the motion transfers onto their own image, creating a disjunction between bodily sense and visual perception—a drifting, unstable spatial experience. It resembles the moment on a metro train when the train on the opposite track starts moving and you momentarily feel your own train is moving instead.

When the moving crop hits its boundary and reverses direction, its speed becomes opposite to that of the backdrop, producing a sensation of acceleration. The viewer’s appearance in the frame then acquires a pseudo-depth similar to side-scrolling 2D games such as Super Mario, where background and foreground move at different speeds to create layered spatiality.

Through this constructed motion, the piece generates a felt sense of the body moving through a field; conversely, if the viewer moves in the same direction as the cropped region, the field seems to extend further outward.

The title Panorama responds directly to my earlier work Point (of view) (2020), in which I removed the notion of a “frame”, allowing a single point of light to expand outward into a landscape-like volume.

In Panorama, I reverse the gesture: I call the frame back, generating space and bodily sensation within a limited window. This becomes a way of re-examining the traditional East Asian concept of borrowing scenery (jie jing)—capturing the infinite within the finite—through a digital and new-media lens.