In the late 1950s, Jordan Belson worked with composer Henry Jacobs on the Vortex Concerts at San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium. Rather than projecting a conventional film onto one rectangular screen, they used the planetarium environment for combinations of abstract imagery, electronic music and spatial projection. The Center for Visual Music considers the Vortex events important precursors to expanded cinema.
This feels remarkably close to contemporary audiovisual performance.
The audience was no longer simply looking forward.
Images could occupy the dome and surround the listener while electronic sound transformed the same space acoustically.
That changes what editing means.
In ordinary film, one image replaces another in time.
Inside an immersive projection environment, several images can coexist in different parts of the viewer’s field of vision.
The audience decides where the cut happens by turning its head.
Modern projection mapping, VJ software and immersive installations have made these techniques technically easier.
Belson’s work is useful because it reminds us that immersive media did not begin with powerful projectors.
It began with the desire to escape the rectangle.
