The 360° 16mm Moving Picture Panorama is a visionary construction with 16 film projectors that project a film in a circle onto a projection screen set up around them. Linked to a central motor, the 16mm projectors project a film circularly, in a loop with no beginning and no end, like an installation. The film runs from one projector to the next, looping in and out of each of them successively. Film technician Nico Komen worked on this machine until his death in 2022. Artists and technicians from the Rotterdam-based, artist-run lab Filmwerkplaats then took charge of the installation, perfecting the first eight projectors and turning a working 180° panorama into a reality. During this process, several film artists were invited to develop a work and shed light on the machine’s possibilities.
Els van Riel’s work reveals the basic elements of the medium of film: 16mm film material, time and light. In her encounters with the panorama, she gradually developed her own understanding of its possibilities and limitations: eight different moments of the film appear simultaneously and continuously. Like a standing wave, the film remains visibly present at the beginning, middle and end as long as the machine continues to run. This unique form of projection views time as a circle rather than as a line, with an arrow pointing in a direction. It questions the time that once began, or didn’t, and the time that will end, or won’t. It examines a space that explores boundaries affected by time. A film with a single camera movement across mirrors in a landscape closes the circle.
