Peter Sutherland: Fotographic Phictions

Emergent technologies give rise to novel art forms, yet the panoramic app installed on smart-phone cameras still awaits its artists. Responding to this conspicuous neglect, Fotographic Phictions proposes a new visual practice that bridges still photography and motion pictures. Peter Sutherland calls it cubist panoramics — if by cubist you simply mean combining multiple perspectives in a single image.

In 2012, while exploring the panoramic app on his first smart-phone camera (a Samsung-SGH), Sutherland discovered a glitch in its Android operating system that frees photography from the dominance of Renaissance perspective and the cardinal rule of panoramics — not to shift the camera’s viewpoint, while you sweep it through the scene to be recorded. Doing so normally aborts the algorithm’s routine, whose early Samsung/Android version divided the sweep into eight separate stills, then stitched them into a seamless panorama.