MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the 1964/65 New York World’s Fair and thus of one of its most prominent exhibits on permanent display at the Queens Museum since 1972—the legendary Panorama of the City of New York—a 9,335 sq. ft. comprehensive scale model of New York City’s five boroughs. To commemorate this anniversary, the Queens Museum mounted Bringing the World into the World (June-October 2014)—a showcase of contemporary artworks that take as their premise the concept of the all-encompassing view popularized by historical panoramas, coupled with 21st century concerns of urbanism, scale, surveillance, heritage, memory, technology, and total vision.

As I examine some of these works in relationship to the Queens Museum Panorama and historical panoramas, I will reference other panoramic exhibits from three New York World’s Fairs (1853/54, 1939/40, 1964/65), say, GM’s Futurama from 1939/40, and ponder how our understanding of the terms “real” and “virtual,” in relation to representing urban environments in panoramic form, has developed over time. I will trace the connections between the “memory palace” (a virtual repository construct of the mind, recalling the “real” city, activated at the Panorama) and the “world wide web” (the ultimate repository, where “real” and “virtual” overlap into the “hyper-real”); between two dynamic, immersive experiences: that of memory, at the Panorama, and that of a search engine, on the internet.