Overview
Who we are
IMHerit is a Centre of Excellence led by Lusófona University, LUCA School of Arts and IADT – Institute of Art, Design and Technology. It focuses on immersive media heritage, from panoramas and cosmoramas to their contemporary virtual reinterpretations. It builds on the research carried out by the research projects Curiositas and Congo-VR: Decolonising the Panorama of Congo – A Virtual Heritage Artistic Research. Both projects have intersected historical research with digital humanities, developing virtual reality experiences and database visualisations.
Our research
Emerging in the early 19th century after the Panorama and before the Diorama, the Cosmoramas, or ‘views of the world’, were one the most enduring of ‘orama’ shows and the only ones with a peeping system. Stemming from the peep shows circulating across European fairgrounds, Cosmoramas were installed in built fashionable exhibition rooms in city centres, displaying pictures behind a series of lenses set into a wall. The Cosmorama was the first commercial venue to provide this kind of peeping experience.
Cosmoramas began to be regularly advertised in the press from the 1820s onward. The research project Curiositas has catalogued, for the first time, over 700 of these advertisements published in Portuguese, Spanish, British, Brazilian, and North American newspapers. In total, more than 200 distinct Cosmoramas that circulated in the West between 1818 and 1889 have been identified. A chronological and a geographical visualization of this data are available.
Navigating this map is simple, allowing users to filter shows by date or by the names of the main Cosmorama showmen who toured the Iberian Peninsula. In the latter option, their itineraries are displayed as lines on the map. Clicking on each entry provides more detailed information about each exhibition, including the title, duration, location, showman’s name, and the newspaper in which the advertisement was published. The innovative nature of this tool lies in its mapping of the global circulation of Cosmoramas and in the access it provides to detailed information on each exhibition and its travels through different countries.
