Cyclorama

I help organize a yearly event at the Boston Cyclorama building. The building itself hosts about 700 guests, and is designed for art exhibits to be shown on the inner side of its perimeter (the building is a huge ring, with a domed ceiling).

While I've never seen it used to present a single image, I _do_ know that it was originally built to host exactly that - a 360-degree painting commemorating the Battle of Gettysburg.

Visited the one at Gettysburg a few years ago and it was pretty neat. It's like the 1800s version of virtual reality/3d video.

R. A. Lafferty extended the cyclorama concept to become "The Longest Pictures in the World," which showed the Mississippi River shore in minute detail. In Lafferty's 1970 short story "All Pieces of a River Shore," a collector searches for fragments of the picture, which had been displayed in hundred-yard sections by travelling shows a century earlier. A Stack Exchange answer [1] describes the story in detail.

[1] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/134578/story-conce...

Wow, as a theater nerd I want to know more about the 1899 Ben-Hur play with live horses on treadmills and an enormous rotating cyc- The article for the play itself has more information but I can't seem to find much else online about it.

The term cyclorama is also used generically for the back curtain of a proscenium-type theatrical stage, even if not painted.

There's a similar art piece I saw once that isn't a perfect 360 degrees but is composed of several video walls that you walk through so you feel as if you're walking through a house, looking into rooms, watching musicians perform a piece, with all the video and audio in sync. It's pretty great - I think it was this one: https://www.thebroad.org/art/ragnar-kjartansson/visitor

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