Myriorama

The "myriorama," or tableau polyoptique, invented by Jean-Pierre Brès in Napoleonic France, is a variable landscape, a panorama whose elements can be interchanged to create an enormous number of different scenes. Often printed on cards, a myriorama consisting of 18 cards (and there are sets with as many as 26) will yield 18 to the 18th different combinations, many more than Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes (a hundred thousand billion poems = 10 to the 14th combinations). This set of cards, "The Endless Landscape," a Christmas present from Wendy Walker, has 24 cards, which the publishers (Tobar Ltd. in the UK) reckon can be assembled in 1,686,553, 615, 927, 922, 354, 187, 720 ways.

Notice how several different horizons have been matched so that they will join whenever any two cards are placed side by side: the haze, the hills, the islands, the near bank, the road, the grass this side of the road. At first glance it may not seem as if changing the order of the cards will make any dramatic difference to the landscape as a whole. But if you wanted to make a narrative that read from left to right (or right to left), then the different elements in the cards — the obelisk, the balloon, the kite-flyers, the island with the gaping cave , the groups walking or riding in one direction or the other — suggest encounters, conversations, adventures that could all be changed by a reshuffling of the cards, which were created as a game for children.

But the images could be more emblematic and their sequence less rationalized.

Hiroshige, an electron microscope image of slimemolds, Francis Bacon, Jacques Callot, and Lyonel Feininger all contributed to this one, with one non-reassemblable horizon line.. A "pure" myriorama might never proceed to the stage of creating a text, narrative or otherwise. It would be fun to create images such that they match up when laid alongside. Besides landscapes it should be possible to make a composite portrait that way. Another famous 19th century game consisted of a book whose pages, each figuring a cartoonish character, were sliced across at the neck and the waist, so that the individual thirds of the pages could be turned separately. In that way the heads, upper bodies, and lower bodies can be recombined. I have never seen such a book with pages cut vertically, but it could be done.

A myriorama could be constructed of text alone. There would have to be a verbal "horizon," an element to link each section of text. This might consist of a phrase with which each segment would end: "… with the consequence that" would yield a very plotted story. Or it could return to the same time and/or place and relaunch from there. Or to an image. One can imagine musical myrioramas where the "horizon" might be, again, a phrase played in the same key at the same pitch and tempo, by the same instruments, a motif exactly repeated. If Wagner had composed in this way, we could reassemble his operas in all the combinations they would afford us. Wagner was perhaps not the man to yield control to listeners, but another composer could.

And of course all of this can be done collaboratively. Once the horizon line is established, from which each segment must begin and to which it must return, different composers can create the segments, and then the group can share the whole "deck" to make whatever combination is preferred, individually or collectively.

I reach for the nearest book to create a challenge. The book is Christopher Hobhouse's Oxford. As It Was and As It Is Today (London: B. T. Batsford, 1939). I open it at random to page 64. Using the following sentence as an opening and a closing, compose two hundred words and send them to tomlafarge@gmail.com:

"On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible."

Or make up your own myriorama and send it to the same address.

[Erik Schurink FWS has recently posted a set of excellent images to Gretchen Henderson's collaborative blog, Galerie de Difformité. My own cut-up piece, "Vitellius' Violent Propensity, is a side-gallery in Exhibit O.]