Opening
Experience the Terapixel Panorama with all your senses during the opening night, and explore the history and future of art pieces.
The Terapixel Panorama is the 1.6-trillion-pixel digital twin of the 19th-century Murten Panorama painting, created by the EPFL Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+) in Switzerland to be the largest digital image of a physical object ever made.
Launched in 2025, the project used a Phase One 150MP camera to capture over 27,000 images, which were then stitched together to create an immersive, ultra-high-resolution viewing experience online and in physical installations.
Beyond a feat of technology, it exposes the delicate balance between preservation and impermanence. Once hidden in storage, the monumental canvas now resurfaces through conservation, scanning, and sensory augmentation—inviting us to explore not only detail and context, but also the layers of history, memory, and fragility embedded in the work.
Sarah Kenderdine and Sara Velas will explore the history and future of panoramas—from their 19th-century role as immersive storytelling media to their reinvention in digital form today—and discuss how these vast images continue to shape the ways we experience memory, place, and history.
Join us for the opening night of the exhibition and experience the Terapixel Panorama with all your senses.
Program
- 6:00pm – Doors open
- 6:30pm – Welcome
- 6:40pm – “Panorama: An Interface for Spectral Immersion” by Sara Velas, Artistic Director of the Velaslavasay Panorama
- 6:50pm – “The Panoramic Imaginary” by Sarah Kenderdine, Terapixel Panorama Project Leader, Professor, Laboratory For Experimental Museology, EPFL
- 7:30pm – Guided tours of the exhibition and Reception
- 8:30pm – Event ends
iCal / Outlook
Event start time
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San Francisco
6:00PM
Speakers
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Bio
Prof. Sarah Kenderdine
Lead Laboratory for Experimental Museology at EPFLProfessor Sarah Kenderdine is a leading researcher in interactive and immersive experiences for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. She is Professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, where she directs the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+). From 2017 to 2024, she served as Director and Lead Curator of EPFL Pavilions and now holds the position of Curator-at-Large. Professor Kenderdine is internationally recognized for pioneering the field of computational museology—an innovative framework that integrates machine intelligence with data curation, ontology with visualization, and public engagement with embodied, kinaesthetic interaction. Her research advances new paradigms of cultural production and experience across immersive and interactive media. She has conceived and produced over 110 exhibitions and major installations worldwide. Her forthcoming book, Deep Fakes: A Critical Lexicon of Digital Museology, will be published by Routledge in 2025.
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Bio
Sara Velas
Director & Founder, Velaslavasay PanoramaSara Velas is an artist, curator, graphic designer, gardener, researcher, urban humanist and native Los Angeleno. She is the Founder and Director of the Velaslavasay Panorama, an institution dedicated to the panorama phenomenon that she established in the year 2000 on Hollywood Boulevard to explore tropes of cinema and visual storytelling in collaboration with a wide range of artists, designers, movie makers, cultural practitioners and more. An Honorary Member of the International Panorama Council, Velas led the creation of the world’s only collaborative USA><China panorama. Sara and her longtime collaborator Ruby Carlson lead IRMA 360 (Immersive Research Media Associates), a consulting art and entertainment firm, and currently serve as editors for the Visual and Creative Essays section of the Panorama and Immersive Media Studies Yearbook. Born in Panorama City, California, Sara Velas studied Painting in St. Louis, receiving her BFA from Washington University in 1999.
