The moving walkway

I wonder if I am going a little off-topic with this, we will see.

The moving walkway

In Panoramic Travel, Schivelbusch exposes some the history and consequences of how train travel affected human perception of the landscape. One of its most interesting passages, [p. 60/61] tells us that, according to Benjamin Gastineau's La Vie en Chemin de Fer, "the motion of the train through the landscape appeared as the motion of the landscape itself. The railroad choreographed the landscape". And again [p. 61] "the steam engine, the powerful stage manager [...] sets in motion nature clad in all its light and dark costumes [...]".
Probably one of the most recurring depiction of the train traveling (and later of the airplane traveling), is this sense of standing still, while feeling the landscape running around us and under our feet. This is true especially in childhood experiences and memories.

Going off Schivelbusch's context just a bit, I find there is no major issue against the idea that the terrain is moving, and not us.
In fact, even if the vehicle we find ourselves on is moving between two given points, our perception and our reconstruction of space in a specific instant could easily be that of a traveling-without-moving experience.
When it comes to perception, it is seldom a matter of historical-logical context and/or perspective in which that perception is inscribed. Instead, as for optical illusions or other visual techniques (like trompe-l'oeil, for instance), or even for the viewing of moving image in film, it is a matter of being hit by a glance. And that glance, I believe, it's something of a completely different nature from its rational contextualization, (occurring later in time). With that said, of course defining that glance is other that the glance itself.

For Example, Roland Barthes in La Chambre Claire (Camera Lucida), tried to divide our visual (and sensorial, in a general way) experience between the Studium and the Punctum, being the Studium our logically and rationally mediated attention toward an object, and the Punctum being the "glance", the emotionally and instinctually almost-non-mediated perception of that object.
And this is the moment of visual experience I'm here referring to.
La Région Centrale, a 1971 keystone in experimental filmmaking by canadian artist/musician Michael Snow, really gets the point (you can watch a brief excerpt here). It describes a deserted mountain landscape (through time, during a 5-day shooting), by moving the film camera around 360 degrees in all directions. He did so by building a unique mechanical structure that allows the rotation of the camera in every possible direction.
What we see is not a camera moving in the landscape, though. By not seeing the camera structure at all, we perceive the movement OF space, not IN space.
The film is about 3 hours long, and this reiteration of movements, somehow absorbs us and allows us to slowly remember our first instinctive impression of it (the Punctum?).

We're not in the movie at all as charachters, and the landscape is here the main event.
Just like train traveling often becomes, for a short time, an absorbing experience in which our motion is subordinated to the landscape motion itself, in La Région Centrale we are invited to concentrate exclusively on our impressions, too.

And, like the readings on collage and postmodernism told us, our relationship with reality is changing constantly, because reality itself isn't one, and neither they are explainable in a uniform way.
About our train travel, depending on what's the topic of our arguments, it really could be valid both us (vehicle) moving into space, and space moving for us, non-moving beings.
The result of this last a perception is so powerful, though, that even changes the way we perceive or define ourselves in that moment.
As I said, I personally feel transported in a condition of "traveling childhood", as if an indefinite number of traveling possibilities are open in that very moment.
And again, when it comes to perception of motion in space, both in physical or moving images space, maybe the glance it's not an issue of us exploring the space as active watchers, but it is the space that revolves and moves around us, usually for just an extremely small amount of our time.
And if we are not the main characters in this picture[s], the space/landscape is. So, we can probably let ourselves go through different paths of perception and try to enjoy the show.