Saccades
Saccades evokes the intricate web of connections between paintings, sculptures, chairs, windows, doorways, and spaces throughout the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It navigates these spaces not the way a physical visitor would, but rather the way the mind might as it follows a fleeting paths of association.
The filmmakers captured 3D objects and the gallery spaces by means of exhaustive photography (more than 24,000 photographs). They then designed special software that enabled them not only to create imagery more akin to painting and drawing than to the photorealistic 3D of mainstream filmmaking, but also to peer from physically impossible angles and positions — through the back of a painting to see the room it faces or down through a ceiling.
The 36 minute 3D film is divided into 24 sections. Each enacts a different kind of formal mechanism, many of which feature new kinds of montage made possible by custom algorithms. Many of the sequences (but not all) are blazingly fast.
The imagery was created by Downie, Eshkar and Kaiser; the music was composed by Downie and Kaiser with Tom Chiu (Flux Quartet).
The work is the second of three commissions by the Gardner Museum, which premiered it in the Museum’s Calderwood Hall.
From the archive — the earlier web page for this work
Saccades evokes the intricate web of connections between paintings, sculptures, chairs, windows, doorways, and spaces throughout the isabella stewart gardner museum, which it navigates not the way a physical visitor would, but rather the way the mind might as it follows a fleeting paths of association.
The 36 minute 3D film is divided into 24 sections, each of which enacts a different kind of formal mechanism. Many of its sequences (but not all) are blazingly fast.
The music is composed by Downie & Kaiser with Tom Chiu (flux quartet), with source material drawn from music composed and performed on the violin by Chiu for the OpenEndedGroup installation into the forest (2011).
Saccades is the second or our artworks to have emerged from a recent series of artists’ residencies at the Gardner Museum (the first being knight’s rest (2013). It premiered there on 6 March 2014.