The journey by a fleet of small vessels under way between Québec City and New York City on the St-Laurent and Richelieu Rivers, Lake Champlain and the Hudson River is being photographed using a technique developped by Luc Courchesne and a his collaborators from the Montreal based Society for art and technology (SAT). Panoramic images recorded every minute on the way will form a time laps journey of about 4 minutes to be presented as a full immersive moving panorama at the Kitchen in New York City from September 14, 2001.
This project reminds of an earlier project by painter Samuel Hudson in 1849 titled Grand Panoramic View of the Hudson River from the New York Bay to the mouth of the Mohawk River. This large scale moving panorama, the first of it's kind, launched a very popular attraction in the United States throughout the rest of the century: river-voyage panoramas were later made of the Mississipi River, the Ohio River and of most major waterways in the US. These moving panoramas used large rolls of canvas painted to depict the river banks. Spectators would often sit on mock-up of steamboats watching the scenery as it unrollled.
The unique technique developped by Courchesne to photograph and display moving panoramas uses special optics and a large hemispheric screen allowing several viewers to simultaneously share the immersive experience of, this time, sailing down the Hudson into New York City.
(Luc Courchesne)