Saccadic Suppression and the Gaps We Never See
Saccades that cannot be suppressed.
My first two posts traced how chance, failure, and black fields enter Prolongance through movement, no-data gaps, and architectural analogies. Here I turn to the physiology of vision and to what happens when our own perceptual system tries to hide its own jumps and cannot quite succeed. Prolongance presses on those limits and keeps those gaps visible.
Saccadic Suppression and the Gaps We Never See
In ordinary experience, vision feels continuous. We look around a room, descend a staircase, cross a street, and the world seems to flow in an unbroken stream of perception. Yet the physiology of vision tells a different story. Our eyes do not glide smoothly across the world. They jump. Several times each second, the eyes execute rapid movements known as saccades, reorienting the line of sight from one point to another. During these jumps, visual sensitivity is sharply reduced, motion blur is actively damped, and much of the incoming signal is downweighted or discarded. The brain stitches the still, detailed snapshots that occur between saccades into a coherent scene and quietly suppresses the blur and disruption in between. This process is called saccadic suppression, and it is one of the reasons we experience vision as stable and seamless rather than jittery and broken.
Video courtesy: InkassoSchroeder, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
In this sense, perception already behaves like an internal stitching engine. Each fixation is a local, high-resolution view; each saccade is a gap, a violent reorientation in which the eye and image can no longer be neatly correlated. The visual system handles this by both throwing away problematic information and interpolating across time, creating a global field of apparent continuity from inherently discontinuous samples. The price of that apparent continuity is a kind of systematic amnesia. The jumps themselves, the moments of blur and mismatch, are largely hidden from consciousness.
Smartphone panoramas reenact a similar logic at the level of the device. In panorama mode, the phone does not expose a single frame. It reads the sensor in strips while the camera moves through space, then selects, warps, and stitches these strips into one extended ribbon of image. The software relies on an internal model of how one ought to move, and of what a plausible environment looks like. It expects a reasonably smooth sweep across a scene whose geometry can be reconciled with a cylindrical or spherical projection. Strips that align with that expectation are retained; strips that differ too much are discarded or heavily warped; gaps are interpolated so that the final image feels like a continuous, coherent view.
This is a technological analogue of saccadic suppression. The panorama engine manages a sequence of partial views over time, it rejects or de-emphasizes the moments that would betray the mechanism, and attempts to deliver a picture that looks like a single, extended glance. What would otherwise appear as jumps in framing and breaks in geometry are edited out in favor of a smooth, apparently natural field of vision.
Prolongance intervenes at the point where this smoothing begins to fail. Rather than obeying the panorama engine’s expectations, I treat the camera as something to carry through the world, integrated with gait, balance, and curiosity. I walk, descend, pivot, hesitate, reverse direction, cross thresholds, ride elevators, circle stairwells, drift through crowds. Others move through the frame as well, with their own trajectories and rhythms that cut across my scans. The smartphone’s internal model of motion and scene coherence is constantly contradicted by these layered movements.
When the conflict is mild, the software still attempts to preserve the illusion. It shears textures, doubles limbs, kinks railings, and stretches shadows. These are the visible scars of its attempt to perform the equivalent of saccadic suppression: to hide the discontinuities by reassigning them to plausible surfaces. When the conflict becomes too great, however, there is no workable interpolation at all, and the system abandons entire regions. In those places the pano engine does not simply blur or warp; it fails to assign any image value that can be reconciled with its own geometry. The result is a black field, a no coverage zone inside the frame.
In a staircase Prolongance image, the steps and landings read as a chain of fixations, those brief pauses between saccades when vision stabilizes. Each patch of tread or riser is detailed, each fragment a moment when device and architecture briefly agree. Between them, handrails and walls buckle, edges refuse to meet. A dense vertical band of black cuts through the structure. That band marks the instant at which the system cannot bridge its own jump. It is the photographic analogue of a saccade that cannot be suppressed, a gap that cannot be smoothed out and must therefore appear as an explicit absence.
On a crosswalk, the figure of a passerby resolves into stacked fragments, each a small accord between their moving body and the sampling strip. The pavement fractures into tiles that only roughly align. At the right edge, a heavy black shape presses into the scene, as if a portion of the optical field had been removed. This mass does not belong to the street. It marks the region where the device declines to synthesize an in-between, where the motion of my body, the motion of the other bodies, and the assumptions of the algorithm cannot be brought into a single, convincing continuity.
A similar logic plays out at the beach. The sand, foam, and my shadow are drawn into a long, unstable ribbon. A strip of black cleaves the surf, interrupts the shoreline, severs my shadow. That strip is a saccadic cut at the scale of the panorama. It registers a moment in which the system abandons the idea of continuous depiction and marks its failure as a void.
Thinking about saccadic suppression in this context clarifies what is at stake in Prolongance. Both the biological visual system and the digital panorama engine are designed to conceal or manage the messiness of how perception is assembled across time. They treat the jumps, the discontinuities, as something to be hidden. Prolongance reverses that priority. It treats the discontinuities as material. It does not simply reveal the seams as glitches; it incorporates them into the internal structure of the image, allowing the viewer to see the difference between the local accords and the global failures.
This has consequences for how we think about agency. In everyday seeing, saccadic suppression is automatic. We have almost no conscious access to the visual gaps our brain erases. With the smartphone, an additional layer of suppression is introduced, where the device decides which slices of the world will be retained and which will be discarded in the interest of a smooth picture. Prolongance places movement between these two systems and pushes both to their limits. The final image becomes a diagram of what the apparatus was willing to keep, what it tried to repair, and what it could not accept at all. In practice, making these scans often feels less like taking a picture and more like testing how far my stride, balance, and breath can push the device before it slips and leaves a gap.
The black fields and fractures are not simply artifacts; they are records of disagreement between body, environment, and device. They indicate where the continuity that vision promises breaks down, where the very processes that usually guarantee coherence are forced to expose themselves. In that sense, Prolongance does not merely exploit the quirks of a panorama mode. It stages a confrontation with the deeper logic of saccadic suppression, bringing into view the hidden edits through which both brain and camera maintain the fiction of a continuous world.
The Revised Contract
Across these different lenses, the same pattern recurs. Remote sensors and their no-data fields, architectural drawings and their poché (both from the previous post), the visual system and its saccadic suppression, and my own embrace of chance all circle the same problem. Every apparatus that promises a smooth, continuous view of the world relies on zones it cannot fully articulate. Prolongance gathers those zones into the frame. The black in these images is not simply absence; it is a liminal field where bodies, cameras, and perceptual habits exceed their own stories about how seamlessly they operate, and where that excess has been allowed to remain visible. As I move through a stairwell or a crosswalk, feeling my weight shift, my breath change, and the device begin to slip out of alignment, I know that those missed beats will return later as seams and voids in the image. For anyone looking, these gaps offer a place to pause within that excess rather than glide past it.
From here, I plan to follow several threads in more detail. One will be walking, both as the basic condition of these images and as part of a longer history of moving on foot through cities, landscapes, and thresholds. Another will be verticality and format: why so many of these images stretch up and down rather than side to side, and how that choice speaks to older traditions of scrolls and hanging images and to ingrained biases in Western picture-making. I will also turn to affinities and frictions with other image makers and movements, from Gerhard Richter’s blurred paintings to Surrealist strategies of chance, estrangement, and walking, placing Prolongance alongside those lineages without simply folding it into them. Along the way, other topics will surface: the culture of the selfie and self-presentation, the pressure toward digital perfection, and what it might mean to keep a camera comparatively honest in a time of synthetic and simulated images.
Happy New Year!
Comments and responses are welcome.