PASSACAILLE
A cycle of five audiovisual and immersive works exploring repetition, transformation and enchantment through the seventeenth-century passacaglia.
THE CYCLE
Passacaille is a cycle of five audiovisual and immersive works created as UHD video, stereoscopic 3D video, 360° virtual reality and mixed reality installation.
Five works. Five media. One underlying musical principle.
THE CONCEPT
The project explores the seventeenth-century passacaglia (or passacaille) not simply as a historical musical form, but as a mechanism of perception. Built upon the continuous repetition of a short ground bass over which an uninterrupted sequence of variations unfolds, the passacaglia gradually transforms the listener's attention. Through repetition and subtle change it creates expectation, immersion and progressive involvement.
MUSIC AND PERFORMANCE
All soundtracks are performed by the artist on the harpsichord and clavichord, and arise from an ongoing investigation of seventeenth-century performance practice.
Each work translates these musical processes into visual and spatial experience. Rather than illustrating the music, the installations reproduce its internal dynamics: elementary visual forms recur, evolve and accumulate, progressively altering the spectator's perception of space and time. Depending on the medium—video, stereoscopic cinema, virtual reality or mixed reality—the viewer is invited to inhabit increasingly immersive environments governed by the same underlying compositional principle.
The project is equally rooted in musical performance and historical research. All soundtracks are performed by the artist on the harpsichord. They result from an ongoing investigation of seventeenth-century performance practice, drawing upon historical sources that suggest tempos often more moderate than those commonly adopted today. These broader tempi reveal the richness of the music's internal architecture, allowing each variation to unfold with greater clarity and expressive depth.
Although each installation exists as an autonomous work, together they form a single artistic investigation into repetition, variation and enchantment, exploring how a musical structure conceived more than three centuries ago can be reimagined through contemporary audiovisual and immersive media.