Pacer looked at the world in a way no film had before it. The geometry of the city and its construction, the artistry of Montreal's landscape seen the hyper-prism of a camera racing through time on different dimension. Compressed imagery and physical motion combine in a never-been-seen-before kind of way. Pacer can lay claim to being the first hyperlapse film, or at the very least, to being the precursor to it's development. It was shot on a Bolex 16mm camera in Montreal, Quebec in 1995. Shooting single frames, all the 'effects' are done in camera. The film's original negative was destroyed in it's one and only printing in 1995. That print was screened once and telecined for posterity, and the print was never projected again. The film would've fallen into obscurity, except for the low rez video version that was included in a VHS video magazine called Channel Zero in 1996. Other visual artists like TopherZ of the Dandelion Collective who saw that Channel Zero and began to pick up the technique, and with Guy Roland's subsequent film, Spacer, in 2004 (later known as Kino Citius), the technique of hyperlapse took shape. The only print of the film was carefully transferred to 2K digital in 2014 and painstakingly remastered in early 2015, resulting in the version you see here.

From 1961 to 1973, a loosely organized group of artists and scientists coalesced around the radical idea that the emerging technology of the computer could be used to make a different kind of art. Known simply as the New Tendencies, this heterogeneous movement included dozens of men and women from the far reaches of the industrialized world. Often working under collective monikers such as Equipo 57 or Grupo Anonima, most of them were as ambivalent about individual fame as they were about the artistic status of their activities, which they preferred to call “research.”

However they saw their own work, their visual innovations were quickly recognized as cutting-edge art, and in a matter of years began appearing in landmark exhibitions at venues such as the Louvre and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

"I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any sem- blance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physi- cal fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have."