"The thing I wanted to do with this, this last record, um, I had this idea where we would cut the record into pieces and then send a different piece, like maybe fifteen to thirty seconds of music, to a different filmmaker, like all over the world, and then have them send it back in without seeing what the other person was making, and then make, like, an album-long movie just kind of like, it's like The Wall for people with attention deficit disorder, you know. Just like changing all the time, like, so that was the idea I had, but like, the record label wasn't so into it." -Tunde Adebimpe, actor, illustrator, and lead singer of TV on the Radio.
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUhsI-CC4Ac

Part documentary, part experiment, most of all, The Saccades Project is about exploring the possibilities of online collaborations. Hopefully, the notebook Thea and Cam share, and, later, the notebook Thea shares with Melody, the drawings and writings and thousands of images that they download and print out, open the subject to immediate interpretation. The most practical way I see to encourage that dialogue is by posting some of the imagery I've chosen for the characters so far, so readers can see and feel the mood I imagine when working on particular scene - anything to offer a fuller experience of that text. Sometimes I'll share artists who have already influenced a scene, and sometimes I'll share the work of artists who I imagine soon will. In order to keep the process as open as possible, I have a Saccades Project Flickr pool, which I'll moderate, but is now open to anyone who wants to submit imagery for the project.

In the meantime, I will begin approaching a range of writers, artists, designers, bloggers, musicians, DJ's and/or image bankers, who I hope to get involved in this project. In terms of a concept, something easily explained, I ran the numbers, and it worked out nicely, so I'm calling it the 45's Series for obvious geometric and musical symbolisms. The idea is that each individual would respond to the story by contributing eight posts, each of which includes an image, text, whether theirs or my own writing, and a song, a playlist of their own, as a means of sharing an angle, their own interpretation of this story and its characters. Then, once a day for eight days, I'll post their contributions on the Saccades blog.

I have a list of about twenty people I intend to approach, to begin, and most of whom I discovered online in the past year. As dependent as I am on the Internet, I'm fortunate that there is such a vital, virtual gallery district, growing by the day and night, and that there's been an explosion of online magazines, galleries, and blogs dedicated to exhibiting young talent. I've been extremely inspired by their independence, their vision, and especially the comradery of all these groups, even if, at times, it's exhausting, trying to keep up. But more often than not, I am in awe, because the most exciting part of this process has been research, my own personal discovery of new work; the sheer number of artists in their teens and early twenties, whose whereabouts range from Kansas to South Korea to St. Petersburg. More than once, I've come across a particularly striking image, whether illustration or photograph, and found myself leaning into my monitor; double-checking to make sure I didn't misread the artist's age. Honestly, my mind reels at the possibilities of using their artwork to develop this character and to the fullest.

But still, there is nothing that compares to holding a book in your hands, no matter what your age or generation, and those worries would never cross Thea's mind. Narrative is alive and well, online, and young people are still reading fiction, possibly more than ever, not less. It's simply that the way young people are reading is changing, radically: they have very different expectations of a reading experience; like it or not, it's multi-media, and teens have reason to believe that they should be involved in the creative process. In which case, why shouldn't a book include music, imagery and text for them to appropriate as they see fit? I'm not looking to reinvent the wheel; I'm simply interested in the possibilities of applying new technology to old-fashioned storytelling, no more, no less.