6.Chronophotography & Marey

ariel
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Re: 6.Chronophotography & Marey

Post by ariel » Wed Nov 17, 2010 6:40 pm

In the article by Stephen Mamber he describes the works of Etienner Jules Marey, who was a French scientist of the late nineteenth century. Mamber begins talking about Mareys chronophotographic gun which many people consider a pre-cinema devise that allows you to capture fast movement. Mamber argues that Marey is not pre- cinema but rather describes Marey as a the bridge between an artist and a scientist and “developed tools to realize his ideas about how complex physical processes could be analyzed.” Marey was able to develop a system between what we think we see and what can be verified with chronographs and chronophotographs. These were a form of patterns and repetition or a series of variations of a single act.

Marey used the camera as another technique rather than a technological progression in itself. He was always more curious of the scientific aspect of the camera. He saw photography as another graphing technique that still used data analysis. Marey saw chronophotography as a way to break down a continuous activity into a set of measurable components.

I found this article interesting because it showed the scientific thought behind Mareys work. At first when I looked at his work with the continuous pieces of movement it seems beautiful and as though he put these pieces together with idea of aesthetics, however this article makes it clear that there was a true scientific thought behind it of time and motion. I also found it interesting how Marey had these ideas in innovations before the techniques of cinema and the industry build around a continuous amount of frames of motion. And how is art work was the beginning of how we use technology.

Manie06
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Re: 6.Chronophotography & Marey

Post by Manie06 » Sun Nov 21, 2010 12:36 am

“…to make the chronograph move is to destroy its essential nature”

“Modeling the world means acquiring, measuring and representing it”…


In Marey’s article, Stephen Mamber demonstrates how Marey was more than a scientist and innovator, and that rather than desiring to invent the chronograph as a way to enhance movement it was created to study movement. Obsessed with measuring and representing such movement, Marey’s scientific achievements have managed to eclipse his artistic ones. Mamber credits a philosophical ideas of what we think we see and what we actually see to Marey, or at least in inventing something to analyze this dilemma. We can consider Marey the godfather of the digital, because his chronophotography created something that was analog into something digital. Member also argues, that the potential of digital media has not been fully realized because it is in its early stages.
Chronophotography it not part of a pre cinema era, but whole new system that allows the discovery of new forms of representation that cannot be achieved by natural human perception by the human eye. He was pushing the boundaries of the human perception. Since energy is quantifiable in the physical world and it is responsible for movement it was a good way for Marey to pursue his interests. Marey was aware of the power of aesthetics relating to the representation of information and also with the problems of perspective within photography. One of Member’s persisting ideas through his article is his desire to separate Marey from cinema, while somehow arguing that his contributions from chronophotography to film and the digital media are on different systems. It is true that to represent the hidden rather than the realistic chronophotography is essential, but it is all a mater of representation because cinema can do the same if its reverse engineered or slowed to super slow motion. It is almost as if Mamber dislikes digital media, or finds it less aesthetic. Below is a perfect example of capturing, representing, and measuring different body forms that would easily escape the human eye perception
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jliu
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Re: 6.Chronophotography & Marey

Post by jliu » Fri Nov 26, 2010 12:23 am

Marey was said to be a scientist and an artist. His curiousity and eagerness to learn about movement challenged him to invent something that would capture small increments of motion for him to study. "He uses the camera as a recording tool". It was also said that Marey's invention was a source for "pre-cinema". Through his chronophotography, people can observe things they usually cannot see with their own eyes such as the flutter of blutterfly wings or how the horse runs. But through Marey, films are developed because of how time plays into his photographs. His photographs are taken in such short intervals that the images show step by step movements and the movements in process. Marey was also touching on the point of physics and greatly influencing the scientific world by allowing scientists to find observations of force and just the cycle of life. They have a better understanding of how the body and how the world worked. Marey sees his photography as a graph where data is collected. "The idea that motion, by bringing us closer to everday perception, would be inherently less analytic." Marey could have embraced the movie world but he chose not to because he was more into the careful study and analysis of movement. Marey's chronophotography is said to be well advanced for his time. "Marey is a forerunner of the visual conpression implied in digital layering, new relationships made visible in aesthetically beautiful patterns of information." (http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/acad ... Mamber.pdf)

yunjikim
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Re: 6.Chronophotography & Marey

Post by yunjikim » Sat Nov 27, 2010 9:43 pm

Stephen Mamber’s article, Marey, the analytic, and the digital, discusses the influence of Etienne-Jules Marey’s ‘pre-cinema’ chronophotographic gun in the art world. With the tools Marey had developed, he contributed to the realization of the complexity of analyzing physical processes. With Marey’s tools, the ability to view movement as a continuous sequence of photographs became available, an artistic and scientific improvement from merely a disrupted series of stages.

Marey’s work has been critically compared to and was formerly categorized with artists such as Muybridge. However, Marey differed, in which his work was beyond the ‘pre-cinema’ concept. Marey viewed photography as a graphing technique; thus, his technique of mapping points and trajectories is crucial for this method of unveiling an image within another image through a series of visual graphing markers. The scientific-analytic development of moving chronophotographs characterized the invention of cinema. This technological advancement is a revolution to the modern day digital media. Marey’s chronophotographic gun “captures motion through a process of serial overlapping images,” and can be seen as one form of motion.

One of Marey’s chronophotographic pieces, the flight of birds, was not an impeded or frozen motion, but rather data captured at regular, isolated intervals, which reconstructed the original action. This technique reached far beyond merely recording an event. This required deconstructing and reconstructing a sequence of events, which could reveal a successive pattern.

According to Mamber, the technology, scientific thinking and aesthetic sensibilities of Mareu can be more realizes in a digital environment, in which affinities are evident in how the environment forms. Furthermore, Marey’s chronophotographs may have been considered “cinema” due to the inaccurate view of chronophotograph’s as “movies-without-enough-simulated-motion” rather than accepted for the beauty of isolated moments of movement.
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danecsmith
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Re: 6.Chronophotography & Marey

Post by danecsmith » Sun Nov 28, 2010 6:13 pm

This article written by Steven Mamber discusses the Marey’s contribution dealing with the study of movement. During Marey’s time, cinema has not been invented yet, although he foresaw the technical change into the digital. He wanted to portray movement and study it. However, in order to fully understand the work that Marey was producing, we cannot think of his work as pre-cinema. Doing so would thus put him in the category of cinema, just with less simulated-motion, lessening and limiting the work that he actually did. Than being said, Mamber states that it is necessary for you to see the work done by Marey as an alternative system to that of cinema. Marey’s goal was not to simply portray movement, but to deconstruct movement. He wanted deconstruct the flow of movement in order to study what was actually occurring. His work was so powerful because it was not a means of showing continuous movement, but a means of breaking down movement from a continuous activity, to that of a measurable, specific components. For example, his work with Pelican in Flight. Marey’s influence can be seen in any sort of database or spatial interface. His main goal was to break down the harmonious flow of motion into more specific elements, and being an artist as well, he would then recompose them.

Sarah
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Re: 6.Chronophotography & Marey

Post by Sarah » Mon Nov 29, 2010 10:14 pm

The Marey Article is reminiscent of the beginning of a phenomenal transformation in technology and photography. Marey took the already incredible notion of a piece of time captured on paper, known as the photograph and transformed it into a collection of moving parts. He had the notion that a photograph which is motionless, timeless, when paired with numerous other photographs could then become a moving piece of imagery.

The interesting thing about Marey's experiment was that of the object in the images. He did not focus on the main points of a photograph such as composition, color, and subject matter. He focused on the representation of human motion piece by piece by having the person wear a black suit with white lines representing the body parts of the human being. This is a very technical aspect that joins technology, art and human research.

Muybridge took an interesting take on the technical aspect of photography and motion as well. Instead of a motionless camera and a moving human figure, he had a moving figure AND a "moving" camera so to speak. He placed cameras at equivalent distances and allowed the moving figure (in this case a horse) to run past them, triggering the camera to take the photo as the horse passes. An interesting and far more complicated system to creating a moving image. Both systems however, have paved the way in the advancement of photography, and many new technologies in this field will benefit from their findings.

DCSmith
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Re: 6.Chronophotography & Marey

Post by DCSmith » Wed Dec 01, 2010 11:12 pm

Mamber’s article aims to shed light on the systematic processes and goals of Etienne-Jules Marey’s work. Often times misunderstood as creating his work for an art audience, Mamber explains that Marey explicitly adhered to his scientific goals.
Mamber brings up an interesting argument that Marey was essentially anticipating and directly effecting the change of technology and digital media. Though Mamber does state that “digital media have blurred the line between work and play, between science and art” and Marey’s work does have quite the beautiful aesthetic, his intentions were more about enhancing or going past the visual limitations of humans. Taken essentially as fragments in time and superimposed in a series, Marey created a way to view motion in detail in a way that made it easier to study. In regard to anticipating technology and digital media, this is exactly how we now view and edit film. He transformed analog to digital with a scientific mindset. Mamber however explicitly states that seeing Marey’s work as pre-cinema would undermine his genius. Instead he says that Marey’s genius is an alternative system. Marey was not interested in depicting life or life-like systems but rather he found “ways to conceptually display traces of movement hidden or obscured by everyday perception.” On another interesting note Mamber points out that Marey saw his images as sets of data and graphs, as “hoof distance or heart beats” but still are full of movement despite them being devoid of any photorealistic elements.
In his conclusion Mamber simply suggests that Marey’s scientific approach and “aesthetic sensibilities” are more easily understood in a digital environment such as outs. Marey was criticized in terms of cinema because they were misunderstood and downplayed as “movies-without-enough-simulated-motion.” Marey was able to analyze complex phenomena in a different, more challenging way.

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amandaziegler
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Re: 6.Chronophotography & Marey

Post by amandaziegler » Thu Dec 09, 2010 1:12 am

In Steve Mamber's article "Marey, the analytic, and the digital" he describes the work of Marey and how Marey, though concerned absolutely on the science of motion, helped influence the photography and further cinematography that captured movement. Marey created a special camera that looked like a gun, however, enabling the photographer to take pictures of the same negative with quick recording of movement. He is most famous for capturing the movement of the wings of a bird in flight. Though Marey engulfed himself behind the science of the movement that was being created, rather than the art, he is believed to have helped be a founding force in cinematography.

The Lumiere Brothers were the first to experiment with films with the first ever film being titled "Exiting the Factory" (1895) and the film portrayed women exiting a factory. Their second film was titled "L' Arrivee d'un train a la Ciotat" (1895) and entailed a train coming into a station. This film was so real and alive that the first time it was shown the audience ran out of the theatre.

My favorite artist that Mamber talked about was Muybridge. Muybridge studied locomotion. He began with studying the locomotion of animals and then studied the locomotion of humans, Muybridge proved that when a horse is running there is a point in the stride where the horse has all fours in the air. He was able to capture this because he lined up thirty cameras that captured the film of the motion of the horses.

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