w02 Chronophotography & Marey

glegrady
Posts: 203
Joined: Wed Sep 22, 2010 12:26 pm

w02 Chronophotography & Marey

Post by glegrady » Wed Jan 11, 2012 11:04 pm

What are the highlights of Steve Mamber's article about Marey? http://www.tft.ucla.edu/faculty/steve-mamber/ Post images found on the internet of relevance for this discussion.
George Legrady
legrady@mat.ucsb.edu

catiee55
Posts: 7
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2012 4:51 pm

Re: w02 Chronophotography & Marey-Catherine Li

Post by catiee55 » Thu Jan 19, 2012 10:57 am

Etienne-Jules Marey was known for his fascination with movement. He was a French scientist from the late 19th century. Marey was known for his chronophotographic gun which would capture complex movements. Considered as an artist-scientist his work with movement began something like pre-cinema (alternative system is what the author calls it). He used movement as a measurement and representation. Marey brings up the issue and has opened up our mind on how we think things are and how they really are. We begin to question how we analyze real time. Can it be a narrative? a database? The systems that he uses to display this idea was through graphical representation, temporal charts, and photographic representations.

Edward R.Tufte who plays homage to Marey uses the central notion of the all-at-a-glace-chart. Meaning, “the single image which brings out a complex activity which would otherwise lie unobserved.” (Mamber 85)With further research on Edward R Tufte, he presents informational graphics and visual literacy. Tufte deals with how to process about visual communication of information. Also in the article it discusses digital media and how it blurs the line of work and play, between science and art, and product and process. Which is something interesting to think about. Is what we see in a photo a narrative and how are we perceiving it?

There was an artist I learned about in a pervious art class who was into databases and mapping. He would combine the two together and create artwork with meaning and visuals. One piece he did was follow people around until the person knew they were being followed. He would then record where he went on a map and did this a few times. Another artist who used a digital database created a website that shows what people are feeling through posts on the internet. Colors and categories were used to separate the feelings people where blogging about.

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An artist named Giacomo Balla creates illusion of motion through a series of minute.
Image Eadweard Muybridge
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Duchamp's piece can be associated with the idea of an all-at-a-glace-chart, bring out complex activity.

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Edward R. Tufte chart work
Last edited by catiee55 on Mon Jan 23, 2012 12:24 pm, edited 2 times in total.

ellencampbell
Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2012 4:06 pm

Re: w02 Chronophotography & Marey

Post by ellencampbell » Fri Jan 20, 2012 2:04 pm

During lecture on Thursday and while reading about Marey’s experiments with recording motion, I was still confused by the process in which he captured movement. I was especially hung up on how the horse photographs were taken by Muybridge. Therefore, I have researched the process of chronophotograps, including the equipment that allowed artists like Marey to take such pictures. His chronophotographs were the first images to explain what happens when the body moves and are an accurate representation of time.

Marey set up a sequence of cameras to photograph the movement of a subject as it to create chronophotographs. Each individual camera must be set up with either a tripwire (like Muybrideg did in his horse study) or an electrically timed shutter release. Then, the photographer pairs together a sequence of twelve different wet-plate photographic prints of the subject in motion. Marey used dry plates unlike Muybridge because the drying time was much quicker.

Behind the lens, Marey put a rotating metal disk that had cut slots spaced evenly into it. This way, when the subject moved past a black background, the rotating shutter exposed the glass plate, and thus, created a sequence of images. This cylander device is called a zoetrope. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together (like the picture above on the bottom) so the viewer looks at a fast succession of images that creates the illusion of motion (equal to a motion picture). Marey however, was less concerned with the progression of chronophotographs to motion picture, but more focused on how it was used as a recording tool.

Image



Image



Image

http://americanhistory.si.edu/muybridge ... sec1p3.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronophotography
http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/ ... raphy.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoetrope
Last edited by ellencampbell on Tue Jan 24, 2012 8:46 am, edited 2 times in total.

brenna.osborn1
Posts: 14
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2012 5:14 pm

Re: w02 Chronophotography & Marey

Post by brenna.osborn1 » Sat Jan 21, 2012 10:04 pm

In Steve Mamber’s article, he discusses Marey’s earlier work before his chronophotography. He “developed strip-like machines” which captured the motion of things like a person’s walk or a pianist’s fingers moving across the keys. In Marey’s book, “Animal Mechanism” he goes over these machines and studies in more detail. He invented an instrument that would translate the vibrations of a foot or hoof hitting the ground into markings on smoked glass.
marey mechanism.jpg
Marey's Mechanism
He calls these, as Mamber does, chronographs as well as tracings. These tracings help understand the mechanisms of a horse’s gallop or how a person walks. Mamber also points out how the results of these machines unwind like film and the patterns that it creates recalls an animator named Norman McLaren.
linetracings.png
Tracings of a horse
marey.jpg
Tracings of a horse galloping
pianist.png
Chronograph of a pianist hitting keys
McLaren was an animator from Scotland who moved to Canada and helped establish an animation studio for the National Film Board of Canada. He was an innovative animator always looking for nontraditional ways to animate. One of these ways was to draw directly on each frame of a celluloid strip in order to create motion. An example of this is McLaren’s film “Dots” from 1940. For this film, Marey created Dots and splotches that moved around the screen by painting them in each frame on the film strip. He also created the soundtrack by scratching the film stock.
images.jpg
Norman McLaren's Dots
images.jpg (2.04 KiB) Viewed 90531 times
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3-vsKwQ0Cg
This is the type of animation that Mamber draws a connection to Marey’s work. If you imagine McLaren’s “Dots” on one film strip, it would resemble one of Marey’s chronographs with shapes that move from side to side.

Sources:
http://www.northernstars.ca/directorsmz ... n_bio.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=5g0OAQ ... st&f=false
http://books.google.com/books?id=oA6m6r ... &q&f=false
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3-vsKwQ0Cg

mmihalche
Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2012 5:09 pm

Re: w02 Chronophotography & Marey

Post by mmihalche » Sat Jan 21, 2012 10:42 pm

The article “Marey, the analytic and the digital” presents us with the work of Etienne-Jules Marey who invented the chronophotografic gun, the predecessor of cinema. We have travelled in time from the invention of the camera obscura to the photo and now this, an attempt at movement, a capturing of a series of pictures that put together like a comic book produce movement.

Marey was mostly concerned with motion in space and wanted to capture it. His process of observation was based on succession and synchronism .He explained the notion of revealing patterns by looking at changes of overlapping “successive traces that bring out unfolding patterns”. (Mambler)

Marey developed the chronograph out of a challenge to prove that running horses lift all their of the ground; he built a device that would display the images in a circle and create the illusion of movement. The images in turn are overlapping creating a ghost like effect. The scientific evidence had become since a piece of art that is based on a set of rules that the artist gives to the device.

Mambler mentions Sol LeWitt in relation to Marley, Le Witt tests the power of directions, this time the directions are not given to a machine and get interpreted by the audience that will execute the art piece. Most of LeWitts work consists of a set of instructions that are given to a series of people that will have to illustrate everything , the directions are sometimes vague, not to say that a line can be slanted for one person and straight for everywhere else. The work produced results in a series of patterns and geometric shapes like Mareys movement.

Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing 118
Pencil, Dimensions Variable, 2009
Sol LeWitt's instructions for Wall Drawing 118 are, “Fifty randomly placed points all connected by straight lines.”

Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing 91
Pencil and Colored Pencil, Dimensions Variable, 2008
LeWitt's description of Wall Drawing #91 is, “A six inch grid covering the wall. Within each square, not straight lines from side to side, using red, yellow and blue pencils. Each square contains at least one line of each color.”

On Sol LeWitt http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/arts/ ... wanted=all
Click here to see a video of a Sol LeWitt realization video http://www.massmoca.org/lewitt/timelapse.php?id=1
http://www.ericdoeringer.com/ConArtRec/ ... WD091.html
http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/MAREY_BIO.html
http://www.ericdoeringer.com/ConArtRec/ ... WD091.html
Attachments
LeWitt-WD091-1.jpg
Sol LeWitt , wall drawing 91
LeWitt-WD118.jpg
Sol LeWitt , wall drawing 118
MAREY_SUIT_2.GIF
Marely, motion tracking
etienne-jules-marey.jpg
Marey , human motion

rjliang
Posts: 17
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2012 5:06 pm

Re: w02 Chronophotography & Marey

Post by rjliang » Sat Jan 21, 2012 10:46 pm

In the article, Stephen Mamber claims Marey's vision of movement is a fully developed media theory rather than merely a primitive pre-cinema idea. According to Mamber, Marey's chronographs and ideas of movement are larger than most others give him credit for because they deal with how to represent change and not just how to depict movement. Because of this, Mamber labels Marey an "artist-scientist" of space-time.

In Jungian mythology, an "artist-scientist" is defined as a unique abstraction of life and the human mind. Artist-scientists are seekers, dreamers, and thinkers who ultimately represent the power of the mind. The intersection of the science and art world is interesting because science and art are both oppositional ideologies; while one represents rationality and logic, the other encourages impulse and fantasy. What makes the two worlds similar, however, is that both explore new ideas. Leonardo da Vinci is recognized as being one of the greatest contributors to the fields of both science and art/culture. His artistic imagination is what led him to produce innumerable scientific discoveries and his intense observation of the world around him contributed to his mastery of detail in painting and sculpture.

As an artist-scientist, Marey viewed photography as an analytical graphing technique and used his chronophotographs as a form of visual graphing ("geometrical chronophotography"). Instead of trying to bring viewers closer to reality through a series of images, Marey was more concerned with the scientific-analytic aspect of cinema. Overall, Mamber concludes that Marey's chronophotographs have been falsely assumed to be merely "movies-without-enough-simulated-motion" and that Marey's analytical contributions to cinema and the digital environment are larger than given credit for.

One linkage to Marey's analytical ideologies Mamber introduces is the wire-frame model. The term "wire-frame" originates from the metal wire designers use to represent 3-dimensional objects. Wire-frame in the digital realm visually represents 3-dimensional computer graphics. In CAD, wire-frame modeling is the least complex form of displaying images, which is exactly along the lines of what Marey wanted from his chronophotographs. Rather than depicting movement as exact as possible, Marey focused on and appreciated each camera image and frame individually.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist-scientist
http://www.jstor.org/pss/20027483
http://chicagoartmagazine.com/2010/08/s ... s-artists/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire-frame_model
http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/ ... 759,00.asp
Attachments
Screen shot 2012-01-23 at 12.18.59 AM.png
النموذج_السلكي.jpg
Perspective displayed in wire-frame.
Last edited by rjliang on Mon Jan 23, 2012 12:23 am, edited 3 times in total.

michaeld.johnsoncst
Posts: 8
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2012 4:46 pm

Re: w02 Chronophotography & Marey

Post by michaeld.johnsoncst » Sun Jan 22, 2012 2:26 pm

The most interesting point I took away from the this week's topic was Marey's use of chronophotographs to reveal what is hidden, to draw light to patterns in contrast to using his methods to document the obvious (albeit in a unique way).

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This made me immediately think of the artist Mark Lombardi. Although Lombardi doesn't work with photographs, rather data represented through text, he uses very similar mapping techniques as Mary (specifically Marey's mapping of train schedules) to reveal patterns where the otherwise doesn't appear to be any.

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Lombardi's work is definitely more message driven, rather than some sort of purely analytical, almost compulsive, depiction of information, as is the case with Marey's work.

It is Marey's analytic mind that brings in digital media into the dialogue. His processes, his way of approaching problems and projects, his solutions and his products, show a mind that seems far ahead of it's time in terms of it's top down approach to data.

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It's a shame he was born in the time he was, missing out on computer assisted graphical representation of data, such as this graphic depicting the development of European architecture.



Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lombardi
http://www.c82.net/posts.php?id=66
http://www.albany.edu/museum/wwwmuseum/work/lombardi/
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=23
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/ ... ewall=true
http://portal.mace-project.eu/BrowseByC ... sification

baxterwfrick
Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2012 4:10 pm

Re: w02 Chronophotography & Marey

Post by baxterwfrick » Sun Jan 22, 2012 11:48 pm

Chronophotography and Marey - Week 2

After reading "Marey, the analytic, and the digital" by Steve Mamber, I was intersted in his arguement that Marey's experimentaion and development of the chronophotography should not so closely be seen as "pre-cinema" but instead as its own medium. Mamber insists, Marey would not have nessecarily believed that the Lumiere Brothers' "cinema" was the inevitable path of his analysisand experimentation, but rather an alternative.

Marey was must more interested in the physics behind 'movement,' and the scientific nature of movement more so than the photographic aspect. In the article it is stated that he has said about chronophotography: "... photography like all forms of graphic representation, is faithful memory which preserves unaltered the impressions it has recieved... the photograph, then is praised for its obvious recording capabilities." However he mentions also, that there still remains "perspective" issues with phorotgraphs of movement.

Because of this suggested difference I wanted to research and explain some of the beginnings of history, particularly dealing with how the Lumiere Brothers used the medium.

The Lumiere Brothers, (Auguste and Louis) are, among others, credited as the first inventors to develop what is known as cinema and usually the first two to actually understand how the camera worked. In 1894, the brothers', after analyzing Edison's Kinetoscope identified two main problems with his device: firstly it was bulky, the camera, was a big piece of machinery and its weight and size were combersome. Secondly, the nature of the kinetoscope only allowed one viewer to experience the films at a time.

By early 1895, the brothers had invented their own device combining camera with printer and projector and called it the Cinematographe. This new device was smaller, lighter, and was hand cranked to run at 16 frames per second. The brothers included an intermittent device to their camera which helped display movment better.

Unlike Marey's interests in photograph's ability to display the physics behind movement and its science, the Lumiere Brothers immeidatly used their new invention to record 'actuality' footage such as workers coming out of their factory. Or a train arriving to the station.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nj0vEO4Q6s

The Lumiere Brothers pioneered not just the technical attributes of the camera but also its artistic attributes, creating a dialogue of relaism that has since been a crux of cinema narrative.

So, while Marey may have wanted his chronophotography to be a scientific medium, the pleasurable aesthetic properties the Lumiere Brothers developed through motion pictures altered the medium greatly.

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"Cinematographe" - Lumiere

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Marey's - "Photographic Gun

-Baxter Frick


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_and_Louis_Lumière
http://www.holonet.khm.de/visual_alchemy/lumiere-x.html
http://www.earlycinema.com/pioneers/lumiere_bio.html

kendallecrawley
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue Jan 17, 2012 5:54 pm

Re: w02 Chronophotography & Marey

Post by kendallecrawley » Mon Jan 23, 2012 11:18 am

In Stephen Mamber’s article, “Marey, the analytic, and the digital”, he discusses the work of Etienne-Jules Marey who is known for his pre cinematic advancements such as the chronophotographic gun. Mamber argues that Marley’s vision of movement was more than just “pre cinema”, instead it was a fully realized analytic and visual concept of digital media. Marley’s progress in the field of digital media along with his obsession with movement has labeled him as artist-science.

In the article, Mamber notes that Marta Braun has compared Marey to Leonardo da Vinci, for their similar approaches in bridging the artistic and scientific. Leonardo’s scientific process was an observational one. He attempted to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in a very detailed manner instead of relying on experiments and data or emphasize theoretical explanation. Leonardo’s observation followed clear scientific theories, and his methods integrated the arts including painting, drawing and photography. The nature of Marley’s analysis and the quality of his ideas, especially the joining of art and science, truly characterize him as Leonardo-like. Leonardo’s integrated and innovative views of science and art make him a forerunner of modern scientific theory and advancements in the arts.

Leonardo and Marey also had similarities in the contribution to cinema. Coming from the Greek word, which translates “recorded movement”, cinematography is defined as the illusion of movement by projecting in rapid fashion, many still pictures. Mamber suggests Marey’s work with movement was fundamental in the development of cinematography. Many years prior in 1515, Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings show he was also studying moving pictures long before anyone else. A sketch drawn by Leonardo of a lantern showing clearly a condensing lens, candle and chimney was found dating back to 1515. Leonardo’s drawing displays the same method of projecting a moving picture implemented with the idea of the magic lantern approximately one hundred and forty years later by Athanasius Kircher’s lantern. None of Leonardo’s writings indicate him actually projecting images with this device, however this illustration demonstrates a device of some type using a candle and lens.
davinci_lantern.gif
davinci_lantern.gif (3.21 KiB) Viewed 90481 times
chimney_lantern.gif
chimney_lantern.gif (6.28 KiB) Viewed 90481 times
In its emergent state, the magic lantern was the precursor of our current day slide projector and overhead. First seen around 1644, the magic-lantern was an antique form of today’s motion picture projector, however, it was without motion. The design this little tin box with a chimney shows similarities to Leonardo’s drawing. Exciting and unique in its presentation, the magic lantern was revolutionary in the art of seeing pictures “move”.
17thC_magic_lantern.jpg
339530281_308bf7e355.jpg
http://www.precinemahistory.net/introduction.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precursors_of_film
http://www.drawingsofleonardo.org/

hnavery
Posts: 16
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2012 3:45 pm

Re: w02 Chronophotography & Marey

Post by hnavery » Mon Jan 23, 2012 2:20 pm

In Stephen Mamber’s “Marey, the analytic, and the digital,” Mamber draws a distinction between Marey’s chronophotography and cinema by stating that his work was based in analysis as opposed to narrative. I chose to compare Marey’s work to databases in order to further exemplify its basis in science.
In Lev Manovich’s “Database as Symbolic Form,” he writes that “many new media objects are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other” and that “database is defined as a structured collection of data.” Marey’s tracings and recordings of movement can be seen as collections of data that when broken up are equally significant. Manovich’s writing also described databases as being endless in that one can constantly add information – ‘add a new line.’ Marey’s images only show a small fraction of information compared to what is available. In his tracings of how a horse moves, Marey presents only three variations of movement although there are infinite number of variations in the speed that he could have chosen to present.
Horse.png
Piano.png
Manovich also mentions how databases have a cultural form that makes them accessible to the public such as search engine that produces results. Marey’s visualizations give his research a cultural significance that makes his findings more easily accessible but also causes many to confuse his intentions as narrative (as in cinema which is purely narrative). Manovich also shares that the “databases becomes the centre of the creative process in the computer ages” much like how data and analysis were the foundation of Marey’s creative process.
I also would like to note that in “Database as Symbolic Form” it says that different paths through a database create different ‘trajectories’ of information that come together to form a new thing and that Marey also used a “technique of mapping points and trajectories so that what unfolds over time in an image is another form of the trace – a series of lines and points, superimposed.”
Crow.png

Sources:
http://books.google.com/books?id=oubaAA ... &q&f=false
"Database as Symbolic Form" by Lev Manovich

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