w02 Chronophotography & Marey

mogle09
Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2012 5:13 pm

Re: w02 Chronophotography & Marey

Post by mogle09 » Mon Jan 23, 2012 4:51 pm

While reading about Marey, I found myself interested in the connection with Marcel Duchamp. At first it was difficult for me to understand the influence Marey had on Duchamp’s work. I have learned about Marcel Duchamp’s artwork in many of my classes, but I have never heard his name associated with Marey.
After reading Mamber’s essay the influence became much clearer. Similar to Marey, Duchamp also had a fascination in capturing complex movement. Duchamp was extremely interested in chronophotography. In an interview, Duchamp revealed that his idea for Nude Descending a Staircase was directly influenced by Marey’s chronophotography. Duchamp revealed that “in one of Marey’s books, [he] saw an illustration of how he indicated people who fence, or horses galloping, with a system of dots delineating the different movements....that’s what gave [him] the idea for the execution of the Nude Descending a Staircase.” Marey used a technique in which he mapped points so that what “unfolds over time in an image is another form of the trace.” Through observation, Marey would render the surface of the object and this influenced Duchamp, causing him to use a similar method in some of his artwork.
duchamp.jpg
Although Marey and Duchamp work with different mediums, they are both fascinated with movement. In Nude Descending a Staircase, Duchamp depicts a human figure in motion by deconstructing the form. Breaking the figure apart and eliminating any resemblance of an anatomical nude, he is able to create a sense of motion. Similarly, rather than focusing on the visual representation, Marey focused more on photography as a graphing technique. Marey, along with Duchamp, were not aiming to document realistic motion as much as they were creating images to be analyzed and created to reveal the hidden.
photo1.jpg
While researching both Marey and Duchamp I found an interesting website. The website took an image by Marey and transformed it into an animation. The original photograph captures the passage of time statically. As it gets transformed into an animation, the duration depiction changes to a dynamic depiction. Similar to the essay, the website makes a link between Marey’s image and Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase.

Sources:
http://books.google.com/books?id=yPDKXn ... mp&f=false

http://www.understandingduchamp.com/text.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_Desce ... ase,_No._2

http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/ ... dcock1.htm

http://www.understandingduchamp.com/aut ... index.html

tikamoini
Posts: 18
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2012 5:12 pm

Re: w02 Chronophotography & Marey

Post by tikamoini » Mon Jan 23, 2012 6:35 pm

Mamber's article about Marey delves into the interests, achievements, and significance of Marey's contributions to cinema and digital media. Marey is compared to Leonardo da Vinci in his likeness and aptitude for the arts and sciences, and his obsession for movement fuels his interest towards artful representation as well as scientific analysis. "'Movement' as a word conjures up equally the artistic and the scientific" (Mamber 83). His determination in exploring both aspects, bridging the arts and sciences, and extensive research are what amounted to his great contributions.


"Marey invented a technique called 'chronotography' that captured the stages of movement on a a single photographic plate, with multiple exposures per second so that the moving figures overlap. In the 1880s, Marey turned his attention to the tricky analysis of bird flight, photographing sequences of herons and cockatoos" (NewScientist).

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Analysis of the Flight Path of a Seagull, Marey, 1887

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Geometric Chronophotograph of the man in the black suit, Marey, 1883

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http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/courses/S0 ... /ejm03.jpg
http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/courses/S0 ... /ejm04.jpg
E.J. Marey, Chronophotographs from "The Human Body in Action," Scientific American, 1914


In 1938, engineer Harold Edgerton continued Marey's scientific findings, taking photos using a high-speed electronic flash to create a strobe effect. These flashes occurred at up to a million times a minute and Edgerton produced images following the style of Marey with extreme accuracy and clarity.

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Densmore Shute Bends the Shaft, 1938.

Sources:
http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/on-the-move/3
http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/courses/S0 ... mages.html

wangqian321
Posts: 15
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2012 5:18 pm

Re: w02 Chronophotography & Marey

Post by wangqian321 » Mon Jan 23, 2012 9:35 pm

In Stephen Mamber’s article, “Marey, the analytic, and the digital”, he claims that the chronographs bring out several dimensions of where Marey’s analyses were leading. He argues that Marey made the transition from describing the movement to measuring the forces that determine it. Movement as such, while celebrated and calibrated to a high degree, was not the sole or final objective. Movement stands in relation to energy as visual elements in cinema relate to style-a significant component of the larger picture.

Compared with the movement itself, Marey paid more attention and effort to the force determining the movement. To assist in his understanding of the mechanism of the wing in relation to the movement of air and the effects of air pressure on the wing, Marey wanted to photograph the wing’s movement in three dimensions. In July 1887 he took several picutures from above the bird, which would then be coordinated with whose he made parallel and perpendicular to the axis of its flight.
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The applications of this study were extraordinary: from the data furnished by the different sets of photographs he sculpted plaster models of the gull and the pigeon in flight. Each model, slightly smaller than life size, depicted a single phase of the wing as it moved through one complete revolution. He then mounted the sculptures into a very large zoetrope, which can help people view the bird’s flight from various aspects and reconstruct the revolution of its wings, invisible to the naked eye, in three dimensions in slow motion.
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Marey explained that "From the point of view of the resistance experienced, whether the solid body be in motion in calm air or whether it be immobile in an air animated with movement is indifferent." He thus presented the principle underlying his later smoke machines: air propelled against an unmoving form. He was then tackling a subject that had almost never been studied before: the problem, crucial for aviation, of the air flow around a surface.
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Sources:
http://urbanseagull.blogspot.com/2008/0 ... -1904.html
http://www.victorian-cinema.net/marey.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne-Jules_Marey
http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/events/exh ... no_cache=1&

mel.weismann
Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2012 5:19 pm

Re: w02 Chronophotography & Marey

Post by mel.weismann » Mon Jan 23, 2012 10:02 pm

Marey's work with chronophotographs and the step-by-step capture and analysis of the many parts of an act of motion is interesting in that it intends to do quite the opposite of 'cinema' - while cinema aimed to capture and replay life/action as humans might observe it in everyday life, Marey's chronophotographs tried to show us the parts of action which we would never see with simply our eyes - the patterns of motion, the hidden details which are only visible when the steps are frozen in time and compared one right next to another. Mamber brought to light in his article the distinction between what we might consider to be 'lifelike' versus what the reality of a motion is. Once these steps and patterns became visible, they could be measured and charted and analyzed, and the processes of human/animal life better understood.

Mamber says, "Elusive movement, complex patterns, subtle temporal-spatial relationships are presented in a framework which can make the familiar fascinatingly detailed and strange" (89). It is a reminder of how the human brain does its best to synthesize and come up with a working model of the world that is just enough for us to get on with our daily lives - how it takes 'extraneous' details and 'hides' them from the waking mind so that we don't have to deal with too much information at once (for if every time we saw someone walking down the street we were acutely aware of every single degree of movement they made in order to actually take a step, we might go crazy trying to process it all). This idea is explained a little bit in this LiveScience article http://www.livescience.com/13690-brain- ... 10413.html, in which a group of researchers think they have found some of the neurons that actually handle this stimuli-sorting functionality. Marey's work seems like an early attempt at overcoming this important evolutionary development so that we can understand things we didn't previously need to understand.

High-speed cameras of the modern day are like Marey's chronophotographs on steroids - they allow scientists to break down processes into even tinier instances of time for even more detailed pattern analysis. A recent example is an examination of the way cats use their tongues to drink water, using a high-speed camera - the camera revealed that they "pull columns of liquid up to their mouths using the very tips of their tongues" and in essence defy gravity. Why? We don't know, but nobody knew this was previously happening, and now there is a way to create a framework of the cat-tongue motion so that this sort of liquid propulsion method could be used for other applications.

Video: http://bcove.me/q73p05fa
Source: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/ ... g/?pid=525
Attachments
features-cattongue-3.jpg

kyle_gordon
Posts: 10
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2012 4:41 pm

Re: w02 Chronophotography & Marey

Post by kyle_gordon » Mon Jan 23, 2012 10:57 pm

The article starts off by stating that Marey was part of a group of the group of innovators labeled "pre-cinema". His chronophotographic gun allowed for the capturing of quickly moving images, much like stop motion photography or frame by frame animation. His work utilized motion and the analysis of visual media. Through his combination of both, he was able to be compared to the genius of those such as da Vinci. We are asked to analyse the work of Marey by placing ourselves in the time period prior to cinema and when digital media was not as construed as it is in present times.

Marey's obsession with time reveals how his thoughts on time and space relations help to represent the change he depicts in his work. He would record changes for things such as heartbeat, pulse, and movements of the body in his early days. With the production of his chronophotographe, he was able to capture images at 12 frames a second, allowing for him to study larger beings of movement. His motives behind capturing these movements were in order to study the original image taken and the change in the structure of the moving object. Later in his life he shifted his focus from living beings and animals to more abstract objects.

Although Marey enjoyed photography as a core part of his work, he made sure to differentiate between it and his study of movement. He also had specific insights into perspective and the limitations the camera provided with regards to perspective.

Figure 7_chronophoto2.jpg
This particular image displays composer Butch Rovan and his interactive display of dancer Ami Shulman. This image is similar to works that Marey would output with the use of his chronophotographe. Additionally you can see the change in movement from the original character throughout the image.
Etienne-Jules Marey-Bird-Flight.jpg
In his image, Birdflight, we notice once again Marey's interest in the change in movement over time of an animal.
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This image, a more recent use of chronophotography, depicts the movement over time of a city over the course of 6 hours.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne-Jules_Marey
http://www.tft.ucla.edu/files/faculty/s ... igital.pdf
http://www.creativeapplications.net/pro ... rocessing/

christinekim
Posts: 7
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2012 4:47 pm

w02 Chronophotography & Marey-christine kim

Post by christinekim » Mon Jan 23, 2012 11:48 pm

Etienne-Jules Marey did not believe that cinema had to move to be cinema. Unlike Lumiere who worked with the life-like and worked backwards on discovering forms of representation of everyday perceptions. Marey believed in working with a single shot and finding so much more about that single shot. He found beauty in the hidden that was usually unnoticed by the everyday eye. Marey stressed the "all-at-a-glance chart: the single image which brings out a complex activity which would otherwise lie unobserved." One of his greatest works was compiling a number of frozen images and overlapping multiple viewpoints.
Marey works with chronography by collecting variations of a horse galloping. Because Marey admired the non-movement aspect of chronography he was able to prove that all of the horse's legs at one point do not touch the ground. He was able to prove this by collecting numerous photos of a horse galloping. He was able to deconstruct the horse moving and analyze each and every movement. He did a similar project with a bird by capturing "all the successive phases of its wing movement." Through this, one was able to actually see the bird fly. Marey was not just recording this bird fly, but broke up the parts into single motions (deconstructing) and put it all together into one to complete a flying bird. With the single shots, his viewers were able to analyze and take a step back through the experiment and understand the proof of it all.


Sources:
http://nickgarrettfeed-noise.blogspot.c ... marey.html
http://thebubblechamber.org/2010/09/wildlife-films-101/
Attachments
Etienne_Jules_Marey_3.jpeg
20060810030640The_Horse_in_Motion.jpeg

goldgills
Posts: 8
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2012 4:42 pm

Re: w02 Chronophotography & Marey

Post by goldgills » Mon Jan 23, 2012 11:58 pm

The French artist scientist, Etienne-Jules Marey, is best known for his chronophotography. He was fascinated with motion and his genius lead to his ability to capture complex movements that dated 'pre-cinema.' His accomplishments have lead to advances in many branches of technology. One of those branches being the digital world.
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The digital world takes Marey's artistic-scientific methods because they are aesthetic and take a step towards the analytical. The computer is an excellent example of parts divided up into basic principals. This real-time linear digital world is based upon a pixellated simulation engine. These pixels capture motion based on overlapping images and works similarly to the chronographic gun. Then there is also the 3-d world and the movement it can portray. This world is built up, based on wireframes, and owes much to the findings done by Marey.
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He photographed a crows wing and taped a piece of white paper on it, so all that appeared on the film was the movement of the wing. These photographs were made into drawings and one could see the influence that they have the 3-d space and building of the wire work, and how an animator looks at movement.
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Here is recent use of digital chronophotography, often seen in magazines where they want to capture the movement in a single image.
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Source:
http://yin.arts.uci.edu/~studio/resourc ... marey.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Étienne-Jules_Marey

juliakristine91
Posts: 8
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2012 3:50 pm

Re: w02 Chronophotography & Marey

Post by juliakristine91 » Tue Jan 24, 2012 12:21 am

Week 2 Chronophotography & Marey - Julia Calderon

In Stephen Mamber's article about Marey, he touches on the many inventions, projects, and ideas that Etienne-Jules had throughout his lifetime. Marey was a French scientist in the late 1800's. He came up with many designs and inventions that dealt with some "pre-cinema" ideas. However, what he was inventing were not movies but images of his obsession with movement and measurements.

Marey's ideas are very closely related to the concepts of today's digital media. He created a system of thought about how to "reconcile the disparity between what we think we see and what could be verified". This is when Marey came up with graphical representations and charts called Chronographs and photographic representations called Chronophotographs.
marey_2b.jpg
Chronophotograph
http://0timeline.net/14a.htm
Although Marey has been closely related to pre-cinematic ideas, Marey was not interested in recording or documenting things in a life-like perspective. He wanted to find ways to display traces of movement that was not normally seen by the everyday/person point of view. In order to capture these new points of view, he created the "Solid Figures in the Zootrope". This device did not just have a strip of paper covered with figures, but it had full on wax models of his bird experiment painted in oils, representing the successive phases of its wing movement. This created the complete illusion of a bird flying sometimes around the apparatus, away from, or toward the viewer. However, Marey also wanted the viewer to have an overhead view of the zootrope. This offered a breakdown of the movements of the bird, which Marey wanted all his viewers to have.
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Solid Figures in the Zootrope
http://collectionsonline.nmsi.ac.uk/detail.php?type=related&kv=18348&t=objects
Marey never intended Chronophotographs to be movies or cinematic. He was only trying to bring the viewer closer to less noticeable movements in life. Therefore he was not as connected to cinema as some might think.
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Chronograph of Air
http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/chronophotography

j_j05ham
Posts: 11
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2012 5:11 pm

Re: w02 Chronophotography & Marey

Post by j_j05ham » Tue Jan 24, 2012 1:13 am

Etienne Jules Marey was a scientist at the forefront of technological innovation during the 1800’s. His pre-cinematic images were created from his own developed camera which captured movement and exposing the beauty that can be found within movement. In a sense his images were a forshadowing of the impact his work would have within the future movement of the world. Thus, the most important part of Marey’s work was that it not only allowed for but inspired new scientist to further develop technology that would capture movement in other more indebt ways. These inventions would eventualy be used through history by the common day artist who developed new art such as cinema, and to this day the pattern has and shall continue.

Within the article it states that “Marey does not seem at all interested in the life-like; rather, he finds ways conceptually to display traces of movement hidden or obscured by everyday perception.” The statement is somewhat confusing and mind-racking but what I understand of Steve Mambers article is that Marey wanted to capture movement in all possible forms that are associated with one single individual change; the key point in the article being the constant idea of mapping out the patterns of discrete variations seen through different forms of movement.

Time and space in physics are considered to be linked one to the other, all movement can be broken into a minute scale representation of this worldly philosophy. Artists have used Marey’s idea of capturing change/movement to create many forms of art from the visual to the audio and so on. One artist that comes to mind is Tehching (Sam) Hsieh who did a certain art project that consisted of him photographing himself and punching a clock in every hour for that one one year. Ultimately the project consisted of photos showing slight variations in his appearance. What reminded me of the project was that within Sam’s experiment he thouroughly documents the movement of time in many forms (he also marked a notch in the wall for each passing day). The images may not have broken down movement to such an exponential rate as Mayer’s photos did, but they did capture the changes of the human body that mostly go unoticed. Much like what Mayer attempted to show, the changes that go unnoticed.
Attachments
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martincastro
Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2012 4:07 pm

Re: w02 Chronophotography & Marey

Post by martincastro » Tue Jan 24, 2012 2:08 am

Steve Mamber writes, “Marey’s chronophotographs are constructed to reveal the hidden, not record the already visible.” I found Mamber’s “Marey, the analytic, and the digital” interesting because he touches on the difference views Marey and Lumiere had for the future of the motion that was being captured on film at the time. While Lumiere was interested in capturing what was represented as “real,” Marey was more interested in what was happening that was not being realized by the human eye. He wasn’t interested in representing the movement for the sake of just capturing movement. I found it fascinating that Mamber writes that Marey didn’t even necessarily want movies to move. Marey’s chronophotographs were different from the proceeding cinema because the chronophotographs were graphs of analysis unlike the cinema movies that were representations of what people saw everyday. I related Marey’s work with modern high-speed cameras because high-speed cameras were mainly developed for scientific purposes but in the process the images produced also got integrated into entertainment purposes. Modern high-speed cameras were first used to analyze what could not be registered by the human eye but now with the availability of such technology slow-motion scenes are now included in most modern action movies. The technology is so far developed that people can now even do it at home on simple programs on their computers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_camera
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/hi ... graphy.htm
Youtube Searching: High Speed Camera and Slow Motion Action Scenes
Last edited by martincastro on Sun Jan 29, 2012 12:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

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