Wk03 - Chronophotography

aimeejenkins
Posts: 10
Joined: Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:02 pm

Re: Wk03 - Chronophotography

Post by aimeejenkins » Mon Oct 22, 2012 8:33 pm

In “Marey, The Analytic, and The Digital” UCLA Film Professor, Steve Mamber, suggests that Etienne-Jules Marey was a classic figure in forming design and pre-cinema. Truth of the matter is, Mareys’ obsession with representations and measurements inclined him to develop new works in the realm of digital media. In succession, he created tools for visualizing and explaining how individuals can break down complex physical processes and discretely analyze them. His works evolved into graphical representations, temporal charts (chronophotographs), and photographs over time (chronophotographs).

At the height of his career, Marey developed the chronophographic gun, a device that recorded complex movements. The chronophotograph broke down continuous, on-going activities into sets of measurable, discrete components. The gun captured discrete variations of a single act that would serve to reconstruct/ deconstruct an original action. Marey, as a designer wanted to create a device that would “reveal the hidden.” He conceptually displayed traces of movement hidden or obscured by everyday perception. By compressing visual information, Marey was able to arrange illusive movements, complex patterns, and subtle temporal-spatial relationships in compelling new ways. “Marey’s ideas of movement lead to a view only now just being realized, but which was essential to his own notion of cinematic form.”

As Marey recorded the barely measurable, and transformed it into discrete variations, the analog gave way to the grid. “The numerical calculus of movement became points in time and space to be represented, traveled through, reconfigured, and transformed.” By bringing us closer to everyday perceptions, Marey’s digital media brought us a step toward the analytic, and away from the mechanical photographic reproduction of movement, which was seen to constitute cinema.

We can relate Anton Giulio Bragaglia to Etienne-Jules Marey because he was also a pioneer during the time in which he lived. His futurist photographs exert strength in response to new mediums. In 1906 he gained a great deal of technical and artistic experience while working for his father’s cinema studio. Like Marey, Bragaglia wanted to eradicate the past in favor of a new modern life. Artists who worked in traditional media such as painting and sculpture had a more difficult task, compared to photographers, such as Bragaglia, who worked with a mechanical tool. His photographs marked the point of a total revolution, aimed at awakening Italy from its museum orientation. Allowing this to occur were new machines produced for speed and developed for the masses. Bragaglia saw relationships between scientific technology and his imagination at the level of metaphysics. Photography soon became the aesthetic and psychological model for futurists throughout the world, for they believed machines created a foundation for their new civilization.

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http://tracesofthereal.com/2011/01/24/t ... odynamism/
http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/anton-bragaglia
http://nickgarrettfeed-noise.blogspot.c ... marey.html
Last edited by aimeejenkins on Mon Dec 03, 2012 11:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

jaehakshin
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:03 pm

Re: Wk03 - Chronophotography

Post by jaehakshin » Mon Oct 22, 2012 11:22 pm

He was interested in the 3 dimensions of bird flight, and so in some of his work he arranged his cameras around the seagulls he was studying rather than alongside them, in a 2D plan, as Muybridge had. He also invented a photo gun to register the phases of a bird's flight. It had a special revolving cylinder that carried photographic plates in a circle, passing them before a camera lens in the barrel; photos could be taken at 16 frames a minute. The method is very similar to Muybridge's, except that in this case there is one camera with sequential plates rather than a whole series of cameras arranged side by side at 1-foot intervals and tripped in sequence. His most interesting work, however, collects the multiple exposures onto a single plate, as in the image at right.
There is an interesting difference between what Muybridge and Marey are doing. Muybridge breaks the motion down into visible, sequential components. Each image is a snapshot on a linear timeline, something that is performed after one event and before another. False though it is to the continuity of actual experience, this is the metaphor that will drive the factory and its production line or assembly belt (as well as make film possible). Marey's mutliple exposure also shows a sequence of events, but with the important difference that the sequentiality is collapsed so that the different moments of the bird in flight overlap on the film and begin to form a new emergent entity, the pattern of the bird's motion. There is a blurring between the discontinuity of the individual bird images, and the continuity suggested by the way these images flow into each other.Marey called his photographs"the language of phenomena themselves".

Photographic artist Lucia Rossi cast off her clothes in Tasmania’s chilly highlands to explore questions of identity, connection and existence. She posed, totally unprotected, among Gondwanan pandanii and against much older but equally indifferent dolorite ridges to produce a series of self-portraits that became an element of a joint presentation titled: Cradle. We are not Finished at the Skin; The Body & The Wild. These colour photos are among Rossi’s creations that have made a deep impression in the island she loves and in Paris, the city she has chosen for the non-Tasmanian half of her life.
“I want to spend half the year here and half the year there for a little while, to really gel the connections,” she enthuses. “There’s so much potential. Tasmania is very well regarded there and David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art has recently caught the imagination. His deal with the Parisian artist Christian Boltanski generated a lot of discussion about our exotic island at the end of the world.”
Rossi is also interested in her forebears from the southern Italian region of Basilicata and is considering how she can present them in Italian or even Tasmanian settings. She is exploring ways in which her experiences in Paris can be applied to her work in Tasmania; and vice versa.

http://www.brandtasmania.com/newsletter ... 04&story=3
http://yin.arts.uci.edu/~studio/resourc ... marey.html

jacobmiller
Posts: 7
Joined: Mon Oct 01, 2012 3:50 pm

Re: Wk03 - Chronophotography

Post by jacobmiller » Wed Oct 24, 2012 11:57 am

"A key notion is to see marey as an artist-scientist of space time"

Marey's obsession with motion lead him to bridge the gap between art and science. His quest to document motion paved the way for motion pictures and digital media.

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A modern evolution from Marey's chronophotography is the work of Tamas Waliczky. Much of his work falls under the category of computer animations and is therefore the result of the digital medium.

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one of his most notable works is focused on the motion of marionettes. It is a computer simulation that demonstrates the forces determining the movement of marionettes.

Another artist with roots traceable back to Marey is Harold Edgerton who would use multiple exposures on the same photograph to represent motion on one photo.

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My brother is pretty big into photography so I have an example of photography that relates quite heavily to edgerton's work. Instead of using multiple exposures, he took multiple photos from the same spot and spliced them together into one photograph. It was pretty fun making these together.

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aleung
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Joined: Mon Oct 01, 2012 3:12 pm

Re: Wk03 - Chronophotography

Post by aleung » Wed Nov 07, 2012 1:02 am

“A key notion is to see Marey as an artist-scientist of space-time, and to view his obsession with movement in that context.”

Etienne-Jules Marey was a French scientist, physiologist, and chronophotographer. He is widely considered to be a pioneer of photography and an influential pioneer of the history of cinema. He qualified as a doctor in 1859 and started studying blood circulation in the human body. Then he shifted to analyzing heart beats, respiration, muscles, and movement of the body. After he constructed an artificial insect to demonstrate the figure-8 shape it produced during movement of its wings, he became fascinated by movements of air and started to study bigger flying animals and other animals as well. An instrument that aided him in his studies was his chronophotographic gun that he made. This device was capable of taking twelve consecutive frames a second and all the frames were recorded on the same picture. Soon after he abandons his gun and invents a chronophotographic fixed plate camera, which gets improved by having the glass plate replaced with a long strip of sensitized paper, which gets improved again by replacing the paper strip with a transparent celluloid film. Marey’s greatest achievement was his use of photography to study movement. His chronophotographs had an important influence on both science and the arts and helped lay the foundation of motion pictures.

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A photographer with the same style as Marey at that time was Eadweard Muybridge who was important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection. He would use multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-action photographs of what the human eye could not distinguish as separate movements. An example would be his study of a horse galloping, which was used as scientific evidence that all four legs of a horse is airborne at the trot. The difference in the work of these two artists is that the subjects in Muybridge’s photographs have their own individual frame while the subjects in Marey’s photographs are in one single frame and motion is seen due to the overlapping of the subjects.

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Anton Bragaglia, a pioneer in futurist photography and futurist cinema, has a style similar to Marey’s as well. The similarity is that motion and movement are depicted in the photographs and the difference is that the photographs are in one single frame.

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Sources
http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/marey.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne-Jules_Marey
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Giulio_Bragaglia

sidrockafello
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Joined: Wed Oct 03, 2012 11:14 am

Re: Wk03 - Chronophotography

Post by sidrockafello » Mon Dec 10, 2012 6:31 pm

chrono.jpg
It is fascinating to think that artist, scientist, philosophers and other arts in the like where able to accomplish such astounding things that lead to the vast array of technology we have today. Etienne-Jules Marey is one of those select individuals who’s though processes lead to the invention of the kind of motion pictures we see today. At the time the type of work Marey was being related to was chronophotography and the analytical system that is its byproduct. Marey’s achievements have become better known as pre-cinema. What Marey was able to do was take multiple photographs at the same time which was not only seen as a scientific process but something that was visually stimulating and interesting to look at, some call this art. The impressive pictures that were the product of multiple images being taken at the same time was an arrangement of movement that is neatly organized and understood visually. By looking at the picture presented such as a man walking across the plain of focus you can see the body in movement. The head creates a swurvy line across the top showing how the body goes up and down while walking, in contrast you can also see how the legs and arms sway back and forth opposite of one another. When approaching these pictures in a scientific view it becomes more anatomically informative. Being able to observe the function of the muscles as they extend and flex is not only crucial for medical reasons but for the first time it is put in a single frame. What I mean by that is in one frame contains all the information in step by step or chronological order in a way that makes the actions being easily understandable.

“Marey’s special contributution I would sum up as follows: he developed tools to realize his ideas about how comples processes could be analyzed. By analyzed I mean how these processes can be visucalized and explained in discrete terms. Marey didn’t just measure. He developed a system of thought about how to reconcile the disparity between what we think we see and what could be verified,…”

Marey’s influence can definitely be seen and translated into different forms of art like Duchamp’s Ascending the Staircase where a chronological photograph of someone walking up a staircase is the center focus for Duchamp’s abstract drawing. The drawing itself is something of itself. It is full of lines and shapes of shades all complex but it is visually enticing. While no clear figure is presented the feeling of movement is very prevalent and in your face. It was this thought process that was passed down from Marey and has healivy impacted how digital photography has evolved.

http://youtu.be/Kc4cBiSXoCs

One example would be how in the past years of film, one motion picture in particular pulled in all these thoughts and processes and combined them into one. The artistic vision in the Matrix I found was astonishing and after appreciating one specific scene I could see some of the same thought processes that can be seen in this week’s artists. In the scene posted I found multiple instances where Marey’s works and ideas can see seen in effect in the digital age. From the beginning of the clip to :22 seconds into it there is not much going on, but for this point I just appreciate how it was his chronophotography that began the steps that up to cinema which is what this segment symbolizes. Following this at :22 to :24 there is a quick special effects shot. The two seconds if of a man taking the appearance of another which was shot using more frames on top of frames that mold together in a chronological order that easily demonstrates how the actor was able to do what he did. Now from :25 to :40 seconds is a buffer that leads to a climatic shot where the main character fires his gun ten times. All of the bullets miss its intended target because the person being shot has superhuman reaction time. This is visually communicated by a type of chronophotography literally making the agent seem slow while appearing to have incredible speed at the same time. The scene is executed by show the visual aesthetics of a chrono-shot where all of his movements are mapped out, so what you are looking at seems like four people coming from one. What this translates into is a man who is moving so fast it looks like he in one place while being in another. When you think about it while although chronophotography can be understood as a system of events taking place in order it is still open to artistic manipulation even though it may not be realistically possible.

http://www.georgelegrady.com/
https://www.google.com/search?q=chronop ... 2QXo04GgDQ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronophotography

maerine
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:04 pm

Re: Wk03 - Chronophotography

Post by maerine » Fri Dec 14, 2012 8:13 pm

“Numerical data as a river of visual measurements is highly revealing of underlying structures.”

In Stephen Mamber's article he argues that Jules-Etienne Marey's work as a scientist artist was not necessarily the stepping stone for cinema, but a visualization of movement in discrete terms. When Marey photographed birds at measured intervals, he was able to see the repeating highs and lows that made up the patterns of movement. While the notions of motion seems second nature to us now that we have the technology to capture and slow down motion to fractions of a second, Marey's photographs were some of the first visualizations of motion graphed out and reconstructed when it was not well understood how things moved.

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Photograph of a bird's flight being measured out.

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Here is a kinetic sculpture by ART+COM where 714 spheres are attached to steel cables attached to motors controlled by 3D programming. While the length and duration of the movements of each sphere seem like arbitrary numbers, visually, one can see how these numbers can be connected. The spheres become a moving plane that goes through patterns that link the movement of one sphere to the next over time and space.

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Sol LeWitt's drawings in the image above and on walls all around the world can be created by anyone with a few instructions by the artists. While one may assume that every drawing would come out the same, because of the different locations, types of walls, and interpretation one can see a repeating pattern that links all of the drawing and the variations that can occur. One can see the instructions as a formula and the drawings as the solution. The instructions themselves while simple enough to visualize in one's head, reveal patterns that may not have occurred without the data from it being plotted out.

http://www.artcom.de/en/projects/projec ... sculpture/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_LeWitt

“Marey, the analytic, and the digital”-Stephen Mamber

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