Hannah Boydstun
October 10, 2012
“One can say that digital media have blurred the line between work and play, between science and art, between product and process”
In the case of Etienne-Jules Marey, his interest and fascination in both science and art integrated into the formation of beginning of film, and more importantly, the beginning of digital media.
Marey’s obsession with movement allowed his work to be multifaceted: not only focusing on the science behind movement, but how these finding could find their niche within the art realm. His progression toward bridging a gap between science and art not only allowed scientific processes to be evaluated on a creative level, but also allowed for the development of a new type of visual perception. By this, I mean to say that Marey opened the door for future thinkers and theorists alike to harmonize between life’s inconspicuous natural processes and what we can see with the naked eye. For instance, Marey was foremost interested in the movement of objects, which after time, led to his interest in how to represent ‘change’ in general. Playing with these ideas, Marey innovated a machine for ‘automatically registering movement’ that would record not only what could be considered pre-cinema, but also recorded the pattern variations of a moving object.
Sixty-Seven years after Marey published his finding in a book titled Le Mouvement, Bernice Abbot began her own studies of movement using her skills as a black and white photographer. For the beginning of her career, Abbott's photography was used to demonstrate population and technological growth within Ney York City. Thus, it was this interest in the notion of ‘urban innovation’ that led her to combine the subjects of science and art. Her piece entitled Bouncing ball in diminishing arcs illustrates the same pattern of movement that was compelling to Marey more than a half century earlier. More so, Abbott followed in the earlier footsteps of Marey by pursuing her own endeavors toward a scientific-artistic union. These projects included a distortion easel, used to create Photoshop-like effects in a darkroom, and autopole, to which lighting can be placed at a number of ‘levels.’
Likewise, this congenial relationship between art and science can be seen yet again in the works of Eadward Muybridge. Beginning in 1867, Muybridge began his career as a photographer and quickly began expanding his knowledge of the processes behind the art of photography. Through his studies of the medium, Muybridge began experimenting with time-lapse photography as the San Francisco mint was being built, and more so, developed a 360-degree panoramic camera. Here, it is evident how Muybridge’s studies of the process of photography (i.e. experimenting with the composition, angles, and boundaries of his photography skills) were the forefront in his creation of these new products. Yet, his greatest contribution, both to the art and scientific world, was his study of a horse galloping. Up until this point time, movements such as a horse gallop were too quick for the human eye to critically analyze. Thus, Muybridge’s work was used as scientific evidence that all four legs of the horse are suspended in the air at one moment in time.
As demonstrated by all three artists, these innovate approaches to problem solving proved that science and art were in fact part of the same process: The artists challenged scientific phenomena by providing visual aides that could be analyzed. More so, the data recorded could then be artistically interpreted and displayed in a way the viewer could understand. In short, these artists discovered that the realms art and science could be called upon simultaneously in order to problem-solve. Today, this field of study is called Digital Media.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge
http://arts.mit.edu/news/attachment/a-b ... hing-arcs/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenice_Abbott
"Marey, the Analytic, the Digital", Steve Mamber