Portraying Movement
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Photography, which was born in 1839, was a visual medium uniquely qualified to portray and to capture the motion that increasingly became a part of the engagements of that century. Railroads moved people from country to city; telephones projected voices across a continent; and film projectors brought entire worlds of static images to life. The great inventions of the nineteenth century changed our movement, our understanding of motion, and ultimately our place in space and time.
The realism of photography is heightened by the concept that the decisive click of the shutter stops movement, thus allowing us to observe that which we normally cannot - a splash of milk or a bullet piercing an apple. Eadweard Muybridge's photographic studies of animal motion began when he was asked to settle the question of whether all four of a horse's legs left the ground in a gallop. Scientists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries continued to use photography to study motion, while artists such as Henri Cartier-Bresson (French photographer, 1908-2004) and Garry Winogrand (American photographer, 1928-84) used photography to juxtapose the elements that passed before their eyes.
Motion pictures achieve the precision of the photographic moment in a repetitive sequence, allowing us to archive and study the nature of our movements through it over and over again. In the earliest films, the camera sat fixed on a tripod and recorded staged dramas--essentially plays. Eventually, directors realized that the camera could be moved to show action from multiple perspectives like those implied in Albert Einstein's (German-born theoretical physicist, 1879-1955) theory of relativity or the Cubist painter's canvas.
The computer, arriving mid-century, enters into and influences a world in which information, images, and identities are in constant flux. There is no moment of stasis when working within the frame of the computer because objects can be scaled, rotated, or penetrated. This is especially apparent in scientific applications such as the program RasMol, which takes a description of a biological molecule and presents it on screen for a researcher to rotate, enlarge, and even "fly-through." Modern video games allow a variety of ways for the player to view the progress of his or her avatar in the game. One can fly behind the character, see things from the character's point of view, or even zoom around the scene, seeing it from any angle imaginable. What effect this might have on a new generation of visual artists remains to be seen.
We declare that a new beauty has enriched the world's splendor: the beauty of speed. A racing motor car, its hood adorned with great pipes like snakes with explosive breath, a roaring motor car that runs like a machine gun, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
-F. T. Marinetti (Italian poet and philosopher, 1876-1944), The Futurist Manifesto
See Also
- Portraying Movement
- Ghostcatching
