ART 10F - 4D FOUNDATION
Module 2 Lecture Content: Time, MOTION + the Moving Image
Introduction - Last Week on Art 10F
Picking up from last week, this week we will be exploring images and sculptures that sit somewhere in between static and dynamic. These artworks exist as “still” pieces or posses still states, and yet are also able to describe motion to the viewer. Motion / movement is directly linked to time because it occurs over time. In pre-digital technologies, motion and physical mechanics are even used to “track” the passage of time. Because of this relationship, many 4D artworks include kinetic elements. Videos are often used to capture some kind of action, and video and animation technologies themselves also utilize principles of motion (at least in their original analog forms). For this reason, it is impossible to fully separate time-based and kinetic artworks.
Still Images in motion
As presented last week, sequences of different, but related, still images can often communicate a sense of progression and time. Similarly, there are single images that can capture, record and/or communicate a sense of motion or movement. These artworks include paintings, drawings, and photographs, and range in time period from contemporary to thousands of years ago. I will try to include a good survey of these in the examples below, but please know that there are manyyyyyyyyyyy other artists out there who explore these types of ideas. The same holds true for most of the artists and artworks I will present this week because we are working with very broad categories.
Jackson Pollock + Gerhard Richter
Calligraphic / Big Brush Painters
Liang Xiao Ping
Lee Hong-Jae
Movement Beyond Painting + Action
Tony Orrico
Cai Guo-Qiang
This artist creates visuals out of the burn patterns left behind by intentionally composed fireworks and other pyrotechnics. These works are both a record of a single moment in time and the record of the artists movement across the surfaces as he placed down the explosive and flammable materials.
Various Artists
Light + motion over time
Drawing with Light
The artworks below utilize a technique called “light painting” or drawing. These images are produced by working with a long-exposure camera setting, and keeping the lens open for long enough to track the motion of light across the frame. I believe these paintings are very interesting examples of combining light, image capture technologies and movement - while most of these images are contemporary, these principles were also utilized by early photographers and artists trying to capture and produce “moving” images.
Tempt One + kinetic translation
I want to bring special attention to the artist below. Tony Quan, also known as Tempt One, is a graffiti artist who was at the forefront of developing unique letterform styles in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2003, Tempt One was diagnosed with ALS, and lost control of most motor functions and abilities. In the early 2010’s, a team of artists, community members and engineers came together to produce an “Eye-Writer” device and program that tracks his eye movements, outputs them to digital files which can then be projected onto architectural surface, allowing him to paint again. His artworks are a record of tiny movements that are scaled up and projected in large physical spaces using animation, motion tracking and image projection technologies. These artworks are a combination of all of many of the 4D artworks presented in this module - they work with motion capture, projection technologies and also utilize light in order to project the record of the artists eye-movements.
Proto-Cinema, Light + Motion
Speaking of light in motion, I want to quickly take everyone back more than 30,000 years ago, the time period (give or take 2000 - 3000 years) that some of the oldest known drawings were created. The drawings below are located in a cave in France, and were the subject of the 2010 film Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
Werner Herzog, the film's director, presents and explores these drawings from many different perspectives. One hypothesis is that these are "proto-cinematic" or "proto-animatic" images, and that the firelight that was originally used to illuminate these drawings - many of which resemble an image sequence - created a strobe that produced an illusion of motion or movement. While I imagine there is not a way to ever "prove" this, I think the drawings themselves capture and convey movement even as completely still images, and find it amazing to compare these images to the chromophotography and modern sequence images developed thousands of years later.
EARLY ANIMATION AND MOTION CAPTURE TECHNOLOGIES
Now lets jump forward a few thousand years to the more recent past, when light, image and optics began to be more intentionally explored to produce early animation technologies. Animation and film developed in tandem, and the earliest film projectors were able to produce “moving images” utilizing the same optical knowledge and physical kinetics harnessed to animate still drawings. Since we will be working with film and video extensively over the next several weeks, I think its worthwhile to trace back to it origins, especially since so many of these images, technologies and artistic explorations are connected.
In the 20 years between the 1870’s and late 1890’s the precursors to modern animation and film technologies began to develop together. These devices relied on many of the same optical principles that anthropologists hypothesize cave artists were working with to create an illusion of motion - namely, light, shadow and image - to capture and produce the illusion of images in motion.
EARLY ANIMATION TECH + INNOVATORS
EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE
In 1878, photographer and early film pioneer Eadweard (no, this is not a typo) Muybridge developed a trigger system to photograph a horse galloping, in order to better visualize and understand the way a horse actually moved. Up until that point, people thought that horses moved with their front and hind legs outstretched - the way that rocking horses are usually positioned. The images of the horse in-motion that Muybridge captured - with all 4 legs in the air at once AND with them folded under the its body - was so shocking that people thought it was fake. So, he had to do it multiple times, and still people didn’t believe what they were seeing.
For Muybridge, animation technologies began to intersect with his projects and pursuits in a few interesting ways. First, when Muybridge was trying to develop a technique to “play back” his photographs of the horse in motion, he adopted Phenakistoscope technology. Phenakistoscopes were devices that "animated" discs with sequential drawings by spinning them at a specific speed and isolating the individual frames by spinning a disc with slits at a corresponding interval. These devices could only be used by a single viewer at a time, and Muybridge adopted the technology by shining a strobe light set at a specific interval through images painted on glass, which would project the animations onto a screen, viewable by a larger audience. The process of embedding photos into the glass, however, distorted them so much that an artist had to re-draw them directly onto the glass or would simply trace with the glass placed directly over the photographs (the first use of the rotoscoping process).
Below are some original Phenakistoscope discs, as well as some contemporary ones, that have been adapted to work with turntables and strobe lights or have been digitally animated without needing to work with a physical isolation method. In their 1900s original form, viewers could never see these discs animated as a whole circular composition, but I believe they are incredible animation artworks, even though they were completely unintentional. Consider how in this situation, the advent of digital technologies allows us to "remix" older artworks and look at them from new perspectives.
ETIENNE JULES MAREY + CONTEMPORARY CONNECTIONS
At the same time that Muybridge was developing techniques to photograph horses in motion, Etienne Jules Marey was also busy developing different photographic technology to capture movement that had a lasting impact on film and also animation. Marey identified as a photographer and a scientist, I’m not sure if he ever considered himself an artist, but his contributions to the art world were immense and ahead of their time. He invented a “Photographic Rifle” that he used to film birds in flight at 12 frames per second all the way back in 1882- this is the same rate that most animated GIFS work with, including the ones that you will be developing in the Studio Projects this module. This camera exposed images onto a disc of film similar in design to the Phenakistoscope.
In order to exhibit these images and the motion they captured, instead of trying to create a “moving” image, Marey applied a photographic print process that exposed and over-layed all of the images onto a single print. While these images were “still”, they demonstrated a dynamic sense of motion and energy - I would argue that these images convey more movement than even some videos today. They were also closer in format to the modern filmstrip run through a camera and then a projector than Muybridge’s glass discs.
Beyond these technical advancements, Marey’s direction and conceptual approaches to motion capture and exploring movement also had lasting connections to and intersections with animation (even if they weren’t all fully realized or recognized until now). The way he set up and photographed many of his subjects - in all black with white stripes against dark backgrounds - produced abstract, geometric, graphic photographs and prints that resemble something painted, drawn and/or constructed. His explorations with movement are similar to the motion studies and character development that animators employ today. These setups also somewhat resemble - at the very least in concept - the motion-capture process employed today, and many of his visuals are similar to the wireframe visualizations that are often the intermediate outputs between capture and final animation. His images are also very similar to the contemporary image sequence shots used to describe complicated motion and progression in a single image.
MAKING CONNECTIONS
3D artworks developed with Motion Capture
Marey also worked with Zoetrope technology - an early physical animation device that inspired the Phenakistoscope. Zoetropes would work with horizontal strips of sequenced images affixed to the inside of a drum with slits cut into it. When these drums were spun around a stick, the viewer would be able to see the animation through the slits, as they would be rotating at the same speed as the drawings.
While Marey did not invent this device and process, he innovated it and pushed its capabilities by creating a zoetrope drum that “animated” physical, three dimensional objects - in his case, plaster birds. With this innovation, Marey, in the 1880’s, developed a conceptual prototype for 3D animation. Presently, many 3D animation studios and animation artists are beginning to explore this technology further, pushing what is possible by using 3D printers and sometimes incorporating projection and light vector lasers. I believe this revival and new exploration of a century old device is another example of how technology in art-making is less of a straight line of progress and advancement, and more of a cyclic progression, where different processes and techniques will circle back again and again, and each time they do they are pushed and developed a but further.
When viewing the images and video below, consider the link between art production technologies and the artworks themselves. How does this connection relate to this week’s reading by Alexander Galloway and some of the other animation artworks and technologies presented in this lecture.
Motion, Time + Kinetic Sculpture
To conclude this lecture content, I want to briefly address kinetic artworks. While early animation and motion pictures devices themselves were never considered “art”, I think there are interesting parallels worth considering between the mechanics used to animate images and capture and project moving photographs. The study of motion capture has shaped our understanding of motion itself, and the way that were are able to produce motion has to do with the ability to study it in moving subjects. A clear line can be drawn from the study of birds in flight to the development of airplanes, and now many artists work with this type of engineering and kinetic study to produce moving artworks.
Many of these 3D artworks also possess both static and dynamic properties. Kinetic sculptures are similar to many of the 2D artworks in that they exist in multiple states - they are both a static, physical object, and a dynamic physical object that reacts to a variety of inputs. In all of these examples, the artworks contain and communicate characteristics of motion, but they also present a physical still image when photographed (which is how MOST of them were observed and documented in most cases, prior to the development of digital technologies and streaming video in the mid 2000’s).
These still photographs of kinetic sculptures are a different type of presence than a still frame of video or even animation, which is why I am exploring these types of artworks in this section. These photographs are high resolution, and often describe different perspectives of a single sculpture - without any type of actual video evidence, the viewer is still able to imagine or envision the potential for movement. This imagining can also be similar to the expansion that occurs when viewing many of the 2D artworks above. The trace evidence or marks left by the artist as they moved across the the canvas, or the photographic images the subjects produces as they moved in front of the camera, communicates visual information to the viewer that allows them to extrapolate - or imagine - the actual motion or movement that occurred in order to produce such images.
This type of extrapolation or interpretation happens when looking at still images of kinetic sculptures. Without even seeing them move, as long as we are given enough information, the still forms communicate ideas about potential movement (and sometimes this potential is more descriptive or dynamic than the actual motion achieved or produced.)