MODULE 3 - TIME, MOTION + DIGITAL DESIGN

I. Introduction

This module will look at time, motion and design, which is a design fundamental that is important for many different types of creative mediums, including film, video and animation, as well as visual 2D art, graphic design, interactive media and playable media, user experience / user interface design {UX/UI}, and digital media artworks.

The focus of this async module content will be on ways in which artists and designs communicate a sense of time and movement via mostly still images, and how these different approaches intersect to creative technologies and the development of some mediums {such as film}. The goal of this module is to explore these connections, and experiment with methods for communicating movement over time via still images, and possibly using video technology as a tool to create still images. The next module will continue to work with motion, time and design, with a focus on "time-based" media such as animation + video.

1. Motion + Time in 2D Design + Artwork

While it might be less evident than in film and video, time and motion can be important design considerations for visuals that are considered more static, and do contain visible movement or animation. Most visual systems ask a viewer, reader or user to navigate - or move through - a visual / textual space. How a viewer moves through this designed space - such as a painting, a poster, a web page, or an app - also impacts how they understand the other information presented through that space. In cases of interactive media, the design of the space and information might also directly influence the viewer / user choices, or their actual physical navigation - such as which links they click on a webpage or which menus they select in an interface.

Additionally, many static visuals and media communicate information about time and/or movement. Motion, movement or change can be the subject of the artwork - such as a painting that records the artist's movements over the canvas or a photograph that overlays all of the poses of an action in a single frame. Time, or changes over time, can also be a secondary factor that influences or shapes the way an artwork or design is understood, even when it is not something the artist or designer originally intended. This is a phenomenon that can be very tied to the technology used to produce the artwork, and an important "big-picture" theme for the course.

As you navigate the videos, artworks and information below, be sure to consider this idea of time and movement. As the viewer, how do the visuals communicate a sense of time, either in terms of a specific time (minute, year, decade, century, eon, etc) and/or the passage of time (from seconds to minutes to hours to days to years). How do they also create a space for viewers, readers or users to move through or navigate, and/or, how do they communicate a sense of movement, motion, or rhythm? How do these different design approaches influence the information being communicated, or form actual meaning?

2. Time + Creative Technologies

One of the central themes of this course is understanding how technology used to produce or make an artwork or design can influence or even change its meaning. The examples below explore this phenomenon more in-depth, and also explore artists who work with this concept in intentional ways. This section will focus on how artists, designers and other creative practitioners use photographic images, techniques and processes to communicate a sense of time, and also how photographs communicate a sense of time via their formal aesthetics {how they look}, their format / production technology, and their subject matter.

2.1 Painting Technologies + Time

Looking at the paintings below, even if you have never seen them before, you might be able to make assumptions about when they were painted based on the visual form, appearance and style, and the type of paint and surface technology utilized. This could be combined with your interpretation of the subject matter depicted, such as the people, settings and/or events depicted or the other recognizable visual components {or lack there of}. In many cases evidence of these materials and process, as well as some of the visual characteristics produced by these materials and processes, link directly to a specific time period.

These attributes, combined with the subject matter itself, can help indicate a painting’s age to the viewer. This type of visual interpretation cannot, however, always be trusted, as many artists across time periods, including contemporary artists, will intentionally utilize these two characteristics of technology and/or subject in order to directly play with the idea of time. Examples of this concept can be seen in the paintings and other visuals below - consider how each visual plays with subject matter or visuals aesthetics to relay a sense of time to viewers that is not accurate to its actual creation date. Consider how this intentional time-shifting and design changes your understanding of the works. What goals might a contemporary artist have for creating a painting, drawing, or illustration that feels like it was made in another time period?

Kyes - Contemporary

Banksy, Mayumi Oda + Horitatsu Mitomo - Contemporary

2.2 Photographic technologies + time

As we discussed in the previous two modules, specific photographic technologies and processes result in visual aspects - like color, level of detail, and/or development process / quality - can also indicate when a photo was originally taken. Things like camera construction, type and model, film / process and chemicals used, printing processes and photographic paper material, and overall level of detail and motion blur can all impact a photo’s visual aspects and give the viewer a sense of time. As with painting, a photograph’s subject matter can especially influence this spatial understanding, due to both overall resolution and the concept of photographic objectivity - that the viewer understands that images captured in a photograph are tied to a specific moment in time and specific location. This can be especially noted with photographic images of subjects that are significantly changed or no longer exist - such as destroyed landmarks and altered environments - or with well known real-life subjects.

Black and white photography technology was also used more prevalently in journalism and other photographic documentation for a time after color photography was accessible. In some cases, this can make photos taken in black and white actually seem older than they are. For example, many of the photographers and journalists documenting the civil rights movement worked with black and white film. When viewing color photographs taken at the same time, they can appear much more contemporary.

With the progression of digital photographic and image editing technology, including automatic processes and some generative AI, it is now easier to intentionally and convincingly adjust digital photographs and video in ways that obscure the time the photos were taken {or at least what type of photographic technology was used to produce and process the images}.

Anyone who has used a camera or photo app in the past 15 years knows that with the invention of digital processes and filters, it can be very difficult to use visual attributes alone to guess when a photo was taken. This is especially true with photos posted to a website or social media v.s. ones that are printed or exist as physical media. Below are a few specific examples of the apps and filters that produce these type of temporal effects. It's possible that folks born after 2000 might not remember seeing analog versions of photographs and video that exhibit these visual characteristics, and only understand and recognize them through either digitized media or these filters.

The artists below intentionally play with time via photographic technology and subject matter. In these examples, the artists do this intentionally, and also make this choice and process evident to the viewer. For each example, consider why these design choices were made, and how this might change the viewer's understanding and experience of each set of artworks.

Irina Werning - Back to the Future

Irina Werning’s photographs play with a theme that has trended in social media for several years. She re-creates a photo taken of an individual or subject at an earlier point in time, and then displays the two together. The concept behind this series conveys the passage of time, and is emphasized by the accuracy of the staged photos - in most cases, the composition, positioning of subject matter, physical color and lighting, and location, are nearly identical matches. Werning also goes one step further by producing similar tones and material characteristics to match older photographs - I think these choices are incredibly effective, because they are visually captivating and also encourage me to focus on the changes that have occurred to the person and settings over time. This effect was especially powerful in the set that contained the Berlin Wall in its original photographic image.

Plaid + Flannel

These images are from a show I put on about 10 years ago entitled Plaid + Flannel. I was interested in constructing queer mythologies and historical narratives based on relatively superficial similarities of dress, style and other self-described attitudes and presentations among my queer community and the imagined patrons of a 20th century hunting lodge. I constructed a life-size canoe out of cardboard, and photographed my friends and I paddling around San Francisco and trying to emulate the visual language put forth by commercial “outdoorsman” imagery from the 1940’s and 1950’s.

For the last phase of the project, I digitally adjusted these photographs to match film and processing types from the general time period, printed them, and displayed them in a queer bar alongside the canoe and other cardboard “hunting trophies” and equipment, including snowshoes and a Bear Rug woven from six-pack boxes. With these photographs and other elements hanging in the bar, the space transformed in a way that “bent” time and played with imagined histories. Even though it was easy to recognized that the photos were taken in the present, their visual attributes, subject matter and visual language create the space for an alternative, imagined history of the bar and its patrons.

2.4 AI + Time

More recently, digital automation processes and AI has been used to colorize black and white photographs and film or increase their definition. This is an important creative process to fully consider, as the resulting images might be captivating and convincing, but challenging to verify and often inaccurate. If folks are looking to these technologies to imagine the past in color {which can be really challenging to do, especially for time periods where black and white photography and film overtook painting and color printing in visual media culture}, those understandings could be completely mediated and manipulated by this technology.

In addition, AI can be used to create totally new images that appear to photographic, taken with older photographic technology- in some ways, this manipulation can make it harder for viewers to recognize an AI generated image, using the older photographic features to mask the usual visual tells. In many ways, this technology could be used to manipulate people's understandings of history and the past, which is something incredibly important to highlight and discuss as artists and designers.

3. Motion + Creative Technologies

The capture and communication of motion and movement in visual art and design is also completely entangled with creative technologies and exploration of these technologies. As we discussed in the first few classes, huge advancements in photography, film and animation technology were achieved out of creative desires to capture subjects at high rates of speed, understand how subjects moved, and "animate" still images. All of these technical and creative achievements and influenced both the ways that artists and designers worked with concepts of time, speed and motion - even outside of film, photography and animation - and also changed the way that viewers understood these topics from visual and cultural standpoint.

I believe it is very helpful to understand these creative and technological intersections and impacts, as they continue to influence contemporary forms of visual art, media and design, especially film, animation, digital media, and interactive media.

3.1 Early Animation And Motion Capture 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.

3.2 Early Innovators + Inventions

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE

In 1878, photographer and early film pioneer Eadweard {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 studio projects in a the next 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 recorded, instead of trying to create a “moving” image like Muybridge, Marey applied a photographic print process that exposed and overlayed 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 more recently. 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 digital motion-capture process employed today in film and 3D animation, 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. These visuals are similar to one approach folks can work with in your studio projects for this module.

3.3 Impacts of Animation + Film Technologies on Visual Art + Design

As these photographic, projection and animation technologies were producing introducing new forms of understanding and experiencing into visual culture, the resulting artworks influenced and changed the way artists and designers worked in other formats. As we discussed previously, knowledge of certain subjects - such as what horses looked like in motion - expanded the references available for image makers.

Other artists began to work more conceptually with the idea of capturing and communicating figures or subjects in motion, or even made things like speed and movement a more abstract subject in itself. These creative technologies and the works they produced directly influenced artistic movements such as a futurism and cubism. These movements explored subjects in motion, and sought to communicate kinetic energy, speed and other movement through "still" images. In turn, these still artworks influenced later directors, cinematographers and animators in their lighting, framing, and editing decisions, which we will continue to explore next week.

4. Wrap- Up

While many of the works above might have more direct connections to contemporary film, video, animation and games {which we will discuss a bit more next module}, I think it is important to understand how still images and static designs can also communicate a sense of movement and time. Still images and designs that communicate a sense of dynamism - or movement - can be more engaging and compelling for viewers/readers, and also help direct focus in artworks or designs with important information.