Thursday, 8 May (this week) at 6pm I shall be giving talk at Kingston Museum, Wheatfield Way, Kingston upon Thames, KT1 2PS.
‘How did the young bookseller Ted Muggeridge from Kingston become renowned photographer Eadweard Muybridge of San Francisco, and how did Kingston Museum become the home of arguably the world’s most important Muybridge collection?’
and…
‘How is Muybridge’s work relevant to artists and the media of today?’
Find out on Thursday.
Posted here by Stephen Herbert
Animation by James Bellis, on YouTube. Enjoy.
Posted here by Stephen Herbert
The T-Shirt Issue ‘Muybridge Part Two’ at MAD, NYC
‘Muybridge Part Two’
http://www.highsnobiety.com/2014/01/28/the-t-shirt-issue-muybridge-pt-2/
Re-posted here by Stephen Herbert
An interesting and rather beautiful video (and sculpture), by Pablo Garcia.
Posted here by Stephen Herbert
This lightbox artwork by Anneke Ingwersen refers to Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion images, ‘The moment of frozen motion, with an illusion of depth”.
More images and details at: http://www.annekeingwersen.com/ccc/lightbox-explosion/
The blue elements remind me of the cyanotype prints from Muybridge’s major work, and the fragmentation of the negative images recalls the fact that all of Muybridge’s original camera negatives from Animal Locomotion are lost.
Posted here by Stephen Herbert
Olympic Celebration: Athletes in Motion
(c) Kingston Museum
The following is from This is Local London. A review and photos will follow.
http://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/news/9829004.100_year_old_photos_capture_athletes_in_motion/
‘Kingston exhibition features 100-year-old photos of athletes in motion
7:30am Wednesday 25th July 2012 in News
By Clare Buchanan
The exhibition will be at Kingston Museum from 28th July.
In the Olympic year Kingston Museum is exploring old and new techniques used to capture athletes in motion.
The exhibition will demonstrate the way artists and photographers have changed and evolved and how they depict the human body over time. The showcase includes work by Kingston-born, Victorian photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who bequeathed his personal collection to the borough in 1904 and paved the way for capturing the world in motion. He was a pioneer in trying to capture motion in sequence photography and the exhibition displays many of his 1887 experiments of humans and animals in motion. Much of his work was devoted to athletics and the male physical form, reflecting a new emphasis on physical fitness and ideals of masculinity in the 19th century.
In contrast, the display also includes contemporary artist David Michalek’s work, which captures athletes in motion in high definition. Coinciding with the 2012 Games the exhibition also focuses on 21st century techniques, including the use of sport biomechanics to measure and correct technique and injury rehabilitation. A video by Charlie Murphy, called the Kingston Big Wheel, will accompany the exhibition, courtesy of the Stanley Picker Gallery.
The video is inspired by Muybridge’s iconic motion sequence and features 300 gymnasts, dancers and athletes creating a chain of human cartwheels. The Kingston Big Wheel forms the final project for No Competition – a series of artist projects exploring the relationship between art and non-competitive sport.’
Olympic Celebration: Athletes in Motion, Kingston Museum, Wheatfield Way, Kingston. From July 28 to October 20. Admission free. Contains nudity. Phone 020 8547 6463 or visit kingston.gov.uk/museum
David Michalek is an artist who takes the concept and techniques of portraiture as the starting points for the creation of his works, on both a large and small-scale, in a range of mediums. While earning a B.A. in English Literature from U.C.L.A., Michalek worked as an assistant to noted photographer Herb Ritts. Beginning in the mid-1990s, he began his professional photographic career working as a portrait artist for publications such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Interview, and Vogue. Concurrently, Michalek began to delve into performance, installation, and multi-disciplinary projects. Since giving up commercial photography in 1998, his work has been shown nationally and internationally with recent public art and solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, the LA Music Center, Harvard University, Sadler’s Wells, Trafalgar Square, Opera Bastille, Venice Biennale, Yale University, The Kitchen, Lincoln Center and at the Edinburgh Festival at Summerhall with the Richard DeMarco Foundation. He has collaborated on the visual art component of two staged works with Peter Sellars: Kafka Fragments, presented as part of Carnegie Hall’s 2005-06 season; and St. François d’Assise, presented at the Salzburg Festival and Paris Opera. Other film and video work for theater includes collaborations with The Tallis Scholars; John Malpede and L.A.P.D., and with the Brooklyn Philharmonic in a project for The Brooklyn Museum’s “Music Off the Walls” series. He is a visiting faculty member at Yale Divinity School, where he lectures on religion and the arts. David Michalek lives in New York with his wife Wendy Whelan, principal dancer of New York City Ballet.
http://www.davidmichalek.net/about.php
Posted here by Stephen Herbert
I’ve been neglecting this blog for too long – due to minor distractions such as earning a living. But also, there hasn’t been too much Muybridge activity these past few months. Here’s a brief roundup.
A new Muybridge song appeared on YouTube recently, and although I prefer ‘Good Evening, Major’, this one – which also has a ukulele as the lead instrument – is a pleasant enough ditty about love and murder. Perhaps some day there will be enough songs for an album.
‘Caroline Grannell performs her original song “Eadweard Muybridge” (true story!!!) with the wonderful ICMP band Ago, Alessandro, Benji and Natasha North’
YouTube continues to be a source of many short Muybridge-related videos, mostly student animations. But here’s something – Tim Cole’s Mining for Muybridge – that’s more ambitious, and more sophisticated than most.
This installation ‘Muybridge men’ (is this the original title?) has a mesmeric, zoetropic effect:
Kinetica Art Fair is produced by Kinetica Museum
http://www.kinetica-museum.org/events/talks-workshops.html
‘…and is the first of its kind in the UK. It brings together galleries, art organisations and curatorial groups from around the world who focus on kinetic, electronic, robotic, sound, light, time-based and multi-disciplinary new media art, science and technology.’
As everyone will already know, Google decided to celebrate Muybridge’s 182nd birthday in April, with one of their doodles. With a milestone birthday like that I should have anticipated such a thing, but I didn’t and a proportion of the hundreds of millions of people who logged onto Google that day checked out Muybridge on Wikipedia, and a proportion of those craving still more info clicked through from there to my website The Complete Muybridge, increasing my daily traffic by around 1000 percent, requiring a bandwidth upgrade. (Still, mustn’t grumble.)
The old man would have liked this, and on his home turf too – just 133 years or so since he captured stereoscopic sequence images of a horse in free motion. (Not 2D, as stated in this article.)
From: Computer Graphics World
‘Xsens, Rothschild Fund Achieve 3D Inertial Motion Capture of Horse in Motion
Category: News
16-Aug-2011
Palo Alto, Calif. – Xsens, a supplier of 3D motion tracking systems, and the Rothschild Fund have accomplished what is being called the world’s first 3D inertial motion capture of a free-moving horse.
The joint project of Xsens and the Rothschild Fund was completed using an advanced prototype system developed by Xsens to enable 3D motion capture of equine locomotion in real-world conditions. The system employs inertial sensors located on the horse’s body and GPS to trackfull-body motion in any environment, indoors and outdoors, allowing the horse’s innate, voluntary movements to be recorded and viewed on a standard PC in real-time.
Xsens’ R&D Team accepted the challenge of developing the prototype, an inertial motion capture system for horses, as an inspiring and out-of-the box project. The aim was to push the boundaries of its MVN inertial motion capture technology, requiring integration with GPS position and velocity tracking, a more complex biomechanical model, and higher motion dynamics.
“We loved the challenge of pushing our technology beyond the state-of-art and to be part of the great ambition of the Rothschild Fund. They provided the equine biomechanical models, equine knowledge, and the horses, so we could focus on the challenge in the sensor fusion,” Henk Luinge (PhD), research manager at Xsens, explains.
Members of Xsens’ R&D Team and the Rothschild Fund performed the world’s-first 3D inertial motion capture of a horse’s gallop in Woodside, Calif. The location is less than 15 kilometers from the site of Leland Stanford’s Palo Alto racetrack where the famous photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, recorded the world’s-first 2D photographic motion capture of a horse’s trot 130 years ago.
“Study of equine locomotion for the past century has remained predominantly laboratory experimentation, in which horses are confined in a controlled environment with stationary cameras,” explains Chris Hart (PhD), a research associate of the Rothschild Fund. “Our goal was to capture the horse’s motions, without capturing the horse. Remarkably, Xsens, the one company capable of the technical innovation, was also the one company that shared our interest in free-moving horses.”
The “MVN Equine” prototype will be used by the Rothschild Fund to further current understanding of horses and was recently presented to peers at the International Society of Biomechanics Equine SIG in Brussels, July 2011. The technology could also potentially be used to animate equine computer characters for visual effects in a large film production without the need to bring horses into a motion-capture studio.’
http://www.cgw.com/Press-Center/News/2011/Xsens-Rothschild-Fund-Achieve-3D-Inertial-Motion.aspx
More on this, in relation to historical precedents, soon.
Posted here by Stephen Herbert
Eadweard Muybridge, Plate from Animal Locomotion, 1887, collotype. Private Collection, Vancouver
Muybridge’s photographs have featured in several recent exhibitions, including one that’s just opened in Vancouver, Canada. The website of Vancouver Art Gallery has the details.
WALKING + FALLING
JIM CAMPBELL, CHRIS MARKER AND EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE
April 2 to September 5, 2011
“Walking + Falling presents the work of three notable artists who have utilized new media to explore and represent complex notions of time, movement and memory.
Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was an English photographer whose sequential images of human and animal locomotion were the product of a groundbreaking scientific study and an artistic vision that evoked a lyrical sense of time and movement.
Chris Marker is a French filmmaker who is renowned for his work in a variety of photobased media. His 1962 film La Jetée is widely regarded as a compelling meditation on time and memory. Marker’s film occupies a liminal zone between photography and film, documentary and fiction, past and future, real and imagined, stillness and movement.
Based in San Francisco, artist Jim Campbell draws deeply on the history of photo-based imaging to produce what may be best described as a newly emerging post-photographic practice. Trained at MIT Labs in Boston, Campbell has created several new bodies of work that use computer software, electronic components and programming language to produce provocative images of contemporary life.
Organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Bruce Grenville, senior curator.”
Posted here by Stephen Herbert
One of the many varied and excellent projects that have been taking place in Kingston this past year is “Muybridge, Movement and Me” – and the results are now being uploaded onto the website www.muybridge.co.uk
“A group ranging from experienced artists to complete beginners was drawn together in the winter of 2010-11 by Kingston Museum to produce a response to the Muybridge Revolutions exhibition at the Museum.Working alongside photographer Crispin Hughes, filmmaker Susi Arnott and the Museum’s Learning and Access Officer Caroline Burt, the group studied photography and time lapse techniques. Using inexpensive compact stills cameras, each member produced work on the cusp between still and moving images. Their work uses Muybridge’s techniques and themes of time and movement to explore their lives in Kingston, London.
This site will be updated every week as new work is produced by the group.
An exhibition of the group’s work will be on show at the Stanley Picker Gallery in Kingston 12-26th March.”
When you get to the website, you can download the exhibition poster shown below, and click PROCESS to see the first pieces from the group.
Posted here by Stephen Herbert
Muy Blog 