The Eadweard Muybridge Experiment
from brian d. katz
4th Place Winner!
for Mofilm London contest, client HTC.
Cast: The Stouts: Samuel, Abigail, Darren, and Gretchen
Crew: Katz, Ian Campbell (DP), Alex Watson, Sebastian Heinrich, Azrael Ricky Daniels
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
The lack of posts on this blog recently is certainly not due to a reduction in Muybridge activity. Other pressures have kept me away, so today a quick roundup of some recent happenings.
Roundtable Discussion: Cinema as a Paradigm Shift in Vision
Thursday 27 January.
Speakers from the Muybridge in Kingston programme returned for a group discussion examining how Muybridge’s work formed part of a wider 19th Century shift in vision as a way of understanding the world. We were gathered together within the exhibition space, around us the glowing images of wall-mounted zoopraxiscope discs and lantern slides. Speakers were Dr. Pasi Valiaho, Prof. Esther Leslie, Deac Rossell and Professor Stephen Barber. As Chair of the event (significantly assisted by Alexandra Reynolds) I certainly enjoyed the evening, and judging by the quality of responses from the audience, they did too. Marek Pytel, master animator of Muybridge images, later remarked: “Sitting, talking about perhaps an end of cinema, while surrounded by the very artifacts of its projected beginnings was actually quite moving. Sometimes one takes these things for granted – and one shouldn’t.”
Other events held at Kingston between September 2010 and January 2011 are detailed on the Muybridge in Kingston website.
http://www.muybridgeinkingston.com/event.php
Muybridge workshops
Rich Bunce gives us a taser of the work of his students at one of the recent Muybridge-related workshops:
http://www.richbunce.com/blog/tag/muybridge/
(c) Rich Bunce
Friday, February 25th, 2011
“This week I completed the last of the Muybridge workshops, which have formed part of the education programme at Kingston Museum; run in conjunction with the Exhibitions on Muybridge’s work at both the Museum and Tate Britain.
The workshops have been great and really enjoyable to run to do which is always a bonus! Here are some highlights from the work…”
Click on the title above to see the work animated on Rich’s website.
Helios opens in San Francisco
Muybridge is back in San Francisco in a big way, starting on Saturday, as the Helios exhibition opened.
SFMOMA Showcases Exhibition: Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change
http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=45299
This first review questions whether the exhibition should have grasped the thorny subject of attribution:
Photograph of Yosemite Valley from the 'Helios' exhibition
‘Helios: Muybridge in a Time of Change’ review
Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic
San Francisco Chronicle February 26, 2011 04:00 AM Copyright San Francisco Chronicle. (Section reproduce here for purposes of review.) Saturday, February 26, 2011
‘…Weston Naef, , a ranking expert on Muybridge’s contemporary E. Carleton Watkins (1829-1916), argues that Muybridge bought the rights to negatives made by others, including Watkins, to market many of the pictures issued under his own name, or under his short-lived commercial moniker, Helios. That Watkins and Muybridge would have connected in the small 19th century world of San Francisco photography seems certain.
The organizer of “Helios,” Corcoran chief curator Philip Brookman, answered Naef’s suspicions by pointing out that some Muybridge landscapes from the period in question include darkroom manipulations, such as the addition of clouds from separate negatives, that appear nowhere in Watkins’ work.
Clearly, over time Muybridge did master the techniques of wet collodion photography and cultivated his own vision of landscape, of history inscribing itself on his time and of his medium’s potential for scientific scrutiny.
Incorporation of the controversy into the SFMOMA presentation – admittedly no small task – might have enriched it. But there is plenty to occupy the eye and mind in the show as it comes.
Muybridge’s innovations went to the brink of cinema, paving the way for the regime of kinetic imagery under which the whole world lives today.
Dwelling in the image world that Muybridge helped create, we inevitably view his work with the slant provided by the famous studies in “Animal Locomotion” first commissioned by railroad baron and university founder Leland Stanford.
“Helios” gathers those sequential pictures – which evidence a bizarre clinical curiosity as well as technical genius on Muybridge’s part – in a depth never seen in an exhibition before.
SFMOMA has appended a small contextualizing roomful of late 19th century American pictures from its own stellar photography collection. But visitors who remember the engrossing 2003 exhibition “Time Stands Still: Eadweard Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement” at Stanford will wish for more in the way of historical framing.’
Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change: Photographs, books and ephemera. Through June 7. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., San Francisco. (415) 357-4000. http://www.sfmoma.org.
E-mail Kenneth Baker at kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page E – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/02/25/DDGE1HT66F.DTL#ixzz1F9b9MxDP
New animated film completed
Previously mentioned on Muy Blog, a new animation has now been finished – as reported in asahi.com news
http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201102220290.html
ANIME NEWS: Director Yamamura completes new short at Canada’s NFB.
by ATSUSHI OHARA
2011/ 02/23
Muybridge's Strings
(c) 2011 National Film Board of Canada/NHK/Polygon Pictures
Animation artist Koji Yamamura (Mt. Head and Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor) has completed his long-awaited animated short, Muybridge’s Strings, in a coproduction with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and others.
Yamamura took seven years to finish the 12-minute short, slated for release this year….
“I aspired to become an animation creator after seeing NFB works when I was a university student,” Yamamura said. “I had always dreamed of making animated works at the NFB.”
Muybridge’s Strings follows the life of groundbreaking British photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904)…..Yamamura’s animated short also includes a parallel story about a girl growing up in modern Tokyo. The film’s score includes J.S. Bach’s “Crab Canon.”
“I wanted to draw ‘time’ in a documentary style with a poetic manner,” Yamamura said. “I wanted to capture moments of connection of the two stories that seem related to each other at one point, yet detached at another.”
The director said he came up with the idea immediately after completing Mt. Head in 2002. Yamamura sounded out the NFB for a possible collaboration through an animation creator he met at a French film festival. Later, Yamamura found a producer who was interested in his works and willing to join forces with him.
Yamamura looked for financiers from Japan while he worked on Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor. He began full-scale work on Muybridge’s Strings after gaining consent from Japan Broadcasting Corp. (NHK) and CG animation studio Polygon Pictures Inc. as co-producers.
Yamamura spent about two years in Japan drawing key sketches for the project. Later, he spent five weeks in a wintry Montreal, where the NFB is located, late last year for editing, sound effects and other production work….
Yamamura is the first Japanese director to produce an animation at the NFB.
“(At the NFB), everyone from legendary masters to artists younger than myself is spending a great deal of time working on projects. It is like a school, with each artist interacting with one another.
“Their artistic creativeness is highly respected, but that doesn’t mean they can make whatever they want. I felt they all had a sense that they were doing their jobs ‘for the sake of animation art.'”
Many artists at the NFB, Yamamura added, spend several years making a short film, just as Yamamura did.
“It would be great for artists dedicated to animated shorts to make 10 or so good ones in their lifetime. You can’t create it if you don’t offer your life to it,” Yamamura enthused.
Yamamura had trouble finding sponsors for the project, which put the production on hold. But even so, he said, that was not a waste of time.
“If everything had gone easily and I finished my film in three years, it might have turned out different from what it is now. You can’t get to the bottom of your work if you don’t go through trial and error and have time to think,” Yamamura said.
“Thanks to advancements in personal computers and other devices, we have more convenient tools. But you have to give much thought to each frame and make it with your own hands. It takes time.” ATSUSHI OHARA
Eadweard Muybridge Online Archive
A newish website that tags itself ‘Muybridge’s Home’ launched this month:
“We officially launched on February 14, 2011 and are in the process of processing and uploading all eleven volumes of “Animal Locomotion.” We hope to have them all up soon.”
“Welcome to the Eadweard Muybridge Online Archive. Here you will find images from Eadweard Muybridge’s seminal work Animal Locomotion, photographed from the original 1887 publication with the kind support of the Boston Public Library and its extraordinary Rare Books Department. These extremely high resolution images are presented copyright free and ready for download.
Dave Gordon, Curator”
http://www.enlightenedmonkey.net
http://www.muybridge.org/
February News Roundup posted here by Stephen Herbert
http://fada.kingston.ac.uk/staff/stephen_herbert/stephen_herbert.php
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
©The Harold & Esther Edgerton Foundation, 2001
Reading Public Museum (Pennsylvania) is currently showing an exhibition comprising the instantaneous photography of two ‘Time Lords’ – Eadweard Muybridge and Harold Edgerton. The text below is a review in the Reading Eagle.
Originally Published: 12/12/2010
Art review: Where art and technology intersect
By Ron Schira
Reading Eagle correspondent
Photographing Motion: Eadweard Muybridge and Harold Edgerton
[illustration not shown here] Harold Edgerton’s “Bullet Through Playing Card”
“In what can be termed an interesting crossover between art, science and photography, the pairing of two unrelated photographers, separated by time and location yet working in similar modes, surprisingly congeals very well for an exhibit of photography on view at the Reading Public Museum.
Titled ‘Photographing Motion: Eadweard Muybridge and Harold Edgerton’, the photos contend with the idea of high speed or strobe photography, in which moving objects are captured frozen in mid-movement, in some cases extraordinarily fast with such things as birds caught in flight or bullets bursting through fruit.
Rachael Arauz from the University of Pennsylvania curated the exhibit, having worked previously with the Reading Public Museum on the Keith Haring exhibit of 2006 and the 2008 exhibit of the Masters of American Photography. The Muybridge prints, an amazing 781 black-and-white photographs, have been in the museum’s collection since it opened its doors in 1904, but upon receiving a recent gift from the Edgerton Family Foundation of nine photos, it appeared a sound idea to pair their similarities. A carefully chosen selection of Muybridge’s “Animal Locomotion” series and the entire Edgerton gift are on display in the second-floor science gallery through Jan. 16.
By utilizing sequentially positioned and up to 36 timed cameras at strategic locations, Muybridge invented a method of catching his subjects: trotting horses at first, then people as they were walking, riding in carriages, smoking cigarettes or engaging in other forms of movement. The photos, all of which were taken in the late 1800s, were framed and placed gridlike in multiples that extrapolated those details ordinarily unnoticed by the naked eye.
Expanding upon those principles 50 years later, “Doc” Edgerton was trained as an electrical engineer and originally used stroboscopic flashes to research the movement of fast-moving machinery. This however found its way into other applications, freezing time so to speak in one-millionth-of-a-second flashes. A girl jumping rope in overlapping leaps and a split-second tumbling acrobat are included, as well as the famous full-color image of a bullet passing through an apple in one and a banana or playing card in others, as the photos documented all the actions of an object or person in real time.
Given the impression of incredibly slow motion, the actual photos took less than a second or two to take, not regarding the intensive consideration, preparation and equipment involved, while presaging high-definition nondigital work by many years. Edgerton is also credited with “Corona,” the timeless image of a drop of milk suspended in midair, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art but unfortunately not in this show.
As such, the photographs are historical documents and incur an intriguing dialogue of where art and technology intersect. All of the skills of classical photography are utilized, with some invented, to pursue the goals of these scientific and moderately experimental artists to document the subtle passages of time, the fluid gracefulness that glides by too fast and silently for us to neither recognize nor appreciate.”
Contact Ron Schira: life@readingeagle.com.
Copyright, Reading Eagle (PA).
The Reading Public Museum is located at 500 Museum Road. Call 610-371-5850 or visit http://www.readingpublicmuseum.org for hours and additional information.
Posted here by Stephen Herbert
For this blog post, I have used a different illustration (not from the current exhibition), an image from the collection of The Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ Department of Photographs :
Death of a Lightbulb/.30 Caliber Bullet
1936
Gelatin silver print
Gift of the Harold and Esther Edgerton Family Foundation
Image Copyright:
©The Harold & Esther Edgerton Foundation, 2001, Courtesy of Palm Press, Inc.
Accession Number:
96.149.18
Andy Serkis. Photo (c) BBC
Apart from re-enactments in a 1960s US programme introduced by Ronald Reagan, Eadweard Muybridge as a character of considerable importance in the story of the creation and recording of the modern world has been absent from television. The Weird Adventures of Eadweard Muybridge is the first programme to attempt to tell the full story. It does touch on most aspects, leaving out the bits with very little visual material – the five years spent as a bookseller in New York, totally avoided in the commentary – and his various activities during the five ‘lost years’ back in Europe in the 60s. But for a one-hour programme, it packs a lot in.
Philip Brookman talks with Alan Yentob. Photo (c) BBC
The talking heads include Philip Brookman, whose exhibition in Washington did so much to introduce Muybridge to a wider public; author Rebecca Solnit, in splendid hat, musing on Muybridge in San Francisco as she wanders through the harbour; print collector Michael Wilson marvelling at the artistry of the travel photographs; Jonathan Miller not getting it at all, and insisting that Muybridge was simply an entertainer; recent biographer and long-time chronophotography specialist Marta Braun talking about the Animal Locomotion sequences; art curator Ann Dumas of the Royal Academy of Arts explaining the connection with the ballet dancers of Degas; and Kingston Museum curator Peta Cook introducing the sacred scrapbook, and zoopraxiscope discs.
A nice touch was Stanford Red Barn (Palo Alto) horse trainer Rachel Williamson confirming that the 1870s horse photos are still used today in the equestrian world.
Rachel Williamson. Photo (c) BBC
I got my fair share of the running time, mostly talking about the complexities of the image projections at a Muybridge lecture, and I also managed to get the last word in. [voice from across the room – “you always do…”]
‘Andy Serkis as Muybridge’ said the blurb, and he appeared reading Muybridge’s own words, wearing just a hint of period costume, but no stick-on beard. Serkis was also one of the expert talking heads, since he’s very familiar with the subject, having been developing a Muybridge feature film project for some years. And of course, he’s best known for being Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy – his physical image altered by CG techniques, in a modern development of the motion capture and image manipulation used by Muybridge for converting his photo sequences to painted animations.
No recent news on the feature movie, but perhaps it will happen someday.
Posted here by Stephen Herbert
The following report is from the Croydon Guardian
Beasley’s panoramas of Muybridge’s garden
will be displayed on postcards you can take away from the exhibition
12:35pm Thursday 18th November 2010
By Graham Moody
http://www.croydonguardian.co.uk/leisure/leisurenews/8674860.Did_Muybridge_build_the_American_Great_Lakes_in_his_Kingston_back_garden_/
There’s been a long-standing rumour about Eadweard Muybridge and a last great project he was said to be undertaking in the back garden of his Kingston home shortly before his death in 1904.
The renowned photographer is believed to have been creating a scale model of the American Great Lakes by digging ponds but no one has yet been able to ascertain whether or not he really was.
Artist Becky Beasley is now the world expert on the subject and has perhaps come closest to finding a conclusive answer which she unveil at her exhibition as part of the Muybridge in Kingston series at the Stanley Picker Gallery from Wednesday.
“The rumour about Muybridge’s last project is something that is really interesting for me,” she explains.
“A lot of people have tried to get access to his garden in Liverpool Road but there are big gated walls around the house and there was an access denied there if you like.
“I wrote to the owners though and explained to them what I wanted to do and they gave me access and allowed me to take photos.
“And so I made two 360 degree panoramas as there are two spaces in the garden, a small one and a larger space.
“The reason for the panorama is because I was inspired by Muybridge’s Panorama of San Francisco in 1878 that is still described as one of the best panoramas ever.”
Beasley’s panoramas of Muybridge’s garden will be displayed on postcards you can take away from the exhibition along with a pamphlet detailing her findings (which she is keeping tightly under wraps for now), all of which will be based on an expensive linoleum floor “For me the most ambitious part of the project is the linoleum floor I have decided to lay in the 140m square space,” says Beasley.
“I have designed an image that will be put into it and likened it to making a movie as it is centrally very expensive and a one off that will only be down for two weeks.
“There will be these two tall thin revolving postcard rails each with images from one section of the garden and they will be things you can take away.
“Although it is very much a landscape space we have opened it up and taken all of the temporary walls down so it will be a big open space that means as soon as you enter you will see everything all at once.
“You will feel like you are in a garden in terms of scale.”
Becky Beasley, Muybridge in Kingston Contemporary Commissions, Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, November 24 to February 5, 12pm to 6pm (not Monday), free. Call 020 8417 4074 or visit stanleypickergallery.org.
Posted here by Stephen Herbert
This video on YouTube, Fish Tank Tuesday, captures some of the recent nocturnal moving image projections in Muybridge’s birthplace, Kingston. The goldfish swimming on the front wall of the Rose Theatre are just yards from Muybridge’s childhood home (the building on the left in the top photo, now a computer shop).
On the evening that this video was taken, just across the street from what was, in the mid 19th century, the dwelling of the Muggeridge household is a giant silhouette of a running deer – a moving image produced from Muybridge’s own animated pictures.
And this animation alternates with a sequence showing the frozen successive positions of a galloping horse, advertising the current Muybridge show at Tate Britain, and a poster for the exhibitions of … Muybridge in Kingston. Strange to think of the young Edward in the 1830s and 40s, peering out of those windows at no.30 but never, in his wildest flights of fancy, imagining that in the distant future the immortal results of his own life’s work would be visible as giant, glowing, living pictures on the walls of the buildings in his own hometown High Street.
Posted here by Stephen Herbert
The Muybridge in Kingston project is currently inescapable in the old photographer’s home town. The Muybridge Revolutions exhibition (original lantern slides and motion discs) at the Museum continues until 12 February, with ongoing lectures.
Barkman Computers in the High Street – Muybridge’s childhood home, just across the street from the Coronation Stone – has a large window display, and in the Rose Theatre next door some of Trevor Appleson’s large colour photographs of human movement/activity are being shown. In the evenings, there are spectacular Nocturnal Projections (18 Sept – 11 Feb).
A few yards down the road at the Market Square, the ancient Market House recently housed a display of local children’s artwork inspired by the old photographer’s sequences of people in motion. As well as single-phase drawings of people in motion and photo-sequences for animating in mini cardboard zoetropes, the children made their own versions of the commemorative plaque that’s on Muybridge’s original house, with details of how they would like to be remembered – from the inevitable “league footballer” to “auther”. (More about the children’s work in a later post.)
This artwork was also in one of the rooms at the Stanley Picker Gallery.
Also at the Stanley Picker, is Appleson’s Dance of Ordinariness – “an ambitious new moving-image and photographic work inspired by Muybridge’s famous collotype sequences of human figures. As part of a residency at The London Contemporary Dance School, the artist has invited dancers to reinterpret gestures and actions that relate to the various visual narratives that Muybridge himself built into his original motion studies”. The multi-screen presentation echoes the multiple-view format of the Animal Locomotion plates. One sequence shows water flowing from a mop in slow motion – the effect half-way between Muybridge’s time-frozen water in a similar scene, and watching this happen in real time – allowing us to see (as in Muybridge’s published collotype sequence) the detail in the water’s movement, at the same time that the synthesized motion is being presented.
http://www.stanleypickergallery.org/index_more.htm
The exhibition runs until 13 November, with Becky Beasley’s exhibition following from 24 November.
Posted here by Stephen Herbert.
Children’s artwork, and workshop photograph, reproduced by kind permission of Natalie Kay, Education Coordinator for the Stanley Picker Gallery.
Flying horses to Avatar – Eadweard Muybridge comes home to Kingston
For a succinct guide to the Muybridge in Kingston project, it’s well worth spending 13 minutes viewing the new video featuring David Falkner, Director of the Stanley Picker Gallery.
“Kingston University and Kingston Museum have teamed up to run a major programme of events and activities promoting Eadweard Muybridge. This coincides with the first significant retrospective of the famous photographer’s work arriving at Tate Britain from the Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC.
David Falkner … believes that, in 2010, Muybridge’s work is more relevant than ever. In this interview he explains how Muybridge’s experiments have direct links to modern films such as Avatar, Alice in Wonderland and The Matrix.”
Posted here by Stephen Herbert
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