Eadweard Muybridge laid the basis for the development of cinematography by producing photos of a trotting horse with a series of cameras that “snapped” as soon as the horse passed through an electrical control. The silhouettes were transferred to glass plates that were rotated at great speed, simulating a continuous movement. This device was called a zoopraxiscope. Many artists, photographers and scholars were inspired by his work, but the impact and dissemination of his legacy was magnified by the introduction of digital technology and the web in the late 1990s. This assignment looks at the relationship between Muybridge’s original glass plates and what can be retrieved, viewed/read and reused on the web. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has created an animation on this subject. Watch it for a concise overview of Eadweard Muybridge and his achievements.
To capture images, Muybridge introduced a new technology.
You are going to consult the Wayback Machine. This is a website archive that takes snapshots of websites and stores them. It also publishes analogue sources that have been digitised. By clicking on this link you will retrieve a digital copy of an illustration of Muybridge’s pioneering work in 1878: his experiment with the horse Sally Gardner.
Consult the document, using the + sign if the letters are too small. Note down the name of the device for which Muybridge obtained a patent in your template.
Consult the digital copy of another relevant contemporary source, the catalogue of an exhibition on Muybridge held at Stanford University Museum of Art in 1972. It was digitised and published online by the Wayback Machine/Internet Archive in 2012, with the support of the Digital Library Project. Although the document is a catalogue of an exhibition, it consists only of texts that have been processed with optical character recognition. The most likely reason for not including the images is copyright issues. The digitised text can be searched by using the function “Ctrl F”. This means that you can directly trace the context of a name or term without first having to read the entire document. Usually it is enough to read what comes before and after the term. If that does not suffice, read the entire section of text to identify what kind of contribution it is (an essay, an interview, an article, a quote, a book chapter, etc.).
The digitised catalogue contains several contributions by experts. Let’s see whether you are able to use “Ctrl F” in an effective way. Answer the following questions:
Muybridge has been referred to as the father of the GIF, a very recent development related to digital technology. This comparison points to how existing principles are adapted and reused in new forms and raises the question of whether we can speak about an original work of art or innovation. The same applies of course with regard to historical sources.
An online video 6.24 min
A comment below a YouTube clip from ferociousgumby (you don’t have to watch the whole video)
A contest related to an exhibition (you only have to watch the first minute of each video)
A multidisciplinary performance 2.14 min
All the content that can be viewed through the links provided in assignment 1b has been published on the web at some point for a particular reason. Try to complete the template for your assignments with details about how the work inspired by Muybridge was published on the web: