Page 146 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 146/206
Eadweard Muybridge: Dancer (Fancy) (plate 188 from Animal Locomotion 1887 + portrait of Muybridge 1899
Muybridge, along with the French scientist Etienne-Jules Marey, made the big breakthroughs in imaging (what we now call ‘motion-capture’) and analysing motion in the 1870s-1880. Muybridge’s serial images and Marey’s chrono-photographs (superimposed prints) were a bridge between still photography and the movies.
These beautiful images of a young woman performing in Muybridge’s ‘motion-capture’ studio in 1886-7, became an essential marker in the quest for a viable motion picture system. Muybridge was thoroughly aware of this potential aspect of his work – “Muybridge made zoopraxiscope discs from what he considered to be his best images, particularly of wild animals and birds on the wing (which he had finally succeeded in photographing at the zoo in August and September 1885); For his Zoopraxographic Hall at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, he published fifty images on paper discs that purchasers could colour and animate at home.”(Marta Braun: Animal Locomotion (p282) from Philip Brookman (ed): Eadweard Muybridge, Tate Publishing 2010.)