Page 175 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 175/206
Eadweard Muybridge: Zoopraxiscope Disks 1893.
Muybridge first developed version of his Zoopraxiscope in 1879, and so may justly claim the honour of being the first to invent a motion-picture projector - although his disks contained only 13 or so images. However over the next decade or so, he became thoroughly aware of the commercial potential of his device, invented on the cusp of Cinematography: "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." So states the Catalog for the large Muybridge exhibition at Tate Britain in 2010. This was a definitive show, mapping Muybridge's career and fascinating wild-west adventures, and more particularly detailing Muybridge's increasing interest in the illusion of motion pictures and their commercial potential around the 1880s and early 1890s. This is an excerpt from Muybridge's letter to Irwin Faber (in 1901): "I sold to Colt - as I think you know - all the sets of transparencies (mounted on large sheets of glass) from which the large gelatin negatives for printing were made, also several thousand (20 or 30,000) - plain unperforated zoopraxiscope cards; and some few hundreds of the coloured perforated discs - ready for use as a scientific toy (if I recollect right - you have a complete set of each - 50 of the former in a portfolio, and a dozen of the latter)."(Marta Braun: Animal Locomotion (p282) from Philip Brookman (ed): Eadward Muybridge, Tate Publishing 2010.”).
Taking his cue from earlier work (around 1832) by von Stampfer , and Joseph Plateau , Muybridge builds his hybrid-projector/disk-viewer – the Zoopraxiscope, in 1979, and utilises his sequential photographs to create hand-rendered and hand-coloured versions of Plateau’s Phenaskistiscope disks, over 70 zoopraxiscope disks were mass-printed onto 12 and 16 glass disks, and sold at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.
The first ‘art-science’ technology that impressed me at Art College was the rotary-demiscope made for Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Anémic Cinéma’ (1926), - an invention by Duchamp and Man Ray. The second was the wonderful Homage to New York (1961) Jean Tinguely’s auto-destructive sculptural-event/ happening, which I saw a film of around 1962-63. It was this convergence of science and technology, in an aesthetic new form that fascinated me - a convergence that was going to escalate enormously in the 1980s, as the digital-art field began to explode. It was as if - in the couple of decades before the digital art/media really took off - it was only the avant garde - and the counter-culture artists, and the network pioneers - who really understood what was happening, and where reacting to the cultural shift in their experimental work (in kinetics, scripted Happenings, Performance-Art, Fluxus events and publications, and what Gene Youngblood called Expanded Cinema (1970). This ebook is exploring this revolution, and the long-tail (stretching back to 1800) - which preceded it.