University of British Columbia s1

ETEC 540

University of British Columbia

Master of Educational Technology

ETEC 540

Assignment 3:

Magic images

By Dragana Kupres

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Magic images

1. Moving images - Freezing to move

Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase

created his “Act Walking Down the Stairs”,

influenced by photographic experiments done by

Eadweard Muybdrigde and Etienne-Jules Marey

( Kirtley, 2005) shows how technology influenced our

life and our perception of us and the world. The new perspective was well embraced in modern artistic circles at the beginning of the

20th century, but was introduced to the educational arena in the last decade of the 19th Century. (Witcombe, C. 2001).

Picture 1: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. Philadelphia Museum of Art,

What were these experiments about? To produce moving images - a movie, to realistically reproduce what we see with our own eyes, the world needed to be freeze in hundreds of a second. E.-J. Marey called it chronophotography – a name derived from the

Greek, meaning “inscription of time by light”. The world was freezed in time, only in order to bring it to another level, which is to inscribe the movement – the cinematography.

Marey was interested in the analysis of the movement. His goal was to recreate movement with various means – “by painting, with optical effects, through tricks with mirrors, by photography, and so on.” He “took his chronophotographs at great speed, up to 100 images per second, so that when projected the subjects appeared to move very slowly. In effect this

p. 2 / 8 ETEC 540 made the physiologist the inventor of slow-motion cinematography” (Cinematheque

Francaise, 2000).

Picture 2: E.J. Marey: Cyclist, Cinematheque Francaise

Reproduction and repetition emerge as vital characteristics of these early experiments, playing an extraordinary connecting role between oral and visual expression.

Picture 3: Self-portrait of Demeny

2. Between sending and receiving - Is the message exact or distorted?

Marey’s experimentation with chronophotography later influenced Dadaistic and surrealist artists (Cinematheque Francaise, 2000), who reflected on the process of creating a movie, rather then the product itself.

But what is the process between sending and receiving the message, or in this story, the image?

Claude E. Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication states that "the fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point, either exactly or approximately, a message selected at another point." (Shanon as cited in Wikipedia)

With the usage of optical machines as communication channels, from early optical toys such as magical lanterns to today’s digital movie theaters, the image needed to be manipulated, changed and distorted, in order to produce something that, at the end, we could call “real”, but what was in fact re-produced. A number of phenomenological questions emerge here: Was

p. 3 / 8 ETEC 540 the outcome really the same as its source? Was our way of looking at it exactly the same or different, distorted in some ways? Was the message exact or distorted? Was our perspective changed in some ways while looking at images with the help of optical machines?

3. Changing our perspective with optical machines

Optical effects were necessary to allow for the final effect, reproduced images or creation of illusion effects. The reproduction of the source as true as possible served early in education and scientific research, but was also present in entertainment. It was used for scientific movies, in research such as Marey’s research of human and animal locomotion, Marey and

Demeny’s study of workers for further training for specific trades, or for archeology education and research such as Underhill’s work in archeology. (Cinematheque Francaise,

2000; Harlan and Price 2004).

Optical effect were used with the goal to distort the image and

produce new effects, not previously contained in the original image,

such as smoke projection of ghosts in movie theaters, or production of

pure geometrical abstractions, such as Marey’s smoke pictures, where figures are obtained by movement of point and lines in front of a smoke wall.

Picture 4: Marey: Smoke trail

«He even succeeded in taking stereoscopic chronophotographs of a hyperboloid on which the image of an asymptotic cone had been superimposed; this effect opened up a whole new dimension in the field of photographic illusion» (Cinematheque Francaise, 2000).

The optical toys such as thaumatrope, zoetrope, praxinoscope, phenakistoscope or magic lantern helped us to change the way we look at things.

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Picture 5: The Instructional Phenakistoscope

Engravings, called vues d'optique, produced for looking through a convex lens were used to “heighten the strong lines of perspective and bright hues that characterized these prints, so that the viewer's perception of the scene's depth was enhanced, making it seem more three-dimensional and thus more lifelike” and “offering viewers an escape from their familiar surroundings, just as television, computers, and other boxed-and-lensed visual technology allow us glimpses of other places and people in contemporary life.” (The J. Paul Getty Trust, 2001).

4. Magic image and the 19th century agora

Optical machines introduced the new magic into looking at world using the images of the world. Magic lanterns were used in the late 19th Century in teaching such areas as Art History

(Witcombe, 2001), archeology (Harlan and Price 2004) and as a classroom aid at the beginning of the 20th Century, such as in teaching English (White, 1984).

The usage of magic lantern, a prototype for a slide projector, introduced photography into the public sphere:

“The introduction of lantern slides in 1849, ten years after the invention of

photography, allowed photographs to be viewed in an entirely new format.

As a transparent slide projected onto a surface, the photograph could be seen,

not only by individuals and small groups, but also by a substantial audience.

This new larger scale expanded the utility of photography, changing it from

an intimate medium to one that was appropriate to entertainment and

educational purposes.” (Frances Loeb Library, 1999).

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The visual form of reproduced images with the use of a magic lantern is

driving us back to the agora,

public space reserved for

interaction with others, in which it

connects the visual and oral

communication, as described by

Ong (Ong, 2002) in its presence in the public sphere.

Picture 6: A Magic Lantern Slide Lecture on St. Peter's Basilica, 1897.

(Image source: The New York Historical Society.)

The way in which the television is used, and not the medium itself, lead us back to our home in the private sphere. The Internet is challenging the Aristotle’s notion of public-private with

combination of both, being present in the world

sitting from in our home.

Picture 7: An aerial view of the Piazza del

Commune in Assisi, Italy. (Image courtesy of Prof. Julian Beinart.)

Finally, the multiple perspectives that are offered to us through literature (Giorgis and

Johnson, 2002) can be used for reflecting about new way optical machines allow us to look at the images: they are changing are perspectives, providing us with unique, visual and enhanced new perspectives about what we “already know and extend (our) knowledge through new ways of seeing familiar things” (Giorgis and Johnson, 2002).

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References

Giorgis C., Johnson, N. (2002). Multiple perspectives. Reading Teacher, 55, 5. International

Reading Association

Cinematheque Francaise (2000). Etienne-Jules Marey Website. Retrieved October 20 20005 from http://www.expo-marey.com/ANGLAIS/home.html

Frances Loeb Library (1999). American Landscape and architectural design, 1850-1920.

Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. Retrieved October 26

2005 from http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/mhsdhtml/aladhome.html.

Harlan, D., Price, M. (2004). The H.M.J. Underhill Archive: Internet Edition. Institute of

Archaeology, University of Oxford. Retrieved October 20 2005 from http://www.arch.ox.ac.uk/archives/underhill

Kirtley, C. (2005). Clinical Gait Analysis: Walking Art. University of Vienna. Retrieved

October 26 2005 from http://www.univie.ac.at/cga/art/modern.html

Ong, W.J. (2002). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World. London and New

York: Routledge. Taylor and Francis Group.

The J. Paul Getty Trust (2001). Devices of wonder. Retrieved from http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/devices/html/homepage.html).

White, G. (1984). From Magic Lanterns to Microcomputers: The Evolution of the Visual Aid in the English Classroom. The English Journal, 73, 3. National Council of Teachers of

English

Wikipedia. (2005). Information theory. Retrieved October 27 2005 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory

Witcombe C. (2001). Art History and Technology. Sweet Briar College Virginia. Retrieved

October 27 2005 from http://witcombe.sbc.edu/arth-technology/arth-technology5.html

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Photographs

Picture 1: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912). (Oil on canvas, 58 inches x 35 inches)

Philadelphia Museum of Art. Retrieved October 26 from http://www.univie.ac.at/cga/art/modern.html

Picture 2: Cinematheque Francaise (2000). Cyclist. Etienne-Jules Marey Website. Retrieved

October 20 2005 from http://www.expo-marey.com/ANGLAIS/home.html

Picture 3: Cinematheque Francaise (2000). Self-portrait of Demeny. Etienne-Jules Marey

Website. Retrieved October 20 2005 from http://www.expo- marey.com/ANGLAIS/home.html

Picture 4: Cinematheque Francaise (2000). Smoke Trail. Etienne-Jules Marey Website.

Retrieved October 20 2005 from http://www.expo-marey.com/ANGLAIS/home.html

Picture 5: Instructional phenakistope. Retrieved October 26 2005 from http://courses.ncssm.edu/gallery/collections/toys/animations/circles/circles.htm

Picture 6: A Magic Lantern Slide Lecture on St. Peter's Basilica. (1897). An illustration from the December 1897 catalogue of T. H. McAllister Company, Manufacturing Opticians, New

York Image source: The New York Historical Society. Retrieved October 26 2005 from http://witcombe.sbc.edu/arth-technology/arth-technology5.html

Picture 7: An aerial view of the Piazza del Commune in Assisi, Italy. (Image courtesy of Prof.

Julian Beinart.). Theory of City Form. MIT open courseware. Retrieved October 30 2005 from http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Architecture/4-241JSpring2004/CourseHome/index.htm

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