MUYBRIDGE: THE EYE IN MOTION

All contemporary visual culture can be traced directly back to the work of Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), whose prolific and inspirational experiments in moving-image photography, animation and projection shattered the boundaries of how images and human bodies are perceived. Muybridgeâ€s work had a pivotal twentieth-century influence on artists such as Francis Bacon, but that workâ€s impact is only now being fully experienced in the era of digital culture. Muybridgeâ€s work is powered by an extreme obsessionality, excess and itinerancy that enabled him to negate all preconceptions and to re-conceptualise from zero the dynamics of corporeal and urban forms. Above all, Muybridge envisioned the origins of cinema, by creating a moving-image projector â€" the Zoopraxiscope â€" for his sequences of human and animal movement, and by constructing the first identifiably cinematic space for his images†projection to spectators. In this innovative and ground-breaking book, based on extensive primary research into Muybridgeâ€s personal archive and projection-devices, Stephen Barber analyses his work principally through the extraordinary medium of Muybridgeâ€s own Scrapbook: a multi-dimensional and unprecedented â€memory-bookâ€, created in the final years of his life, which illuminates both the preoccupations behind his role in cinemaâ€s origins, and his workâ€s seminal prefiguring of the digital world.

Dettagli