The Virtual Step

Virtual Reality enables the audience the ability to not only witness an artists work, but to visually engage into the work itself. Everything seen in the computer is (in a sense) is part of the virtual universe. The term is used for a three-denominational experience in which the user can 'step' into the virtual environment, with the use of specialized equipment such as body suits, eye covers, and gloves.

Since 1990, The Legible City made my Jeffery Shaw, allows an individual to explore a virtual world by simply riding a mounted bicycle. The viewer is expected to encounter buildings, signs, roadways, and more along the expedition. The work was said to predict what the future may hold for this line technology as progressing forward. People are said to become more familiar with the concepts of virtual reality, as much as they are now with modern television, telephones, computers, tablets, and other means of modern technology. We are already seeing this now with the introduction of virtual reality games that have recently been provided to the common public.

The Cave in 1992 was a virtual environment of stenographic computer graphics which interacts with the movements of the user equipped with stereo glasses, this allows for users to spot other users present in the same area. For every second, images are played out through the projection.

So.So.So. Somebody, Somewhere, Sometime by Maurice Benayoun enables users with VR binoculars to enter an environment of panoramic spheres that display images of people engaging in various activities at different times. Users create a new reality based on the pre-existing one when focusing on elements from different scenarios.

Artist Micah Ganske made his attempt at AVR with his project; Ocular EVA Pod - Augmented VR Project. In addition to the virtual reality provided through the Ocelus Rift, the created a six-foot tall sculptural cockpit which was 3D printed. The user is meant to feel as if he/she was piloting through a virtual environment created by Ganske. The user finds that the cockpit is replaced virtually in an enclosed glass EVA vehicle. The airlock doors open as the pod enters space and finds one of Ganske's alternate projects, an assemblage of spacecraft sculptures combined in the form of a humanoid figure. His work revolves around what he refers to as "Asperational Technology" which details what our future could have been and what he believes could still be.

Cinematic Installation

Contemporary artists have worked to produce participatory works of art, which goes beyond the simple premises of computer interactions. Viewers of the work become an essential part of the works's fiction.

Bill Seaman created an interactive triptych installation titled Passage Set/ One Pulls Pivots on the Tip of the Tongue  shows three projections that have highlighted text for present viewers to press, doing so will display a spatial poem that reflects the layering or collision of psychological spaces which allows for sequential reading, much like reading a poem or staring at a painting.

Paul Garrin's White Devil revolves around more social issues. When walking through a neighborhood, a dog suddenly chases after the viewer, seemingly so.

Ken Feingold's Childhood/Hot and Cold Wars (the Appearance of Nature), touching the clock will flood the viewer with images that represent 1950-1960's culture. The flow of the images can be controlled by the viewer.

Galápagos by Karl Sims shows off multiple abstract shapes in the form of 'genetic' organisms which viewers can grow their own. The work was inspired by Charles Darwin's famous theory on Natural Selection. 

Sims had also explored this concept through his other work, like Evolved Virtual Creatures, Evolution Simulation, 1994.

Holography

The very idea of art made from holograms would often be thought of something found out of science fiction.  But as artists work on exploring and expanding on three denominational forms to this day, the idea has never been so far fetched as one might think (speaking for one's self).

Holography in general, is the science of producing holograms, illusions performed from a light field, rather than images projected through a lens. It requires the use of a laser in order to illuminate the subject matter of a given object.

The holographic method was first invented by Hungarian-British physicist Gábor Dénes, who received a  Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971 for his breakthrough.

Dieter Jung was a German artist known for working with holographic imagery. He developed a projected form of text which he titled BIBI BEI BOB, in 1987.

The National Polytechnic Museum of Sofia displays a self portrait, to whom it is unknown.

Holograms are more commonly found placed on credit/debit cards which are added as security features, they are applied so that they can not be removed as easily as they provide identity for the card's brand.

These images show two parts of a single hologram of a mouse as a means to reveal different angels of a projected object.

Work from the hard drive

Once the computer was made accessible by the common people, new forms of art work was introduced to the digital media. The calculative machines were used as a primary tool to create works that were in some ways futuristic by appearance.

Computer art, however, was not entirely met with positive feedback, as most works of computer art was left without credit (from well known artists) due to an anti-technology sentiment from counter-culturalists of the 1960s-1970s.

Lillian Schwartz's Pixillation was an image made entirely out of pixels, consisting of abstract imagery.

John Whitney's Catalog was a short film made by using outdated military computer equipment.

William Letham's The Evolution of Form is a series of complex images of three denominational objects which are "sculpted" by the computer.

Generation of Computer Imagery

CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) has forever changed the way cinema has incorporated special effects. It's often rare to view a film of today's era without some influence in digital enhancements. Some people have feared that CGI may one day replace physical actors and environments all together, like in Rober Zemeckis's 2004 film, The Polar Express were every character was animated through motion capture.

The first ever CGI rendered character to at least express emotion as a believable entity, appeared on Young Sherlock Holmes in 1985 known as the Stained Glass Knight. Lucasfilm created the first "photorealistic" computer generated character, within 10 seconds of screen time.

Rise of Digital Filmography

"Cinema has become an art of video, rather than video art." Directors such as Steven Spielberg and Jean LucGodard are recognized as new-media digital artists. Around the time of the twentieth century, films have been heavily altered by digital special effects, such as the kind seen in Spielberg's classic: Jurassic Park in 1993. In the film, live actors would often be seen interacting with CGI models such as the Tyrannosaurus Rex in the films most famous scene.

New-age cimina is said to consist of illustrations that are multi-screen, multi-user, panoramic, dome-projected, and nonlocal. Isaac Julian explored these concepts through his works:

The Long Road to Mazatlán (1999)

 Paradise Omeros (2003)

Baltimore (2004)

These works were designed to embrace both the issues of racial and class identity, and the history/ theory of film including painting, choreography, and the psychology of memory. Each work is projected through multiple  screens in a filmed environment of cinematic sophistication.

Dawn of the Digital

The uprising of digital technology was unstoppable, and widely popular among artists with new and expansive opportunities. Once an image, language, ect was included into a computer, it could be altered in various ways.

Scanned work like the one from Lillian Schwartz Mona/Leo that shows a split image between Leonardo Da Vinci famous work; Mona Lisa, with a pic of a self portrait for the other half. 

Jean-Peirre Yvaral had also tweaked into Da Vinci's work by reconstructing the Mona Lisa into Synthesized Mona Lisa. 

Victor Burgin's Angelus Novus is a triptych of digital prints where the central piece shows a woman altered by the contrasts and exposure to lighting effects. From each side reveals bombs dropping from planes during World War II. Burgin intended for the viewers to see the 'angel' looking outward from the center of the piece, with her wings being flanked from each side. It is somewhat meant to only appear this way.

Digital Dilemma

At its time, no other text grasps in developing a language addressing issues withing the art age of technology more than Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Benjamin's essay resolves around cultural criticism that proposes the devaluation of a work of art is consequent to its mechanical reproduction. Technology raised issues of authorship and the uniqueness of the art object whose 'aura; was lost in reproduction. It is debatable weather or not art still had retained its value once it's manufactured in a certain sense. Instantly, this reminds me of the "kitsch" term used by Clement Greenburg, who believed modern art at the time was tied more to mass production, and was not "genuine culture," as he would put it. Kitsch as how Greenburg had seen it, was art made simply for art's sake, and nothing else. A similar relationship can be seen on Benjamin's essay, discussing the issues with mass produced art.

Identities

Video artists have used their installations for deepening the examinations of the self. Video installations were designed to elaborate on the individuals who viewed the images themselves. The camera for instance was a tool created to conduct real-time images the self. Installations had the ability to do this with the addition of adding an alternately designed environment, thus executing an encompassing view. It also grants the viewers a sense of being included into the work itself, in a literal viewpoint.

Adrian Piper's What It's Like, What It Is #3 invites people into the work with screen projections of racial stereotypes that audinace members interact with as the projected individuals challenge their presumptions and prejudices. Out of the Corner consists of seventeen monitors and photographs, doing so involves the audinace in once again interacting with ethnic stereotypes whom address the audience with trivial questions.

Moving into theatrical performances once more, Lovers by Teiji Furuhashi has naked bodies perform aerobic activities while interacting with the audience. Voices murmur as bodies appear from the darkness as they confront the viewer, only to fall back into the void, with the shadow of AIDS hovering over the installation.

They Lyrical

Poetic ruminations were incorporated into installations by artists such as Steina Vasulka, who produced Orka in 1997. The installation reveals several strokes of birds passing by on screen, fallowed by a sequence of burning lava, and ocean waves. It expresses a motion that runs counter to the laws of physics as well for "frame-bound images," as described by Romaeuropa Webfactory. Stenia's work is set to describe the roots of her personal mindset. Orka was intellectually designed to homage her place of birth.


Bill Viola's work is praised for his work having the greatest tendency towards lyrical art. It comes form his interests in exploring the spiritual side of things along with explorations of light and form. In his work Installation, vertical slabs of granite turn as mirrored projections controlled via computer show three sets of human bodies submerged in water. Once again reminding me of a work done my an artist once mentioned from an earlier presentation.

The Stopping Mind was an installation made by Viola that incorporated sound into the images. The four screen installation was set to preoccupy the passing of time, where the seemingly peaceful images are interrupted by sudden violent sounds to give the illusion that the march of time has halted.

The Political

Between the 1960s and 1970s, some artists had taken notice to arguments from art critics like Saint-Simon. Simon wanted to see artists apply political sensitivity into their work. Frank Gillette created his 1969 installation Wipe Cycle as a response to the critics urge. The installation is described to integrate the audience into the information, and enabled viewers to stand within the environment in order to make the viewers feel as if they are associated with information you would expect to see on headline news.

Irish Tapes in 1964 was a controversial installation by John Reilly and Stefan Moore designed to "bombard" the viewer with images of conflict in Northern Ireland. The installation includes several rare interviews with members of the Provisional IRA as well with individuals who suffered from unrelenting violence in Belfast (as mentioned via link).

Installation

Installation art; a sculptor-based genre of artworks that are usually designed to alter the perception of space and are often site-specific. Because of it's close associations with sculptor, installation art received more acceptance from critics whenever allowed to be showcased within a museum, perhaps this was so seeing how the concepts of sculptor was so familiarized among art critics of that time. Installation art also exploited a sense of time and space, since instillation often required the use of video projections, it also associated what is called time-based media which involves video, sound, and linear/nonlinear time frames.

Nam June Paik explored this concept through Electronic Superhighway in 1995, and Video Jungle in 1977.

Shigeko Kubota was known for incorporating historical art references into her work, such as Duchampiania: Nude Descending a Staircase, 1976, which is an obvious nod to one of Marcel Duchamp's more popular works. The physical structure of the piece resembles that of a staircase with each with a monitor projecting a visual within.

Floating Parallels

As said in the last paragraph for Chapter 2; video art had developed into a profound medium for expressing innovative and experimental narratives. It has since then been viewed as a newly established genre within the art world, one of several mediums. 

Coming into Chapter 2's conclusion, one artist's work reminded of a presentation that was held in class several weeks ago. It was when it mentioned Anna Gaskell, an American photographer who is best known for her "ellipital narrative" series, including her 1997 project; Floater. 

Reading about the contexts about Floater reminded me on the work of another artist, whom worked on several feminist projects including a nude woman tied to the bottom of the water floating still as the wave currents moved steadily. It is to much regret that I can not remember the artists name nor the title of the work I refer to. Reading on this has had me thought about comparing the two works as well as their meaning. 

Personal Narratives

Bill Viola experimented with videotape electronics in his 1973 project; Information, where he used a self-interrupting error to perform a sequence of images he organized remotely, such as the images shown below.

Viola believed that video is a personal medium that helped explore expressive thoughts and philosophies. He explored mystical concepts which heavily influenced his work, such as I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like in 1986.

 The video seeks into the connections to all living things, as well as a mystical journey into Visola's self-aware philosophy.

Shock Value

Some artists such as Ana Mandieta and Chris Burdan express their work through more extreme techniques. For example, In Mandieta's work during graduate training in the Intermedia Department mainly consisted of performances of her distorted in shards of glass, or imprinting her body on sheets of paper while coated with animal blood. All of this was part of a collection of videotapes she titled Body Tracks in 1974. 

Mandieta's work resolved around the visceral connections with her body and nature, Chris Burdan made his work intentionally to startle viewers with their vivid imaginary. In his work: Through the Night Softly  in 1973, Burdan is seen crawling on a floor of broken glass with all his limbs tied together. In 1973, he had his friends witness him nearly being lit on fire in his project Icarus. 

It is said that Burdan's shocking and risky intentions express psychological insights into his relationship with the art world.

Manipulation of the moving image

While working into the television medium, artists had also attempted to experiment more into the technology of the camera itself, creating new works of expressive imaginary that in turn would be usurped by mainstream media and advertising. Artists such as Ed Emshwiller, Dan Sandin, and Kieth Sonnier would all take part in manipulating the camerawork in order to create exotic photographic works of art. Sonnier used an old Scanimate to make image collages including Painted Foot:Black Light (1970), Color Wipe (1973), and Animation II (1974). These abstract shapes and colors portrayed on the screen act as a metaphor to properties of physical paintings seen in classical forms of art.

The husband-wife team that was Stenia and Woody Vasulka worked on projects such as Home and Golden Voyage, 1973, both were made through manipulating the colorizing and electronic imaginary methods used withing video functions.

Other related works include:

Woody Vasulka Art of Memory, 1987

Objects, 1978

Transformations

Inspired by this, artist Nam Jun Paik preformed a similar technique in his work through a device named The Paik/Abe Synthesizer, which was designed for manipulating video image and colorization. This would eventually produce one of his works: Butterfly, in 1986.

A New Medium

"Artists were free to let their imaginations run rampant" as written by Lucy Lippard. Ever since Marcel Duchamp's Fountain  the idea of what truly makes art "Art" has since them been challenged and redefined. To this day we no longer see it exclusively in the form of classical mediums like paintings of well illustrated prostrates or gorgeous landscapes. In a way it has become a more emotional medium, revolving less on how something looks and how it makes the beholder feel, or feel reminded of which. This concept was heavily implied with the performance arts of which would be orchestrated on stage, but by around 1960, ninety percent of people could view these events at home with the availability of home entertainment through television sets. As new media was being introduced to a wider audience, Marshal McLuhan published his book: Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects, which was designed to help explain to new generation on how media impacts their way of living.

Famous artists from the postmodernism era produced several works in the form of video art, such as Andy Warhol who worked on the series Factory Diaries: Paul Johnson, 1965 and Chinese Dinner on Couch, 1965, including Outer and Inner Space in 1965.

Nam June Paik created video related projects not for any commercial purposes, but more on personal expression. which is evident on Zen for Head, 1962. It was to enact La Monte Young's performance score; Draw a straight line and fallow it.

Products of Postmodernism

The mid 20th century was the era where postmodernism took place, which was an era that unlike modernism, focused less on the consents of constructing fully original and innovative ideas, and instead works on expanding concepts that  have been used before, while also containing the attitudes of skepticism and irony. This, of course, would influence the ideologies of performer artists as well as their work. For example, The Wooster Group would reanimate classic theatrical texts while infusing them with new media, and imply the chaotic context of contemporary global culture into the mix as seen in one of their stage projects, Jump Cut in 1997.

F@usto: Verson 3.0 1998, was a performance piece orchestrated by La Fura dels Baus, an international performance group in Barcelona. The performance was designed to showcase disturbing imagery designed to help illustrate the tale of a formal agreement between man and the devil.

Performance of the Feminists

As video recorded performances became a widespread phenomenon for new media artists, feminists had also taken interest in expressing their philosophies into the visual media. One such project was a multimedia performance depicting a graphic tableaux titled To Have No Power Is To Have Power, made by German artist Ulrike Rosenbach in 1978.

The image here was designed for the intention to "attempt in making feminist traditions through resistance to hegemonic representations of women."

Orlan (originally named Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte) was a french multimedia performance artist who would often alter her body through recordings of her surgical operations, by doing so she has made numerous self portraits of her many different appearances including the samples from below.

The Obscure work of Bruce Nauman

Coming back to artist Bruce Nauman, who made his work without the intention for any interactions with an audience, but more to expand on personal qualities, and presenting "live sculptures" using his own body.

One of his works that was showcased in page 49 of Rush's New Media art, describes Anthro/Socio (Rinde Facing Camera).

One of Nauman's work caught my interest in researching, that being the preformance video: Clown Torture. It is said that Nauman often portrayed clowns in his work as it invoked his interest for erratic human behavior and language. The video provided below shows him in some screens moving  his limbs vigorously in random directions while yelling and pleading for help.

Vector Triptych

My vector triptych portrayed some of my personal interests in life in an abstract point of view. from left to right, the letters start from K,S,and A for specific reasons. Each letter was modified in such a way that visually revealed certain aspects that I appreciate in experimenting with  art and how I view selected objects that play a major role in my lifestyle.

The first one started out as a K, and was originally set up in a way that looked like a star, I later changed this to look like what's supposed to resemble written scribbles that are commonly seen on sheets of paper. This was to invoke my interest in drawing by hand. The reason I went with a K was from my online nickname as Kazzy, and is the name I use when showcasing my artwork online. The color was set to a shade of green since I often use that color as my theme.

The S was of course, the initial for my last name, and the name used in my family. Where the K was shaped into harsher and jagged lines with grit (meant to reflect my own work), I made the S into rounder and softer lines. This represents a culmination of my families work in a united form. My mom was a painter and my dad works as a munition, the curved shapes and flowing nature of the shape shows the smoother and calmer nature of their work, in contrast to mine. The set color in mind was a shade of magenta since that is the color that has always come to mind when thinking about the family name.

Lastly, the A is an obscure case, as it represents our home, where our work and memories are made. A is the first of the 26 letters in our alphabet, to me, A is a letter that is often looked up to as a goal to reach, or a place to reach. After working at a long day at work or at school, home is then our destination, our top priority to reach. The colors were a mix of colors that represent the shades of the sky during an outstanding unset out our front porch.

The Art of ASCII

Born in 1966 in Blegrade, Vuk Ćosić was best known as one of the earliest pioneers of net art, or "internet art," which is digital mediums of art made primarily through the internet, rather than the traditionally being display in a museum much like classical works of art.

 Ćosić's most notable works of art mostly involved using software to convert regular images into full ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), that consists of simple characters such as zeros, exclamation points, percentages, commas, periods, ect. They act as the "pixels" of the image in order to successfully mimic the depth, shadows, and texture of the original image. Ćosić often tried to recreate scenes from multiple sources of popular visual media, including ASCII History of Moving Images which is a scene taken from Alfred Hitchcock's film, Psycho, as well as a fully animated scene from The Birds.

ASCII History of Moving Images

The Birds

Ćosić's emphasis on remaking entire scenes in ASCII indicates his interest into what gives art a "historical" aesthetic, as taken from his quote in Mark Tribe and Reena Jana's book New Media Art: “My works and experiments with moving ASCII... [are] carefully directed at their full uselessness from the viewpoint of everyday high tech and all its consequences. I try look into the past and continue the upgrading of some marginalized or forgotten technology.”

Another of Ćosić's related works; ASCII History of Art for the Blind was a specialized webpage that would read out each ASCII character verbally through an recording. 

Private Preformance

Artists such as Raushenberg would express their art publicly through performance theaters, by taking full advantage of technology through the use of projections in combination with actor's moment and gestures. This collaboration would soon bring artists and engineers to form the EAT community in 1967, intended on experimenting with art and technology. This group would soon produce unique works including Robert Whitman's Prune Flat.

Other artists, however, intended on keeping their work private, such as the American Painter Carolee Scheemann, as she conducted "private actions" including Eye Body in 1963, which were described as "bodily still lifes" that would anticipate body and performance art. It's a series of photographs where she wold apply herself with paint, glue, fur, feathers, garden snakes, glass, and plastic as she "re-created mythical goddess imagery, using her own body as the sculpture."

Eye Body,1963

Private media-based performances would later be preformed by multiple artists, including Bruce Nauman, who would preform his projects in isolation, such as Neon Templates of the Left Hand of the My Body Taken at Ten Inch Intervals in 1966, and From Hand to Mouth in 1967.

 Neon Templates of the Left Hand of the My Body Taken at Ten Inch Intervals, 1966

From Hand to Mouth,1967

Animatronic Beginnings and Comeback

At a certain time before the late 90’s, practical effects were used frequently in film production, but as soon as Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) was introduced into the media, it forever changed how special effects were incorporated. As CGI allowed for more creative freedom in designing landscapes or characters,  there has been a steady decline in the use of practical effects, such as puppets, stop-motion, and animatronics.

Animatronics on one hand weren’t established until the 17^th century in Pre-Industrial Revolution France. The first animatronics were made as miniature characters built within an advanced clock. When every hour struck, the characters would be animated by gears connected to time-keeping devices (as said in the Stan Winston School of Character Arts webpage).

 Modern animatronics weren't established until 1961 by Walt Disney when developing animated characters as entertainment for his films and theme parks. An animatronic of President Abraham Lincoln was accounted as the first functional human audio-animatronic developed for his theme park. 

Ironically, the Disney company would later return to using practical effects when obtaining the Star Wars licence from Lucasfilms. Videos on their YouTube channel go in further depth of how their fictional characters and creatures were animated using advanced remote-controlled skeletal framed technology to make their creations look as believable as possible, as shown in this video starting from 2;10 to 4;03, Thankfully there is still an appreciation and advancement in practical animatronics used to this day. 

The Preforming Artists

Performance is now a major subject for media, now that many artists began experimenting with film, visual art later translated to theater, audio, and video. Robert Rauschenberg was one of the earliest proponents of intermingling art and technology together, with the help from other artists, the presented Homage a New York in 1960. 

I took some inspiration to look into some of Rauschenberg's work, this video reveals his work in paintings, he was in some respects a painter and a sculptor. He would then work with John Cage and Merce Cunningham to work on his multimedia projects such as Variations V.

Duchamp's Arrival

While continuing the introduction from movement to fluxus, I am then brought to a familiar name, that being Marcel Duchamp. I remember Duchamp as an artist that was known for his work in the dada sub-movement during the postmodernism era. One of his most famous works in that era was a urinal piece titled Fountain, which became a controversial piece as it was often rejected by the committee, regardless that it had every right to be displayed as he paid the fee to do so.

But this time we see more of his work revolving around contemporary art, such as the Optical disc in 1925, and The Large Glass (the Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even) of 1915.

Motion was not out of the discussion yet, as artists who studied fluxus worked into new creative ways for film and video. Andy Warhol, who was another big name in the art community, known for his famous works in pop art, also took interest in film as he performed Kiss in 1963, and Eat in 1964.

The Art of Scanography

It’s incredible to discover how far one artist can go to prefect a new and unusual technique. Scanned art is a media I've rarely ever heard of until just recently in class when proposing a project that resolves around scanning objects. At first I would have figured one couldn't do much with scanners aside of placing objects on the top panel, but that all changed when the artist Maggie Taylor was brought up as an example. By my astonishment, her work oddly resembles more of classical paintings more so than a collage of scanned images merged together with the help of editing programs. I would have never believed it had if some stranger told me these images were taken from a scanner. 

These are all samples of Maggie Taylor's work, more can be seen on her webpage through this link. 

Self-Portrait and its meaning

The story behind my self-portrait showcases the mystery of what’s behind the mask, behind what I may appear to myself and others, a hidden figure encased in what is merely an image just for show. Notice how the illustrated portrait is notably darker in color and in theme in contrast to me peering through the door. The olive green color is prominent through the image, as homage to the similar colors of the walls in my house. The dark colors, including the unusual black eyes and messy hair add a grim theme to the portrait, as it represents my serious and dull side as I go about my everyday business through school, work, and other places that are out of my element. The photo of me is set to contrast to the illustrated image. I can be seen wearing a much more colorful shirt with patterns including the Fleur-de-lis on the shoulder. In a strange way I point upward as an unusual way of symbolizing “upward,” which is meant to further emphasize a more uplifting theme with the photo. Lastly, a lighting effect was added through the crack of the door, this was done to signify the joyfulness that is stored within oneself.

Code switching was the idea behind the image, a term I picked up back in Cultural Anthropology. It is the practice of alternating between two or more languages or behaviors in conversation, depending on the change of environment of the individual.

Moving Forward

Continuing the chapter, it further discusses the concepts of movement explored by artists as a new form of media in art. Film of the Avant –Grade Cinema was first developed by Thomas Edison with his assistant William Kennedy Laurie Dickson when experimenting with a phonograph that made images move in an animated fashion. This leads to the works of the director Georges Méliès, a great innovator of his time, directing multiple silent short films, including his most famous work: Le Voyage dans la Lune, which since then has been praised as a spectacle sensation. This was the beginning of what would be the dawn of cinema. After that time, Sergei Einstein was known to use various technological methods in filming his work, such as the The Battleship Potemkin of 1925. Moving through the 1920s, film and photography go hand-in-foot, as both mediums explore the concepts of movement. 

The first of a lost art

Stop-motion animation was at a certain point in history, a primary source of media for animation, whether in animated film or as a practical effect in live action media. For example, in the 1933 monster classic King Kong, a model was made using a metal skeleton coated with rabbit fur to make up a fully articulated stop-motion puppet animators would set in position and move frame by frame. The same concept is used in the animated shorts Wallace and Gromit; unlike in King Kong where the puppet was animated in correspondence to live actors, was fully animated, and allowed for more creative freedom.

Stop-motion animation in no way is a new form of media in today’s era. We rarely see it used in recent films. Aside from the animation company Laika that brought us films like Kubo and the Two Strings, or as an affect in Disney’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, revealing a brief shot using stop-motion animation.

The question left to wonder is when this style of animation was first introduced as a new form of media. Multiple sources on Google points to an animated short titled The Humpty Dumpty Circus.  The film was made in 1897 by director J. Stuart Blackton along with Albert E. Smith. As the title suggests, it featured a circus with acrobats and animals which according to Smith, were actually his daughter’s circus dolls. There is no actual recording of the film to be found, nor are there any recorded details explaining what happened to the film. Only a few images of the film exist.

One other early example of stop motion animation heavily used in film, was the 1925 silent film The Lost World, animated by Willis O'Brien. 

Frame by Frame

The introduction to Michael Rush’s New Media in Art reflects upon the branching of classical printed art forms to technological mediums which allowed artists to experiment within the concepts of time and space, which lead to the influence of time-based media. For years it’s been a substantial a basis for entertainment and advertising in modern society. Animation, audio, video, and film are all products to “time art,” revolving especially around motion. Many painters and photographers have experimented with the concepts of motion through various mediums, for example, the painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash by Giacomo Balla explores the vibrant actions of a walking individual with their dog  across a path.

 Edweard Muybridge had explored movement by an assemblage of photographs which line up in a linear direction, showcasing the motion of the subject within the image. The book demonstrates by showing two of Muybridge’s work; Decending Stairs and Turning Around, and Studies in Animal Locomotion.

Etienne Jules Marey worked with more than several other examples of motion-based imagery, aside from the book’s provided example, Gymnast Jumping over a Chair, Marey had worked on other examples prior to which, including one of a flying pelican in 1882. He, along with other artist discovered new possible techniques to record phases of movements collaborated in a single image. 

Other examples relating to, but not showcased in the text include a 400 year-old mural in an Egyptian burial sight discovered in the tomb of Khnumhotep at the Beni Hassan cemetery. The mural reveals segmented events in a wrestlers match, relating closely to Muybridge and Marey's work. 

Another abstract example, is an animated gif of a phenakistoscope disc created by Eadweard Muybridge in 1893.