E.-J. Marey's visual rhetoric and the graphic decomposition of the body (original) (raw)
Related papers
Movement and Immobility: The Two Faces of Representation
Graphic Imprints, 2018
If images were invented to try and replicate human vision and freeze time, then representation seems to have a lot in common with the way a person uses his eyes while taking a walk or when he stops to rest. This paper examines whether it is possible to associate walking and standing still with the two basic representation methods in order to see if, in history, drawing with contour lines can be associated with movement, and luminist, chiaroscuro and coloured drawings with standing still and reflection. Actually this game of linking movement-line and idleness-colour/surface/light/matter is not new: probably rooted in antiquity, it has been taken into consideration in the last hundred and fifty years when it was approached by exploding representation limits and trying to put pieces together in a different context, where dimensions where added or reduced: let's think about Abbot's Flatland and of Dewdney's Planiverse. Both operations seem to be strictly linked to the course of non-euclidean geometries, which where indicating new horizons for geometry and representation science since Euclidean space was put under discussion. In fact, it doesn't look so uncommon to relate representation codes to the way we move in space and occupying space is not really far from an aesthetic experience. In his Walkscapes, Careri writes: "apart from being an action, walking is also a sign […]. The world becomes a vast aesthetic land, an enormous canvas on which we draw when we walk". Clearly, the aesthetics considered in this context involves the creation of space and architectures rather than representation. But if this distinction between full and empty spaces associated respectively either with being sedentary or with erratic wanderings holds true, then perhaps representation itself may be considered rooted in this duality. Even if we mean to limit our discussion to the dynamics of bodies in space, avoiding to afford dynamic representations, literature leads today to new and wider borders spacing from territory to fashion and the issue is not limited to representation but involves visual approaches in a broader meaning.
‘MOVE AS IF ALIVE’: The instability of movement in the early years of the kinematograph
The trope of life-like movement appeared frequently in early coverage on the kinematograph. This conference paper focuses at a newspaper article that appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune on April 4, 1897, by arguing that movement in relation to the moving pictures signified an entanglement with a broader notion of motion as part of modernity. The trope referred back to at least two paradigms, addressing both the mechanical-dynamic worldview and the post-mechanical, electromagnetic worldview. Subsequently, the paper argues that movement crossed machines, objects, and bodies, and involved the spectator with the spectacle.
Visual Guides and Bodily Metaphors: Understanding a Philosophical Text Through Prints. The case of the frontispieces from René Descartes’ Opera philosophica, 1664, Amsterdam, Janssonius & Weyerstraten. MA Thesis, Leiden University., 2022
This chapter analyzes the two engravings from R. Descartes' Opera philosophica (1664, Janssonius & Weyerstraten) from an embodied cognition standpoint. To do so, the two prints are treated as complex metaphors that are formed by multiple bodily metaphors which, ultimately, convey meaning to the viewer. Lastly, the aim is to see how the two can communicate and impact us in a manner that engages our embodied human condition.
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2020
The paper addresses an underexplored puzzle about pictorial representation, a puzzle about how depiction of movement is possible. One aim is to clarify what the puzzle is. It might seem to concern a conflict between the nature of static surfaces and the dynamic things that they can depict. But the real conflict generating the puzzle is between the pictorial mode of presentation and what can be seen in pictures. A second aim of the paper is to solve the puzzle. While many take it that depicting movement is to make visible something that has duration, I suggest that it is to make visible something atemporal.
Man-Machines and Embodiment: From Cartesian Physiology to Claude Bernard's 'Living Machine'
Embodiment, ed. J.E.H. Smith (Oxford Philosophical Concepts), 2017
A common and enduring early modern intuition is that materialists reduce organisms in general and human beings in particular to automata. Wasn't a famous book of the time entitled L'Homme-Machine? In fact, the machine is employed as an analogy, and there was a specifically materialist form of embodiment, in which the body is not reduced to an inanimate machine, but is conceived as an affective, flesh-and-blood entity. We discuss how mechanist and vitalist models of organism exist in a more complementary relation than hitherto imagined, with conceptions of embodiment resulting from experimental physiology. From La Mettrie to Bernard, mechanism, body and embodiment are constantly overlapping, modifying and overdetermining one another; embodiment came to be scientifically addressed under the successive figures of vie organique and then milieu intérieur, thereby overcoming the often lamented divide between scientific image and living experience.
Semiotic reflections on medieval and contemporary graphic representations of motion
Working paper presented at the History and Pedagogy of Mathematics Conference (HPM 2008), 14-18 July 2008, Mexico City, 2008
In this paper I will present an ongoing semiotic investigation of motion and some 14th century attempts at representing it in geometrical terms. The semiotic approach that I will follow focuses on the manner in which time, space and velocity were signified in certain historical periods. I take as my starting point the idea that the conceptualisation of motion and its key conceptual elements—speed, time and velocity— can only be understood within the scope of the epistemological configurations that make motion thinkable in a certain way. In other words, any attempt at investigating conceptualizations of time, speed, and velocity needs to take into account the cultural mental structures that underpin them. These cultural mental structures, or épistèmes, to use Michel Foucault’s term, are not mere spiritual or intellectual forms evolving on their own. They arise, acquire shape and evolve under the evolution of social practices, as well as their material conditions, forms of production and social relations. Thus, in the perspective that I am advocating here, to ask questions about time, speed and velocity is also to ask questions about the cultural and social conditions that made these theoretical constructs possible.
In his foreword to a military handbook published in 1899, physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey deplored the incorrect ways of walking that he saw in everyday city life: "We are the slaves of conventional aesthetics, both in regard to walking and to all other processes of life. This is because we have been taught since our childhood that to have a distinguished gait one must hold the chest straight, not move one's arms, and turn one's foot outward with an extended knee when putting it on the ground. Aesthetics are everywhere. Did we not see that during the past century the equerries made it their ideal to assemble their horses for the purpose of inducing them to execute movements that were considered elegant? They even went so far as to ridicule the rider who seemed to demand nothing more of his horse than the quickest possible arrival at his destination." 1 The yoke of "ridiculous" conventions imposed by the dictates of fashion was to be shaken off by the physiologist, who entered the fray with an arsenal of new machines:
This article argues that the kinematograph, at the time of its introduction (1896-1897), was a technology of movement before it was a method of representation. Drawing on (or, in conversation with) Tom Gunning's observations on the image of energy, I propose that the discourse around the early moving pictures signifies a mixture of two paradigms on movement: one mechanical-dynamic and one post-mechanical or energetic idea of movement. The multiple paradigms involved destabilized the understanding of the kinematograph. Therefore, in the conclusion, I offer possibility to rethink spectatorship in-between these paradigms on movement.