A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N DÉtienne-Jules Marey : 1830 - 1904
Étienne-Jules Marey (b. 5 March 1830; d. 15 May 1904) started his career as an assistant surgeon in 1855, and specialised in human and animal physiology. In 1867 he became Professor of Natural History. He was the inventor of the "chronophotograph" (1888) from which modern cinematography was developed. Some in fact see Marey, rather than the Lumière brothers, as the true father of cine photography, though Marey's equipment had no transparent film, no perforation of film stock, and no claw to move the film along. Whereas Muybridge had used a number of cameras to study movement, Marey used only one, and the movements being recorded on one photographic plate. Characteristic of his pictures were his studies of the human in motion, where the subjects wore black suits with metal strips or white lines, as they passed in front of the black backdrops.
 Marey's 'Motion Capture' suit possibly worn here by his then assistant George Demenÿ
 Overexposed? image incorrectly? showing model as well as motion suit 'markers'
 'Correct' exposure showing only the motion suit 'markers'.
For those who think slow motion photography is relatively new, Marey also invented a slow motion camera in 1894, which took pictures at the rate of 700 per second ! Text: A History of Photography, by Robert Leggat Images: http://lila.elte.hu/cgi-bin/wrap/feher/ludwig
Étienne-Jules Marey (b. March 5, 1830, Beaune, Ff. d. May 15, 1904, Paris), French physiologist who invented the sphygmograph, an instrument for recording graphically the features of the pulse and variations in blood pressure. His basic instrument, with modifications, is still used today. Marey wrote extensively on the circulation of the blood, cholera, terrestrial and aerial locomotion, experimental physiology, and graphic methods in physiology. He also contributed to the development of the motion picture. To study the flight of birds, he invented a camera in 1882 with magazine plates that recorded a series of photographs; the pictures could be combined to represent movements. In 1894 he adapted the motion-picture camera to the microscope.
Étienne-Jules Marey, French physician, inventor, and photographer, noted for his contributions to experimental physiology and early cinematography. His doctoral dissertation of 1857 on the mechanical recording of the circulation of blood was followed by ten years of experimentation with various instruments used for monitoring the pulse and heart. He invented the odograph, similar to the odometer; the chronograph, an instrument for measuring time intervals; and "Marey's tambour", for noting subtle movements in human activity. Throughout his life he tried to simplify and standardize medical charting instruments so that they could be used without difficulty in clinical diagnostics. But Marey's greatest achievement was his use of photography to study movement. His chronophotographs (multiple exposures on single glass plates and on strips of film that passed automatically through a camera of his own design) had an important influence on both science and the arts and helped lay the foundation of motion pictures. Marey was born on Mar. 5, 1830, in Beaune, France. He studied medicine in Paris and became a member of the Academy of Medicine and the Academy of Sciences, of which he was made president in 1895. He held the chair of "Natural History of Organized Bodies" at the College de France from 1868 and published more than 150 scientific papers. For many years he was president of the French Photographic Society.
 Marey's 'Fusil Photographique' or Photographic Gun
It led to an interest in aerodynamics generally and in the 1890's Marey built a wind tunnel and made the first photographs to illustrate turbulence and to determine which shapes create the least resistance. His chronophotographs of men walking and running show that the human torso, straining for speed, follows an amazingly precise, cyclical pattern. Although they were made for scientific purposes, the chronophotographs are at the same time aesthetically appealing. Photographs of a threaded metal armature in motion done in the 1890's suggest the constructions of artists of the 1940's such as Naum Gabo. It was Marcel Duchamp who recognized most profoundly the implications of chronophotography for the artist, and he acknowledged that his Nude Descending a Staircase had been inspired by Marey. Almost all of the early 20th-century artists who were concerned with depicting movement and with finding new pictorial relationships found Marey's studies to be vital references. He died in Paris on May 15, 1904.
Source: The Electric Library
Étienne-Jules Marey, a French medical doctor, (1830-1904) wanted to make the world visible, and measurable. He had several inventions with respect to circulation, electrocardiography, respiration, muscle function. In his studies on locomotion he wished to generate a description of human motion, to depict the relationships in time and space between various body parts in a single representation. The early photographic procedures were not sensitive enough to record moving subjects, anything that moved produced blur on the silver plate. Marey invented a method - using a fixed photographic plate and a rotating, slotted-disk shutter - that allowed him to take multiple exposures on the same plate, and to reduce blur. However, even with this method, the problem of blur was not copletely solved. There was a trade-off between acuity in time and in space. If he increased the number of exposures (number of slots in the shutter), he got more pictures, therefore better temporal resolution, but, due to the superimpositions of the pictures (contour overlap) the spatial resolution was poor, and the images were blurred.
"In this method of photographic analysis the two elements of movement, time and space, cannot both be estimated in a perfect manner. Knowledge of positions the body occupies in space presumes that complete and distinct images are possessed; yet to have such images, a relatively long temporal interval must be had between two successive photographs. But if it is he notion of time one desires to bring to perfection, the only way of doing so is to greatly augument the frequency of images, and this forces each of them to be reduced to lines." Marey's solution to the problem was to chose the lines and points that gave the most information about the successive attitudes of the body. He dressed his subjects in black clothes, and placed shiny buttons on the joints that he thought were important. When he asked the subjects to walk in front of a dark background, the pictures finally came out the way he wanted them. All redundacies were removed, and the trajectories of the major points could clearly be seen within one representation.
Picturing Time by Marta Braun Étienne-Jules Marey was an inventor whose methods of recording movement revolutionized our way of visualizing time and motion. Best remembered for his chronophotography, Marey constructed a single-camera system that led the way to cinematography. Picturing Time, the first complete survey of Marey's work, investigates the far reaching effects of Marey's inventions on stream-of-consciousness literature, psychoanalysis, Bergsonian philosophy, and the art of cubists and futurists. Braun offers a fascinating look at how Marey's chronophotography was used to express the profound transformation in understanding and experiencing time that occurred in the late nineteenth century. Featuring 335 illustrations, Picturing Time includes many unpublished examples of Marey's chronophotographs and cinematic work. It also contains a complete bibliography of his writings and the first catalog of his films, photographic prints, and recently discovered negatives.
Marey, E.J. ANIMAL MECHANISM: A TREATISE ON TERRESTRIAL AND AERIAL LOCOMOTION. NY: D. Appleton and Co., 1874. First U.S. ed. Small 8vo., xvi, 283 pp., 117 wood-engraved illustrations, (12 pp.) adverts. Red cloth with border decorations in black. A fine, bright, near new copy. Chapter four deals with the paces of the horse and explains Marey's methods of research. It was one of Marey's published attitudes of the horse which led Gov. Leland Stanford of California to commission Muybridge to do his epoch making work of the movement of the horse.(12138) Source: http://www.cahanbooks.com/phmono9a.html Marey, Etienne Jules. PHYSIOLOGIE DU MOUVEMENT. LE VOL DES OISEAUX. Paris: G. Masson, 1890. First ed. 8vo., xvi, 394 pp., 1 photographic plate and 164 illustrations in the text. Gilt-stamped morocco-backed marbled boards. A fine copy. TRUTHFUL LENS #ll3 "... along with the researches of Muybridge, proved one of the important steps towards cinematography, many feel Marey to be the creator of animated photography."(988) Source: http://www.cahanbooks.com/phmono9a.html [MAREY] Braun, Marta. PICTURING TIME: THE WORK OF ETIENNE-JULES MAREY (1830-1904). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. First ed. 4to., xx, 450 pp., 184 b&w plates from photographs, drawings, etc. Fine, as new in dw. The first complete overview of the work of Marey, the inventor of chronophotography, the single-camera system for recording motion in precise phases on a single photographic plate.(15925) Source: http://www.cahanbooks.com/phmono9a.html
Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904): Inventor of first movie camera Date: 04-02-1999 :: Pg: 26 :: Col: d Étienne-Jules Marey was born on March 5, 1830 at Beaune, in the wine-producing district of France. On the advice of his father, a wine merchant, Marey went to Paris to study medicine. He combined a knowledge of medicine with a love of mechanics. This combination proved fruitful, for he invented, a number of scientific devices for recording, physiological movements in animals and human beings otherwise invisible to the eye. His first measuring machine named the `Sphygmograph' counted human pulse beats and recorded them on a revolving smoked glass disc. He thus showed that attention to mechanical detail could produce accurate physiological measurements like pulse beats. The next instrument `Kymograph' that he developed was for the transmission of animal movements from their site of origin. He devised a small capsule covered with a rubber membrare, from which a small rubber pipe transmitted variations in air measure to the moving needle on the paper recorder of the kymograph. With this ingenious machine, he measured the wing movements of bees and pigeons, and the leg movements of horses and men. Marey heard of the work of Eadweard Muybridge an English professional photographer: so he invited the latter in 1861 to give a demonstration to the scientists at Paris. Marey immediately saw, from Muybridge's results, the ideal, inertialess transmission and recording technique in photography. Using a rotating photographic glass plate, he introduced his `photographic gun' which took twelve consecutive pictures per second. The images, the size of a postage stamp, were arranged round the edge of a revolving circular photographic plate, which was a development of the technique used a decade earlier by the astronomer Pierre-Cesar Jules Janssen to capture the movement of stars. Jansen's apparatus made only one exposure every 70 seconds and could hardly produce the illusion of movement. It was the advent of the dry photographic plate in 1880 which made possible Marey's shorter exposures. The next innovation which enabled accurate scientific study of movement was his final solution and led to the first modern movie camera. It employed a silver bromide emulsion on a paper ribbon, which was brought intermittently to rest behind a lens and obscured by a rotating shutter while moving forward for the next exposure.With the gelatin-based film that George Eastman introduced in 1885, Marey obtained 60 in ages per second each 9 cm x 9 cm. These were truly the first modern cinematography films. With this type of camera, Marey not only recorded a wide variety of animal and human movements but laid the foundations for all subsequent cinematography. He used high speed technique to slow down rapid movements and invented the reverse-technique, time- lapse, to speed up slow movements. Marey acknowledged that his innovations were the practical extension of the inventions of Jansen (1824-1907) and Muybridge (1830-1904) to meet the split-second accuracy which they sought. He published his results freely. Marey served in the College de France as a Professor of Medicine from 1870 until his death (May 15, 1904). In 1898 the ``Institut Marey'' was founded in Paris with assistance from the French Government, the city of Paris and the Royal Society, London. His colleagues and students continued his work for many years.(The Illustrated Science and Invention Encyclopaedia, Pubd. by H.S. Stuttman Co., New York, 1976). R. Parthasarathy Source: http://www.webpage.com/hindu/daily/990204/08/08040003.htm
The Human Motor http://access.tucson.org/~michael/hm_intro.html
Building better Humans To Fall Standing Exhibition essay for Rebecca Cummins' (c) 1993 Paul De Marinis The central and interactive element of To Fall Standing is the video machine gun. Here, Rebecca Cummins makes deliberate reference to Etienne Jules Marey's famous machine-gun camera, widely accepted as being the direct precursor of the cinematograph. Marey designed this device in 1882 to assist in his studies of the dynamics of bird wings in flight and later employed it to chronophotographic studies of male athletes(1). His device, based on an earlier gun-camera designed by the astronomer Pierre-Cesar Jules Janssen to record sequential images of Venus's solar transit, was capable of recording 12 frames per second with an exposure time of 1/720 of a second. The fact that the renowned scientist Marey cast his experimental apparatus into the form of a weapon of violence cannot help but make us wonder: how, in a few decades, did the photographic apparatus evolve from the camera obscura - a roomy and passive receptacle for the faint traces of light - into a bizarre phallic weapon without a projectile ? We could search for exclusively practical reasons for the design. It's easy to forget, in this point-and-shoot era, that before celluloid film and George Eastman's Kodak(ca. 1890) , the act of positioning the photographic apparatus vis-a-vis the subject required staring at an upside down image on ground glass under a black velvet hood. To carry out the time-motion studies Marey wanted with requisite speed and accuracy, he needed a mechanism which could move a single plate into successive positions while stopping it long enough to record the image. Among repetitive start-and-stop technologies available at the time, the machine-gun, as designed by Gatling and refined by Maxim, offered a well designed solution. In addition, Marey, as Janssen before him, needed to track fast moving objects with a long focal length lens, suggesting both a long barrel-like lens mount and an apparatus that was easy to point. Although these research requisites could suggest a machine gun, some gadget that fused the elements of a telescope and a clock might have been equally plausible. The profound connections between warfare and cinema have been exhaustively examined by Virilio (2). We cannot ignore the fraternity Marey's device shares with contemporaneous developments in the technologies of imaging, identification and localization on the one hand, and the technologies of warfare and execution, on the other. Cameras carried by pigeons were proposed as surveillance devices to cover territory invisible to soldiers in balloons using telescopes. The identification, trial and conviction of the leaders of the Paris Commune was carried out on the basis of photographic evidence gathered from souvenir snapshots taken during the first triumphant days of that uprising. The progress from these early applications to present day technologies of surveillance, tracking, sensor-fusion and automated firepower appears as an unbroken continuum. Without denying either the practical design basis or the psycho-social firmament surrounding Marey's cinematic machine gun, it may be of additional interest to view it within a context of a class of inventions that can only be thought of as chimeras. Jonathan Crary has discussed in detail the profound transformations that ideas of vision and perception underwent during the 19th century (3). A glance at the procession of apparatuses Victorian inventors devised to make flesh these new notions discloses a legion of phylogenetic monstrosities. Derby hat cameras, vest pocket cameras, silk flower cameras, cameras inside canes, accordion cameras, etc. ad absurdum. As MacLuhan observed that each new medium incorporates as its content the previous medium, so may we infer that new media will inevitably generate chimeras. While some of these teratogenic spore were undoubtedly whimsical creations of dilettantes, Marey's sport of nature has borne much credible scion. To Fall Standing updates and elaborates the invention of Marey to create an interactive experience in which each viewer takes turns at being observer or observed, hunter or quarry, inside or outside of realtime. It also places this experience within a context reminiscent of the shooting gallery of a carnival. Travelling sideshows, devoid of any central spectacle, were the original purveyors of natural chimeras, and the point of conception of many more (4). Cummins allows us to shoot at each other, that we may each visually experience our own death and reanimation at the hand of our companions. This leap from realtime into analytic time forces ourbodies to participate in the creation of a chimera of life and death, time and space, of self and other. To Fall Standing helps to reveal the tangle of one-way ties and mechanisms at work constructing and unmaking the individual within "the regime of the brother."(5)
(c) 1993 Paul DeMarinis
(2) Paul Virilio, War and Cinema - The Logistics of Perception, Verso, London, 1984
(3) Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer, MIT Press, 1991
(4) The video-game was conceived by the founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell, during years spent working in carnivals. Steven T. Mayer, personal communication
(5) Juliet Flower MacCannell, "The Regime of the Brother", Routledge, 1999
also see... Photography of the invisible
Musée des arts et métiers, La revue N°ree;25, december 1998
and last but by no means least, also see some wonderful re-animations of Marey 's work by Charl Lucassen
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