Creativity Unleashed: A Week of Art Challenges, Eadweard Muybridge’s Horse in Motion, and AI Magic!

What a great week! The 100 days of art challenge has been good in so many ways. Difficult but good. I was able to get my gelli plate out and print quite a bit this week as well as spending considerable time in photoshop on various projects. Corel Painter on my mac mini has developed a challenge and will need to be re-installed...always a pain. In the traditional media studio I was able to get a few projects taken care of but it was cold in the studio so I was not as productive as I would have liked to have been. I pray you all had a great week living your best creative life as well. Here is what we have this week.

Eadweard Muybridge article. He is the man who opened the doors to the possibility of motion picture (mostly) I think it is interesting to recognize that it was really a serendipitous moment while going after something entirely different.
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The Horse in Motion Series: A Pioneer's Quest for Equine Truth
In the late 1870s, Eadweard Muybridge embarked on a photographic journey that would eventually challenge conventional wisdom and pave the way for future innovations, although his initial goal was far simpler. His endeavor was not to invent cinema, but rather to answer a fundamental question: Did all four hooves of a galloping horse ever leave the ground simultaneously? A conversation, then challenge and commission had been presented to him by Leland Stanford, a prominent railroad magnate and racehorse enthusiast who would later become the founder of Stanford University.

Muybridge was a seasoned professional photographer but like all of us creating art he faced resistance before concluding project. His journey was marked by unexpected diversions, including a hiatus to stand trial for the murder of his wife's lover, a charge of which he was ultimately acquitted on the grounds of "justifiable homicide."

"Abe Edgington", owned by Leland Stanford; driven by C. Marvin(?), trotting at a 2-24 gait over the Palo Alto track, 15th June, 1878

Another significant challenge was the need to develop the technology capable of capturing images in rapid succession. Cameras during that era typically still required a lengthy two seconds of exposure time obviously rendering them unsuitable for capturing the swift movements of a galloping horse. Muybridge ingeniously devised a system of trip wires linked to specialized mechanical shutters, each capable of capturing a photograph in a mere one one-thousandth of a second as the horse thundered down the path.

24-camera rig with tripwires

Eadweard Muybridge conducted a series of experiments at Stanford's horse farm in Palo Alto, California, yielding several sets of photographs, all bearing the title "The Horse in Motion." While these photographic series did not qualify as what we know today as "movies" due to the absence of projectors at the time, Muybridge's work did inspire the creation of a groundbreaking device: the zoopraxiscope. This apparatus featured a glass disc adorned with illustrations resembling the Horse in Motion photographs along its rim. An optical lantern projected these images onto a screen, creating a captivating illusion of motion. Spectators found it challenging to discern whether they were witnessing the actual moving scene or a projection.

Black-and-white picture of a colored zoopraxiscope disc, circa 1893 by Eadweard Muybridge and Erwin F. Faber

The identity of the jockeys featured in Muybridge's photographs remains, frustratingly, shrouded in mystery. Historian Phillip Prodger has noted that at least one of the jockeys in the Horse in Motion series, particularly in the Sallie Gardner running picture, may have been of African American descent, which was not uncommon, as many of the era's most skilled jockeys hailed from this community. However, due to the lack of historical records and the silhouetted nature of the earliest images, confirming their identities remains a formidable challenge even though many standard informational websites, including wikipedia credit the jockey in the original image to be one C. Marvin.

Of particular interest to me was the book that was published in conjunction with many of the projects. Here is an excerpt from wikipedia. "Stanford commissioned the book The Horse in Motion: as shown by Instantaneous Photography with a Study on Animal Mechanics founded on Anatomy and the Revelatins of the Camera in which is demonstrated The Theory of Quadrupedal Locomotion, written by his friend and physician J. D. B. Stillman; it was published by Osgood and Company. The book featured little true instantaneous photography; the majority of the 40 chronophotographic plates are rendered as black contours and 29 plates contain line drawings of Muybridge's photographic "foreshortenings" (views of the same instant from five different angles, much like what later became known as bullet time). Muybridge was not credited in the book, except noted as a Stanford employee and in a technical appendix based on an account he had written. As a result, Britain's Royal Society of Arts, which earlier had offered to finance further photographic studies by Muybridge of animal movement, withdrew the funding. His suit against Stanford to gain credit was dismissed out of court.

 
The book received very little attention, which disappointed Stanford and Stillman very much." It makes me really curious about the relationship between Stanford and Muybridge. Did they have a falling out of some sort? Why would Stanford, a man who was already prosperous not give credit to Muybridge?

1. "THE COMPLEAT EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE: CHRONOLOGY 1876–1880 (Also in 1878:)". Stephen Herbert. Retrieved January 5th, 2024.
2. Braun, Marta (January 4, 2024). Eadweard Muybridge. Reaktion Books. ISBN 978-1-78023-000-9.
3. "Sacramento Daily Union 18 June 1878 — California Digital Newspaper Collection". cdnc.ucr.edu. Retrieved January 4, 2023.
4. John Sanford (February 12, 2003). "Cantor exhibit showcases motion-study photography". Stanford Report. Retrieved January 4, 2023.

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It seems that Krea works best when given slightly blurred images like old family photos. For pictures that were extremely blurry, the results were somewhat mixed.

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