Please Take it & Re-use It : Muybridge’s Motion Studies at Work in Present-day Visual Culture

• This essay examines three instances where Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies have been referenced and reused in present-day visual culture—a scientific experiment that encoded a GIF of a galloping horse into bacterial DNA (2017); a project where multiple frames from the horse-in-motion series were tattooed onto eleven different people (2014); and an activist video that used images of animals from the series to argue for the urgency of species extinction and environmental catastrophe (2019). The author’s central argument is that, in addition to the more or less clearly stated intentions of this image-use, these transmediations of Muybridge’s historical photographic images also activate and extend questions and concerns from recent media theory: contributing to notions such as image ecology and image liveness, and proposing challenges to established distinctions between new/old media, still/moving images, and material/immaterial media qualities. A further suggestion is that their ability to carry out complex theoretical work relating to present-day media practices can help explain why these images have come to have such staying power in visual culture a century and a half after they were first made.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Konst (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Muybridge

Greta Thunberg

Image ecology

image circulation

appropriation

Aesthetics

estetik

konstvetenskap

Art History

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)