Revolutions in Space, Time and Image: Technology and Perception

However the world exists in itself, the world is understood through our experiences and perceptions of it. The 19th Century was particularly rich in new modalities of living and seeing human experience. Before 1800, all travel was through the use of shaped physical means: walking, riding animals, using sails to catch the wind. With the increased focus on the mechanical increase of production came successful attempts to harness and increase the power of nature through technology. Along with the developing of the manufacturing of cloth and metal goods, came the production of the harnessing of steam power for factories and then for propulsion, both over land by rail and over water by steamboat. This concentration of intensifying power led gradually but inevitably towards significant increase in the efficiency of travel from one point to another. In England, a journey from Oxford to London at a distance of 60 miles, took in traditional terms, two or three days by horsepower or four or five on foot. With the establishment of rail lines and steam power, the journey could be accomplished in less than a day. As travel increased in speed, so the perception of space and locale was significantly altered. The idea and the experience of spacial distance and the meaning of place was significantly changed by the new rapidity and observation of travel. This change in the mode of travel affected both the perception of space and the experience of time. The need for the predictability of travel schedules of trains, both for journeys and for commerce, led to a regularization of the measurement of time for comparison and control. Consequently, the traveler was induced to experience both distance and time under more regulated and standardized ways. The train schedule itself, objectifies and quantifies place, distance and time.

Earlier in the 1600s, lenses for sight, the telescope and the microscope forged a way of intensifying and increasing the visual investigation of the world. While visual art was exclusively done by hand, the discovery of spacial perspective in the Renaissance became a preoccupying interest for visual artists. One important tool for the artist to represent three-dimensional space in a two-dimensional medium, was the Camera Oscura where a lens was used to project a scene to be painted onto a standardized grid. The artist could then trace the outlines of the image as represented by the lens to create a more effective sense of space and depth. One of the goals of the study of the visual world, was to find a means to fix the image in the Camera Oscura for demonstration and further study. In 1827, Niecpe discovered the way of taking an image in a Camera Oscura, and burning it onto a metal plate that could be revealed and preserved through chemical processes. This was the first photograph. One central aspect of the Modern World to this very day, is the ability to take and fix visual images. While early processes were slow and cumbersome, early photography allowed for the documentation of place and person with an apparent objectivity and ability to convince hitherto unknown. At this moment in time, 2009, the photographing capabilities of the mobile phone is a distant but real descendent of those discoveries from the early 19th Century.

In terms of artistic expression, there is a powerful dialogue and even struggle, between the claims of realism and documentary power of the photograph and the expressive and artistic impulses of painting and drawing. From one point of view, the struggle between photograph and painting is a microcosm of the emergence of Modernism.

Just as the desire to fix the still image haunted artists from the Renaissance on, so the desire to find a way of capturing and reproducing motion continued to be a fundamental drive of Modern culture. Parallel to the process of the evolution of the captured image in photography, was the movement toward the mechanisms that could capture and reproduce the illusion of movement. Mechanical devices of slightly changing still photographs that could be rapidly changed, allowed for early attempts at the reproduction of motion. The form of the flip-book, which we still encounter, where slightly changing images follow one another as we flip the pages and catch a glimpse of a moving image, underlies both the perception and then the mechanical attainment of the ability to record and replay motion in the physical world.

By 1895, the first predictable mechanisms for recording and projecting motion, was achieved in Paris by the Lumiere Brothers. Their success was quickly replicated in America and elsewhere. The capturing and showing of moving images, involves a significant amount of technological sophistication, yet it stimulates a new intensity in visual imagination and desire. The famous early hit of the Lumiere Brothers in 1895, was the great event of the film called “Train Coming Into a Station”. The shear wonder, magic and even manipulation of the illusion to capture and show motion, made even the simplest daily events extraordinary. While a person might see a train coming to a station every day, to encounter the visual reproduction of that event through film caused a popular sensation as well as an entirely new way of apprehending the world. Early film revealed quickly the multiple nature of the reproduction of the physical world, the documentation of object, person and event on the one hand, and the ability to manipulate moving visual images through trickery and unexpected juxtaposition. For instance, you can photograph a chair that is empty, stop the camera, have a person come and sit on the chair, restart the camera, restart the camera and create the illusion that the person has appeared out of nowhere, magically on the film. Very early in the work of the magician and then filmmaker, Georges Melies, in 1897, the magical potential of film became immediately apparent. Melies’s films tell stories of fantastic and magical happenings through the magician’s manipulation of the mechanism of the camera and film itself. Melies’s, Voyage to the Moon (1902), is still famous for its entertaining and light-hearted treatment of science-fiction themes. This dialogue between film as document and film as fantasy, informs the history of cinema and a great deal of the spirit of Modernism.