Persistence of Vision- The Illusion of Motion in the Age of Muybridge
Lecture by Bernard Welt at the Corcoran College of Art + Design
This ridiculous display of animal cruelty was one of Thomas Edison’s early forays into filmmaking, shot and projected on his dually functioning camera/projector, the kinetoscope. Using this video, among others, Bernard Welt, professor of Arts and Humanities at the Corcoran College of Art + Design, showed the incredible breadth of development the film world experienced as an entrepreneurial, technological, and artistic medium in its first few decades. Using Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies of animal and human motion (currently on display at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C.) as a point of departure, Welt outlined the major historical moments in film’s nascence that lead to our current experience of the medium. The title of the lecture (persistence of vision) comes from the idea that the retina retains images for 1/20th of a second after it sees them, the basic function that allows the viewer to create the illusion of motion when pictures are displayed in rapid succession. Because in reality, the concept of a “motion picture” is sort of oxymoronic. Our mind simply cannot process the information it’s experiencing fast enough, so it strings them together, creating the illusion of motion.
I spoke with Professor Welt after the lecture, and asked him about his thoughts on the current 3-D phenomenon, which he dismissed as a fad. He noted that 3-D technology has been around since the 50’s and has never caught on, perhaps because the “illusion of depth” is simply not as mesmerizing as the “illusion of motion.”
Strangely enough, there was no mention during the lecture of Eadweard Muybridge’s gross misspelling of the name Edward.
