MOTION | SHORT HISTORY OF MOTION REPRESENTATION

Sequential Image of a galloping horse

The technology of photography was developed in the early 19th century, by a combination of several different technical discoveries, making possible the fixation of the image produced by the camera obscura phenomenon. Initially, the first photography methods would demand long hours of exposition, or even days, in order to produce one image. It was only in 1838 in France, after several technological improvements, that Louis Daguerre was able to take the first confirmed picture of a person, by a 10 minute exposition of a street in Paris. Luckily for him, there was a man having his boots polished for enough time in the same position to appear in the picture.

Parallely to the development of photography, in the mid-19th century, another observed phenomenon, the so called persistence of vision, made possible the invention of a few different devices that could create the illusion of moving pictures. Devices like the Zoetrope or the Phenakistoscope used drawings of people or animals in slightly different moments of movement, that when displayed after each other on the same place at a rapid rate would give the impression of motion.

Later, with more improvements in photography technology, these two initially separated inventions merged into what today is known as the process of filming. The basic idea behind it being that by registering several instances of an unfolding situation, it becomes possible to store and recreate the dimension of time and consequently movement. The quick success of cinema can be attributed to the moving picture's ability to store and depict a visual narrative and reproduce it many times. For that it became a powerful tool to the representation of dramatic arts.

As a representation tool for architecture, however, film has only in the recent years started to become more oftely used, mostly for its ability to show the operations and design decisions involved in the conception of an object, than for the ability of explaining the effects and results of a post-built occupation. In a way, the use of animation for the production of contemporary architectural documentation becomes merely an expansion of the diagram. Instead of taking advantage of the moving picture's narrative and phenomenological potential, architects tend to use it only as an aid for the explanation of spatial operations. It is only after a building is completed and it is filmed at a finished state, that its use and occupation are revealed. This only makes explicit the tendency of architects of thinking architecture first and foremost through spatial and geometric logics, rather than through the logics of use.