CHAPTER 6 — Visual Elements III: Kinematics
18-minute read
Change over time
For thousands of years, artists have used all kinds of images and media to depict the fourth dimension: time. In our upcoming readings on metaphors to cinema in Chapter 16, we will encounter how prehistoric people portray motion in paintings and carvings of animals. Trajan’s Column in Rome contains a triumphal narrative of a conquering hero in a bas-relief spiral that plays like a filmstrip. The Admonitions Scroll from the Song Dynasty era in China is another panel narrative. Depicting time and motion is a human impulse that permeates every era and culture.
Only with the development of cinema, however, did the expression of kinetics in art — change over time — achieve full flower in the late 19th Century. Cinema developed along with the invention of the airplane and the automobile. Meanwhile, the exploration of temporal relativity by Einstein and the climax of the Machine Age made time and motion a touchstone for Cubists, Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists. Interest in expressing the fourth dimension extends, logically, into the Digital Age. It finds a means of expression through HTML5 animation and the virtually infinite links among websites. Of course, digital modeling, rendering, and animation are a major piece of the puzzle.
In new media, what does it mean to express the fourth dimension, given the long history of artistic interest in doing so? Modeling can create a high-fidelity virtual world. Thus, it can express time and motion in any way that any media in the real world can.
Beyond Kandinsky: Kinematics
Related terms: Time | Motion
A Kinematic element exhibits the physical manifestation of change seen over time. It is the path of a volume in motion, a volume activated by internal or external phenomena. In classical physics, these phenomena include:
- Translation, moving position
- Rotation, spinning about an axis,
- Vibration, shifting scale or position in a rhythmic temporal pattern
These are changes of state, and change can only be understood in terms of time. In reference to time and motion in a graphic context:
Time and motion are closely related principles. Any word or image that moves functions both spatially and temporally. Motion is a kind of change, and change takes place in time. Time and motion are considerations for all design work, from a multipage printed book, whose pages follow each other in time, to animations for film and television, which have literal duration.
Motion can be implied as well as literal, however. Diagonal compositions suggest movement, while rectilinear arrangements appear static. Cropping a shape can suggest motion, as does a sinuous line or a pointed, triangular shape … .
Film is a visual art. Designers of motion graphics must think both like animators and filmmakers. A motion sequence is developed through a series of storyboards, which convey the main phases and movements of an animation.
— Lupton and Cole 2
The arrow of time
In physics, kinematics describes the motion of entities. Physicists describe the fourth dimension as time. We are limited in experiencing the arrow of time in one direction. Thus, it is difficult for us to perceive the dimensional realities of kinematic elements, except by analogy. For example, a mathematical illustration of a cube in four dimensions is the tesseract or hypercube. Its construction is almost impossible to visualize because it is a purely mathematical concept.
Nevertheless, the fourth dimension is essential when you are creating events. For example, you receive an invitation to a party. It’s at the corner of 1st Avenue and 2nd Street in an apartment on the 3rd floor at 4 pm. The invitation contains four coordinates. The numbers 1 and 2 reference horizontal coordinates on the city street grid. The number 3 is a vertical coordinate in the apartment building, and 4 indicating a temporal coordinate. Without that final coordinate, you might show up at the right place but at the wrong time.
We understand time as the fourth dimension, but we experience it differently from spatial dimensions. We experience space as whole cloth: a room we occupy reveals height, width, and depth to us all at once. But, at the scale we encounter the physical world in via our daily experience, we don’t see time as a totality. Rather, we recognize a past we can’t return to, a moment we call the present, and an unforeseeable future. Physicists call this phenomenon time-asymmetry. British astronomer Arthur Eddington coined the phrase “arrow of time” to succinctly describe our macroscopic experience of time as an asymmetrical one, moving only and constantly forward. Except for the ephemeral present, then, we describe the vast bulk of time in terms of memory for the past,anticipation for the future.
Memory and anticipation
In art, memory is codified in objects that serve as memorials. These focus on the memory of some individual, institution, or event important to the maintenance of culture. Much public art is concerned with this. One of the most engaging examples of this is Mnemonics by the team of Jones and Ginzel. Four hundred hollow, sealed glass blocks are placed at random locations in Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School. Each block contains a fragment of a culturally significant artifact described by an etching in the glass describing its contents. Rather than encountering a Mayan pyramid as a textbook abstraction, students encounter a stone fragment as a tangible, tactile reality to remember.
Renaissance artist Michelangelo understood that to depict a moment just before a significant act creates a high degree of dramatic tension in a work. His David sculpture shows a hero, gazing with a determined but uncertain look at the enemy, just before he lifts the sling off his back to cast the stone. In the Sistine Chapel mural panel depicting The Creation of Adam, the fingers of God and Adam are separated, suggesting a gap between creation and the moment depicted. Anticipation was a device he understood from the study of Classical works. The potential energy in Myron’s Discobolus can be appreciated in the wind-up just a moment before the release of the discus.
Linear time
Our view of the arrow of time is informed by our culture. In the West, time is largely regarded as a straight-line phenomenon, continually moving forward. We see expressions of linear time in the panel art of the Middle Ages. Sassetta’s Meeting of Saint Antonio and Saint Paul implies a linear development of time, depicting Saint Anthony as a dark-robed, haloed figure encountering events along his journey, finally meeting Saint Paul in the foreground. Work like this told biblical stories to a largely illiterate population. Our population is largely literate, but graphic novels and panel-based narratives such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus use a similar visual construct — the repeated, recognizable figure — to move a narrative forward in time.
Cyclical and parallel time
Many non-Western cultures view the arrow of time as non-linear, creating cyclic or parallel concepts of time. The Aztec calendar seen above encoded the cycles of time in a circle divided into quadrants representing prior incarnations of the universe, while the stark, geometric environment of the astronomical observatories known as Jantar Mantar, created during the Mughal period in India, takes its striking sculptural form from the cyclic celestial phenomena they are designed to record.
A view of time as a parallel, multivalent phenomenon is developed in Doug Aitkin’s large-scale video work Sleepwalkers, which is documented on the MOMA website. Five urban characters are chronicled through one day’s events, each projected at random on the facade of the museum, creating a sense of parallel action, flow, and movement in the courtyard space.
Motion
As beings rooted in time, we are hard-wired to observe, create, and respond to change over time in our environment. Change is revealed over time by our perception of motion. Observation and expression of motion as a function of change of position were greatly aided by the invention of photography, and several artists, including Edweard Muybridge and Thomas Eakins, used multiple cameras and/or multiple exposures on photographic plates to record sequential images. An homage to these kinds of images has been created by Peter Jansen in Human Motions sculptures, which he generates with 3D modeling.
Peter Jansen, Human Motions, 2007
Implied motion
Motion can itself be the subject or content of a work of art. The depiction of the Hindu god Shiva as Lord of the Dance uses a dynamic pose, visual repetition, and counterbalancing arms and legs in a composition reminiscent of the overlaid figures in Peter Jansen’s work above. Most obviously, the doubled arms function both as a suggestion of motion at the same time each hand has a symbolic significance, but other elements, such as the points of fire on the ring, symbolize the soul’s cycles of rebirth.
Simultenaety
Cubists like Juan Gris were fascinated by simultaneity — multiple events occurring within a single frame of reference. In Place Ravignan, we see the title of the newspaper Le Journal from at least 4 aspects, suggesting the dynamic motion of a spectator’s shifting point of view in relationship to the static object.
Suspension
Of the 20th-century artists obsessed with motion, perhaps no one explored the territory better than Marcel Duchamp. Where Cubism was fascinated with the changing point of view of the spectator, Duchamp reverses the equation and explores the changing position of the subject. He was certainly aware of the chrono-photography experiments of Eakins and Edweard Muybridge, inspiring Nude Descending a Staircase.
Continuing his interest in depicting implied motion, Duchamp creates The Large Glass. In the archive of his website Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp, Andrew Stafford notes, “The Large Glass depicts a chain reaction among abstract forces. That’s why Duchamp subtitled it “a delay in glass” — because it shows a sequence of interactions, suspended in time.” 3 Visit Stafford’s site to see his marvelous animations of the Glass, presented as if it were indeed kinetic — but you’ll need the Ruffle plug-in to do so. Duchamp eventually embraces the kinetic realm of actual motion, as we’ll see below.
Action and ritual
Cubism’s multiple points of view and shifting planes gave inspiration to other artists, including Sonia Delaunay, who enhanced the normally monochrome palette of early Cubism with the contrasting, visual push-pull of color. She develops multiple images of a couple dancing as a mash-up of Eakins’ superimposed exposures with a Chinese scroll narrative. Meanwhile, the Italian Futurists added the love of speed to Cubist motion. The human experience of motion had been fundamentally changed by the automobile and the airplane. Umberto Boccioni captures the spirit of the age in flamboyant bursts of energy.
Action Painting, a branch of Abstract Expressionism pioneered by Jackson Pollock, transforms the act of painting into the content of painting. Hans Namuth’s mesmerizing images of Pollock at work are almost as, and possibly more, interesting than the work itself. Action Painting records motion and presages Performance Art, turning the corner toward actual motion, as a means by which we can integrate motion into artistic expression.
Actual motion
Flags, kites, banners, and other man-made objects meant to be activated by the wind have existed since ancient times. With the advent of the Machine Age and the electric motor, artists began harnessing mechanical forces to create works whose forms don’t simply imply motion, but actually indulge in it. Fresh from leaving his “delay in glass” definitively unfinished, Duchamp mashes up fan motors and phonographic turntables in a series of optical illusion machines seen here. The rotating elements of these “sculptures” develop a reading of a space generated by motion.
Happening and performance
Sculptors like Naum Gabo and Jean Tinguely wished to divorce their work from traditional sculpture’s preoccupation with mass. Gabo creates the implication of form through rapid temporal repetition and distortion of a linear element, while Tinguely pioneers the hallmark chaos of Happenings and Performance in his self-destructing Homage to New York. He’s the grandfather of such post-apocalyptic artists as Peter Fischli and David Weiss.
Rare footage of Homage to New York in action
Mobiles
Although some of his early work used mechanics, Alexander Calder eschews the mechano-nightmare metaphors of Tinguely for a return to the most ancient kinetic art force — air motion — in his invention of the mobile. One of his most spectacular mobiles is Untitled at the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It moves with a silent grandeur. An amateur time-lapse video reveals the patterns of that motion.
Time-lapse video of Untitled in motion. The work responds to air convection currents in the atrium space of the National Gallery East Wing.
Illusion of motion
While Duchamp’s illusionistic works rely on motion to create a sense of space, many static optical illusions are created by a phenomenon known as anomalous motion. The effects of this are quite unsettling to some individuals. Less seizure-inducing is the illusion of motion generated by the cinema, which is covered in greater detail elsewhere in these readings. A similar illusion to that of cinema is created by animated light boards, used by advertising to get our attention. Jenny Holzer subverts their use by supplying her signature “truisms” in a famous installation at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The text seems to flow down the ramp wall, but this is an effect of lights carefully programmed to switch on and off in a pattern.
Force
Change comes through motion, but motion comes about by the application of a force to a body. Like motion, force can become the content of a work of art. The nature of that expression can change radically whether the force is seen as active or passive, internal or external. Because force is subject to physical laws, the 3D animating artist has to take care that the nature of the force being modeled is consistent with the motion seen. A kicked ball should interact with a foot. We achieve this by deforming and moving with the proper perception of acceleration in the right vector direction. Unless slapstick is the point, of course: the ball can stay stuck to the ground so the kicker trips over it. Even then, we must invent a set of physical laws to maintain consistency with such a kooky world.
Active vs. passive
Active force creates obvious spectacle and drama. We are familiar with it through action films and other popular entertainment. In art, we see expressions of it in Performance Art like that of Ant Farm in Media Burn. Ant Farm simultaneously celebrates and lampoons America’s love affair with the auto and television. This created a happening that got, not coincidentally, a lot of media coverage, which they documented in their hilarious video.
Excerpt from Ant Farm’s video documentary of Media Burn
Passive force introduces some agent of change other than the artist’s will to create the form of the work. In the 20th Century, events determined by chance operations became the hallmark of graphic works by Jean Arp and the musical work of John Cage. Cage introduced the use of I Ching coins to a more deterministically-minded West. He needed to reference Eastern cultures more willing to acknowledge the role of chance and divination in determining one’s fate.
Cage, Suite for Toy Piano
Here, Cage does not compose music. He rather composes a game that generates the musical composition — analogous to writing a code script. Keep this metaphor in mind when you begin working with scripting languages that automate functions for you.
Internal vs. external
Mechanical kinetic art applies a motor, the potential energy of a falling object, or other internally generated forces to create movement in other elements. In the work by Man Ray variously titled Indestructible Object or Object to be Destroyed, he uses a wind-up metronome spring to induce the mesmerizing motion of a single eye mounted to the counterweight. Once we turn the key, the object self-propels — try it yourself!
williamCromar, Infinitely Indestructible Object, 2018. The hammer is your cursor: tap the eye to stop, and tap the key to restart.
Man Ray’s object suggests spectator interaction, but you’ll never get to touch one in a museum (or see one move, for that matter, in a blatant curatorial misunderstanding of how to display such a work!). Increasingly over the last few decades, however, artists (and, more importantly, museums) have explored the territory of spectator interactivity.
Pioneer video installation artist Gary Hill uses motion sensors hidden in the labyrinth of Withershins to trigger video clips in response to the presence of the audience. The video clips make ambiguous and contradictory suggestions about where next to go in the labyrinth. This creates a back-and-forth dialog between the internal motion of the video and the external motion of the spectators changing the order of the clips.
Timelines and hierarchies
The kinds of time-and-motion phenomena we’ve been discussing are possible to generate through careful understanding and use of two important functions: the timeline usually featured at the bottom of the interface, and a hierarchy interface. The timeline allows the artist to generate a change of geometry location over time, and all of the manipulations of time possible in traditional animation and cinema are possible to create there. A hierarchy interface such as the Outliner in Maya makes it possible to develop hierarchies among objects so that we can maintain the proper motion of one element relative to another.
Time in cinema
We think of the cinema as the primary metaphor for working timelines and hierarchies in modeling. Chapter 16 will give you a full understanding of the role this major kinetic art form plays for animators.
Time manipulations
We generate the visual language of cinema largely through manipulations of temporal patterns. Animators stretch, compress, reverse, and cut up the arrow of time as a way of telling a story. These time manipulations are so effective because they map quite keenly on our psychological perception of time. We recognize a second or a minute as an objective, measurable unit of time, but the minute you spend on a roller-coaster is not quite the same minute you spend waiting at the bus stop. Cinematic flash-backs and other non-linear storytelling devices seem to work much like the way the brain does when it conjures up memories or pictures in the mind’s eye.
A technique known as time remapping is responsible for the familiar cinematic devices of time-lapse and slow-motion. Both devices reveal patterns that normal experience disguises, and both comport with psychological shifts in time perception based on the nature of our environmental input.
Compression
Slow-motion expands a time scale, remapping a shorter period so that it takes longer. Agent Smith in The Matrix can fire off three rounds from his semi-automatic pistol in less than a second, but remapping expands that into a dramatic 20-second display of Neo’s superhuman ability to dodge projectiles at “bullet time.”
Wachowski Brothers, The Matrix, 1999. “Bullet time” sequence using digitally manipulated ultra-slow motion footage.
Expansion
James Leng, Glowing Cities Under a Nighttime Sky, 2008.
Time-lapse is the opposite kind of time scaling: it remaps a longer time frame into a shorter one. This can achieve effects from the quite comic to the quite sublime. A profoundly beautiful example is seen in James Leng’s chronicle of his flight.
To achieve either of these effects in your Timeline, you need to do some arithmetic. Say you need to do a slo-mo manipulation of a man picking up a glass from a table; you observe such an action in real life and determine it takes 0.8 seconds to complete the action using the stopwatch on your mobile device. Assuming 30 frames per second (fps), how many frames would you need to expand the action into 12 seconds? Do the math: 0.8 seconds X 30 fps = 24 frames to complete the normal action. 12 seconds X 30 fps = 360 frames to expand the action. Therefore you’ll need to animate the action that normally takes 24 frames into 360 frames.
But it gets even more complex than that — recognizing that the arm motion is not a uniform velocity (that is, it starts slow, speeds up, and slows down again as it approaches the glass), you’ll need to perform keyframing that captures the subtleties of acceleration and deceleration that might go unnoticed in the real-time situation. Fortunately, tools such as the Graph Editor in Maya allow you to perform time expansion/contraction and slow-in/slow-out functions with relative ease. In animation studios like Pixar, they shoot slo-mo footage of live events to observe and model acceleration and deceleration.
Reversal
Time reversal, like compression/expansion, can reveal interesting patterns we don’t consider in everyday experience. David Macaulay, illustrator and author of The Way Things Work, created a compelling narrative that tells the story of how the Empire State Building was constructed, but it does so by carefully dismantling the structure. While in a post-911 world, Unbuilding has a few unintended ominous overtones, it is a clever and poetic way of illustrating a process that might otherwise come off dry as toast.
As a narrative arc in cinema, reverse time seems like it would be anti-climactic — the audience knows the outcome before the end, right? But one of the most daring suspense movies of all time used reversal as a major storytelling device. Memento along a timeline diagram that the authors used to concoct one of the most original screenplay ideas in motion picture history. The movie has since become part of the film-school canon, used to help students understand the difference between plot order (sujet) and story order (fabula) in the development of a screenplay.
n-Narratives: time and interactivity
Gaming and interactivity, hyperlinking, and social networking have all contributed to the idea of simultaneity of narrative. That is, given a world, there are n-number possible stories or outcomes that can occur within the confines of that world.
The Web
The Web has helped interactivity become a more common attribute of the art experience. Annette Weintraub developed an early example of a hypertext narrative whose arc is never the same from one viewer to the next. The spectator clicks on the images in The Mirror That Changes to reveal words, images, and sounds in a non-linear way, totally dependent on the external choices the audience makes to activate the work. Visit the site here — Ruffle plug-in required.
Narrative now becomes part of the spectator’s job, the artist acting more like a Cage-ian scripter of potential action. Using modeling and interactivity, Rui Filipe Antunes has created a digital metaphor for evolution in xTNZ, a virtual world that is a parable for Eden, the corruption of environment by our presence, and the possibility of a post-human or other-than-human world.
Rui Filipe Antunes, xTNZ, 1999
Gaming
Will Wright (the creator of classics like The Sims) developed Spore, another evolution metaphor, but this time taking on a universe, where gamers can interact with other gamers by bringing their created worlds together. As a game and online phenomenon, the Creature Creator has developed a following — so much so that Spore users have invented more species than occupy the Earth itself!
Code is poetry
We conclude our discussion of time and motion with the work of Marcus Wendt and Vera-Maria Glahn, who collectively go by the moniker FIELD. Visit their highly engaging website for a glimpse into their practice, which extends beyond the use of software to generate content into the generation of the software itself — a bit like Michelangelo creating his tools for sculpture. The philosophy of some digital artists asserts that the true nature of digital art practice exists in the writing of code, although this is a commitment that the more right-brained among us might resist. Do so at your peril — you don’t need to become a computer scientist, any more than a printmaker needs to become a chemist. But a printmaker wouldn’t get too far without a working knowledge of acid reactions.
FIELD, Interim Camp, 2008
- Klee, Paul. Pedagogical Sketchbook. Praeger. 7th ed. 1972. p. 30.[↩]
- upton, Ellen and Cole, Jennifer. Graphic Design: The New Basics. Princeton Architectural Press. 2008. p.20.[↩]
- Andrew Stafford, “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even — also known as The Large Glass (1923),” http://www.understandingduchamp.com/text.html[↩]