Abstract
This essay presents a cross-history of motion visualisation, especially in relation to the visualisation of human movement duration in time-based media. Our aim is to locate the object of study in a crossover discourse from chronophotography to photodynamism, which facilitates a number of discursive shifts (from analytical to nonanalytical, and from scientific to artistic visual experimentation). We argue that because chrono and dynamophotography remain unresolved fields in-between, they offer a distinct way of seeing (thinking) the body move, quite autonomous to cinematic vision (thinking), which has become congealed into a dominant disciplinary visual and academic discourse. Whilst presenting this debate as a kind of chronophotographic collection of visual histories, we present an ongoing entanglement between science and art that reaffirms the interdisciplinary and intermovemental character of chrono- and dynamic motion vision. In particular we address the impact of classical movement analysis and Etienne Jules Marey’s chronophotographic science on modern chronophotographic art (Duchamp) and Italian photodynamism. This complex historical crucible finally presents us with an enduring tradition of hybrid experimentalism in the visualization of the moving (dancing) body, which persists in digital contexts through increasingly palimpsestic, past and future-oriented work that combine chrono- and dynamophotographic visions.