Movement in Italian Futurism: Video

link to new media explorations of sound and vision.
http://vimeo.com/user7421147

The title of these moving pictures at Vimeo, reference the modernist Italian art movement Futurism. For visual artists, a characteristic of Italian futurist painting and sculpture at the beginning of the 20th C, (the era of the avant gardes) was seeing industrial reality through speed.

On February 20th 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the first Futurist Manifesto. In the same year, Henry Ford put into operation the first assembly line in his car factory in Detroit. Marinetti the influential literary leader of the Italian Futurists spoke of acceleration, speed, the cult of the machine: these were to be the values emphasized by his Futurist Manifesto.

Up until the late 19thC ,and the beginning of the 20th C, the horse and cart were the dominant means to view the visible word, you could say this was the period of agrarian blur as opposed to the new faster optical insight from cars and trains. So for the first time speed of movement became an optical phenomena to express though art, e.g. Balla's painting, Dog on a Leash, with its depiction of rapid shaking of the lead, and Boccioni's object sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space- a representation of a blurred body moving through space. The term futurism offered an optimism of the machine age, the technological wonders of machinery both benign and violent.

Today we could think of jet aviation vistas as a phenomena of space, speed and time. Having an aesthetic beauty of being gods looking down over the landscape as a graphic canvas in time constantly reformatting itself through the hyper speed of the jet engine makes for extraordinary visual wonder.

My explorations here at Vimeo are to that optimism of technological wonder, with digital technology and the ubiquitous phone camera. Always on hand to catch time, bodies and objects at various rates of speed. I have been taking still photography but since chancing upon the video function of the phone camera, it has led me into moving/still photos. These video images are like an extension of the single shot only moving, the paradox is engaging. Hope you find so too.