Étienne Jules Marey

This is the catalog for a 2019 exhibition at the Radcliffe Institute featuring Dario Robleto's work on the nineteenth-century history of the pulse wave as a graphic expression of internal life. Robleto explores the profundity and confusion of this moment, when ineffable sensory and emotional experiences were first made visible as data. The essay pursues a deep investigation of just one of the waveforms on display: a single cerebral pulse wave recorded by Angelo Mosso and his subject Michele Bertino in Turin in 1877.

Both Eadweard Muybridge's and Étienne-Jules Marey's chronophotographic studies of the human body were undertaken as a purportedly scientific means of analysing movement. The perceived objectivity of these embodied representations of movement was effectively upheld by the supposed impartiality instituted by the camera. In recent years, many scholars have offered alternative readings of these photographs. One key aspect often highlighted is the encoding of gender, particularly evident in Muybridge's chronophotographs. However, rather than addressing the subject of these photographs-namely, movement-scholars tend to analyse the gendering of the body itself. On the other hand, given that in Marey's chronophotographs the corporeal body itself vanishes into an abstract pattern, the question of gender has been altogether neglected. This thesis follows from such scholarship that challenges the presumed objectivity of such studies, arguing that both Muybridge and Marey’s photographs evince the gendering of movement itself. By visually analysing these photographs in relation to the tradition of the nude, this comparative analysis highlights the way in which the gendered codes that historically informed artistic representations of the human body are echoed in the work of both chronophotographers. Moreover, it takes into account the circulation of the photographs within wider socio-cultural currents centered on the body in the late nineteenth century, and subsequently considers the broader historical ramifications of these projects. This thesis is therefore exemplary of revisionary approaches within the history of photography, and art historical scholarship more broadly.

Reseña del libro de Francisco Javier Frutos Esteban "La fascinación de la mirada. Los aparatos precinematográficos y sus posibilidades expresivas" (Valladolid, Junta de Castilla y León/Seminci, 1996).
La enorme importancia social, industrial y cultural alcanzada por el cine a lo largo de este siglo, trajo como consecuencia la teoría que ve en el aparato patentado por los Lumière el anhelado final de un proceso formado hasta entonces por un sinfín de ensayos más o menos insatisfactorios. Desde la linterna mágica hasta el kinetoscopio, pasando por el zootropo o el estereoscopio suelen aparecer como habitantes de un limbo que algunos dieron en llamar "infancia" del cine...

This chapter was published in 2006 in In Bryndis Snaebjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson, Nanoq: Flat-out and Bluesome, Blackdog Press,  pp. 25-46 ISBN 1-904772-39-0

It centres on a comparison between realist taxidermy (pioneered by Carl Akeley among others) and photography. Snaebjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson's contemporary art project, Nanoq: Flat-out and Bluesome, brings together these two means of representation.  In doing so, it makes vivid their common characteristics. Both photography and taxidermy are technologies of preservation and deal in the frozen moment. Both are, in semiotic terms, indexes; signs which have a direct connection to the things they stand for. The living lug the dead with them, sex suspends lover, outside the passing of time, and a stillness in motion characterises the photograph's odd relationship to its referent. This is the tragedy taxidermy shares with photography, since it is made from the corpse of that which it depicts. The 'truth-claim' of a taxidermied animal is stubborn even if its appearance is sometimes unconvincing. Its truthfulness rests not on the mediation of machines, or of physics and chemistry but on the fact that it is, residually but fundamentally, part-formed  from the animal itself. If taking a photograph was a sublimated murder according to Sontag, taxidermy owes its very existence to an act of violence or a death: its realism is deadly.

Holy Motors has been ascribed with multiple interpretations. Speculation about the meaning behind the film has emerged since its debut at the Cannes film festival, 2012. These revolve around the baffling storyline and the context technology holds in, not just cinema but, contemporary society. By shifting from genre to genre, Carax purposefully tries to confuse his audience: the French director protects his film from distinct definition with what appears to be a lack of narrative and, instead, creates a highly allegorical and illusory film. This seemingly irrelevant sequence is what makes the film so captivating and has scholars trying to dissect its illusive meaning.
The film won twenty-eight awards and gained sixty-seven nominations. Protagonist, and long-time collaborator of the director, Denis Lavant won four awards for ‘Best Actor’. At the Chicago International Film Festival, he won the award ‘for breathing life into a character who is alternately tragic, hilarious, shocking, profound, hideous, beautiful, wise - but always human - and, quite simply, unlike anything we've ever seen before’. The film can be interpreted in many different ways, but these facts cannot be repudiated. So, how did the tarnished director thwart early criticism with this ‘Island of Cinema’?
The inquisitive viewer might find Holy Motors leaves them questioning existence and the future of technology as machines are replaced just as much as people. In addition, the art of cinema is enveloped in this illustration of cinematography. Whether it provokes philosophical contemplation or not, the film is an extension of the cinematic universe, according to Carax. In essence, this dissertation seeks to broaden, as well as provide sufficient evidence to support, interpretation.

One of the oldest, and surely the most obsessive, topics in the history of photography is the relationship between art and photography. In the past, efforts were made to prove that artists had used photographic models, the aim at the time being to ennoble the medium of photography. The 'influence' it exerted on art was to turn photography itself into an art. In contrast to this theoretically unreflective and unfruitful practice, an approach will be outlined here which shifts the focus of attention to the fundamentally historcial conditions that made the encounter between the two media possible in the first place.
Even though Muybridge's photograph series were not primarily intended as models for artists, they were bound to unleash a fierce debate among representatives of a painting bent on exact reproduction of physical reality. The supporters of traditional artistic representation lost no time in raising doubts about the veracity of Muybridge's photographs. However, once the authenticity of the photographs had been proven by (re-)animation, the question that was then raised was how painting should deal with a reality that was simultaneously visible and invisible. The ensuing discussion was characterised by two equally positivstic positions: the one position, taken by Muybridge, declared flatly that any representation that did not correspond to the instantaneous photographs was simply false, thus arguing in favour of an objective modus of painting free of conventions; the other position rejected instantaneous photography because it did not comply with what the human eye was capable of grasping of a swift movement and demanded that representation be in accordance with the physiology of perception. Photography became involved in this debate not via the aesthetic influence it exercised, but via a questioning of the epistmological character of painting. Only on the periphery could voices be heard that granted art the right to represent reality according to its own laws, above and beyond what was either sensually perceptible or knowable.

A paper looking at the idea of 'Cyclical Time' in photography and film, focusing on two particular artists whose work has been highly influential in contemporary culture. Tim MacMillan developed the technique of "Bullet Time" popularised by the Wachowski brothers in the film "The Matrix". Looking at the relationship between still and moving image, this essay argues that the techniques adapted by MacMillan actually date back to the earliest experiments in photography. With this in mind, how do we contextualise this alternative to 'linear time' within the socio-economical framework of Postmodernity and how do we view this 'Eternal Present' within the multiple perspectival imaging systems surrounding us today?

Cette théorie propose de reconsidérer la problématique du montage (les liaisons comme les disruptions, la dépendance comme l’indépendance des plans) à partir d’un principe générateur. Il s’agit de saisir son essence au-delà des fonctions syntaxiques, sémantiques, narratives, discursives, rythmiques ou plastiques ; au-delà des contingences historiques, géographiques, des critères de genre et des politiques d’auteurs. Son horizon : comprendre ce qui se joue entre les images, quelles que soient les formes de montage, des plus communes aux plus singulières, des toutes premières aux plus contemporaines.
L’hypothèse de départ est simple et douée d’une force heuristique : les plans sont porteurs d’une énergie – dont les manifestations sont variées – que le montage prend en charge, actualise, active, polarise. Ceci implique l’analyse des forces en action dans les plans et les transformations et métamorphoses qui en découlent.

Abstract of the Book: Il primo volume della collana «Mente e storia», promossa dal Centro ASPI — Archivio storico della psicologia italiana dell’Università degli Studi di Milano–Bicocca, è dedicato ai rapporti tra scienze della mente e fotografia, due ambiti apparentemente distanti ma in realtà molto più prossimi di quanto si possa immaginare. Tra Otto e Novecento neurologi, psichiatri e psicologi introducono la nuova tecnica di registrazione delle immagini nei manicomi, nelle cliniche e nei laboratori. Da Charcot a Lombroso, dalla contestazione al neuroimaging, la fotografia diviene uno strumento fondamentale per la ricerca, la sperimentazione e la cura, ma anche per la documentazione scientifica e la denuncia sociale.

ISBN: 978-88-99586-20-1. Sul finire dell’Ottocento, l’invenzione della fotografia, spingendo gli artisti oltre le tradizionali conoscenze provenienti dalla teoria delle ombre, aveva esportato nell’arte il concetto di esposizione luminosa, intesa come impressione fotografica, quindi sostanzialmente scrivendo una sorta di
‘teoria della luce’. L’avvento della cronofotografia adesso introduce un concetto assai più critico: la possibilità di rappresentare la quarta dimensione come inviluppo dei diversi stadi del movimento.
La scientificità della tracciabilità del movimento (umano, animale e, persino vegetale in alcuni esperimenti di Marey) non solo rimette quindi in
discussione la tradizionale maniera di rappresentare il dinamismo, ma alimenta essa stessa una nuova figuratività che consolida, parafrasando Benjamin, l’ormai aperta questione dell’opera tecnica nell’epoca
della sua riproducibilità artistica.
Le influenze che gli esperimenti condotti da Muybridge e Marey ebbero sulle arti visive, aprono dunque un coacervo di questioni cognitive ed
estetiche. Analizzando alcune di queste ricadute artistiche sulle maggiori correnti artistiche dei primi del Novecento, il paper vuole mettere in
luce come il concetto di mappatura, applicato alla fisiologia, fornisce un ulteriore contributo all’annosa questione sul connubio tra tecnologia e arte, che permea tutto il Novecento.

Mather's scholarship demonstrates it was the camera--not the engine--that was the key invention against which many futurist ideas and practices were measured. Overturning some misconceptions about Italian futurism's interest in the disruptive and destructive effects of technology, _Futurist Conditions_ argues that the formal and conceptual approaches by futurist visual artists reoriented the possibly dehumanizing effects of mechanized imagery toward more humanizing and spiritual aims. Through its sustained analysis of the artworks and writings of Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, and the Bragaglia brothers, dating to the first decade after the movement's founding in 1909, Mather's account of their obsession with motion pivots around a 1913 debate on the role of photography among more traditional artistic mediums, a debate culminating in the expulsion of the Bragaglias, but one that also prompted productive responses by other futurist artists to world-changing social, political, and economic conditions.

This article deals on Xavi Bou's photographic series " Ornitographies " , in which the author updates the nineteenth-century technique of chronophotography, invented by Marey, to poetically capture the flight of birds during a short time. Through a graphic visualization of a bird's trajec-tory in the air, this technique allows Bou to generate a new abstract image of great plastic beauty, that exceeds the limits of our perception. Thus, he takes this procedure beyond its scientific origin and transfers it efficiently to the field of fine arts.

Este artículo trata sobre la serie fotográfica de Xavi Bou “Ornitographies”, en la que el autor actualiza la técnica decimonónica de la cronofotografía, inventada por Marey, para captar poéticamente el vuelo de las aves durante un breve espacio de tiempo. Visualizando gráficamente su trayectoria en el aire mediante este sistema, genera una nueva imagen abstracta de gran belleza plástica que supera los límites de nuestra percepción, llevándola más allá de su origen científico para trasladarla eficazmente al terreno de las bellas artes.

Abstract of the book: This collection of essays focuses on current theories of sensation and synaesthesia in films and audiovisual works from a variety of methodological perspectives. It offers an insightful exploration of recent film theories about the cinematic experience. Film spectatorship and its extension in new media as a similar form of audience enjoyment stimulates both our senses and mind by creating immersive environments that involve different levels of emotion and consciousness. The collection addresses these topics through its five sections. The first, “Perception,” focuses on the synaesthetic mechanism underpinning film perception and its connection with affect, cognition, and emotions. The second part, “Movement,” calls into question the role of gesture and movement within the synaesthetic properties of film. The third section, “Senses,” examines how movies stimulate all senses, such as olfaction and haptics, and how senses flow into each other according to a-modal perception. The fourth, “Abstractions,” addresses how avant-garde and abstract cinema trigger synaesthetic reactions in the viewers. The fifth part, “New Media and Media Art,” explores the deep involvement of the human body through the experience of new media and a variety of synaesthetic implications theorized in different perspectives.

# A partir de un repaso del campo de estudios del cine de los primeros tiempos, se plantea una versión diferente de las raíces de aquel complejo primitivo del cinematógrafo, centrada en los tres atractores que definen lo fílmico —la inscripción cinemática, la inmersión escénica y la integración narrativa— cuyo juego (a partir de tres figuras o potencias: Marey, Lumière, Méliès) sería, precisamente, el espacio no solo donde se define la emergencia del sistema institucional del cine sino todo posible saber y hacer de la praxis fílmica

The paper concentrates on the conception of movement and mathematics of Paul Klee and his contemporaries during the 1920s: Rudolf von Laban and Oskar Schlemmer. While Klee in his "Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch" provided a way of thinking movement as becoming, Laban and especially Schlemmer considered a more mathematical approach to the description of movement, closer to the approach of Étienne-Jules Marey.

- Uploaded is the first page of the paper; the entire paper is published in: Braun, Pierre (ed.), "Digital Klee – Pedagogical Sketchbook – An Inquiry Into The Future Of Form", Dijon: Les presses du reel, p. 56–74.

The paper focuses on the in-depth analysis and historical contextualization of a chapter from Etienne-Jules Marey’s Le Mouvement (1894). The part of the book under scrutiny is devoted to the potential function of chronophotography – a photographic method born and developed for scientifically representing motion – as an aid for figurative artists.

Around 1900, several experimenters investigated turbulences in wind tunnels or water basins by creating
visualizations. One of them, the German zoologist Friedrich Ahlborn (1858-1937), was familiar with the
works by his contemporaries but he struck a new path. He combined three different kinds of photographs
taken at the same time and showed the same situation in his water troughdbut each in a different way.
With this first basic operation, Ahlborn heuristically opened up a previously non-existent space for
experimentation, analysis, and recombination. He generated an astonishing diversity of information by
adopting the tactics of ‘inversions’ in which he interpreted one part of the experimental setup, or its results,
in different ways. Between the variants of the ‘autographs’ which he developed, he defined areas of
intersection to be able to translate results from individual records into each other. To this end, Ahlborn
created other sets of visual artifacts such as drawn diagrams, three-dimensional wire frame constructions,
and clay reliefs. His working method can be described as a cascading array of successive modeling steps, as
elaborated by EricWinsberg (1999), or of inscriptions in Bruno Latour’s words (Latour, 1986). By examining
Ahlborn’s procedures closely we propose conceptualizations for the experimenter’s various operations.

Il y a dans la poïétique de Valéry une radicalité qui l’apparente aux ready-made de Marcel Duchamp : l’œuvre en tant que telle y est dévalorisée au profit du processus même qui la fait advenir. La poïétique valéryenne témoigne ainsi des grands bouleversements esthétiques du XXe siècle, eux-mêmes parallèles à l’évolution des représentations du travail et de la valeur dans la pensée économique, à laquelle Valéry fut lui-même sensible comme lecteur de Karl Marx et des théoriciens néoclassiques.

There is to be found in Valéry’s poetics a radicality akin to Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades: the work per se is devalorised for the benefit of the process that brings it forth. Valéry’s poetics thus bears witness to the great aesthetic turmoils of the 20th century, which are themselves parallel to the evolution of the representations of work and value in economic thought, to which Valéry was attuned as a reader of Karl Marx and of the neo-classical economists.

In che modo gli acquari ci parlano del cinema come macchina di visione? È possibile che queste miniature della vita acquatica ci rivelino la natura delle immagini in movimento? Lo schermo e l’acquario si interroga sulla sfida estetica che il mare ha da sempre lanciato alla settima arte: molti film hanno infatti esplorato uno dei più misteriosi territori del pianeta facendoci sprofondare in una dimensione onirica e spiazzante, un’esperienza lontana dalle abituali sensazioni provate in superficie. Per fare questo, l’acquario ha funzionato da costante modello di riferimento. Con un percorso attraverso l’archeologia dei media, ricco di documenti originali, il libro riflette sull’esperienza cinematografica a partire dall’universo subacqueo e mostra come due mondi apparentemente lontani si siano più volte sovrapposti generando incontri inattesi. Coi suoi cristalli trasparenti l’acquario ha funzionato per il cinema come una perfetta metafora dei limiti della visione.

Despite the relatively tame way they are used in most mainstream films, cameras are versatile devices that can both see the world and move through it in ways that exceed our own capabilities. The proposed paper examines the fundamentally mutable nature of the camera and suggests that movement has been a driving force behind the metamorphoses of what this paper calls the camera’s body. Specifically, I argue that the body of the camera has mutated incessantly throughout its existence to adapt to the types of movements it has needed to capture and those it has needed to perform itself. In so doing, I ultimately aim to underline the unique ways in which cameras can experience the world and, by extension, suggest how they might give us access to elements of the visible world that were hitherto out of reach to us.
To reach its goal, this paper surveys three major points in the timeline of camera mutations: the 19th century camera-array of Eadweard Muybridge; the exo-centric, body-worn camera that is the Snorricam; and the virtual camera of motion capture. This order does not aim to impose a teleological reading of these successive evolutions, but is used rather as a figure of style and as a rhetoric strategy to help us navigate through ever more complex camera configurations:
1) The sprawling body of Muybridge’s twenty-four contiguous cameras was required to freeze the horse’s gallop in time and, by doing so, inadvertently created “a sequence of instants of movements in space” (Lundemo 2011).
2) The exo-centric camera of the Snorricam is attached to, but away from, the body it films, creating a non-anthropocentric perspective and a perception of movement that differs completely from our own.
3) Finally, the “camera as camera” (Crockett 2009: 119) of motion capture eliminates the need for a mechanical camera, which enables it to record “movement itself” (Ng 2012: 278).
By examining these three incarnations of the camera body, my essay aims to demonstrate the inherently protean nature of cameras and the ways in which each transformation affords the camera—and its viewers—access to new ways of apprehending the world.
Two main approaches enable this paper to accomplish the task at hand. Firstly, each type of camera will be described and analyzed in technical detail with the help of specialized sources on the devices studied. These technical analyses form the pragmatic base from which the theoretical study of each camera’s relation to movement will be discussed. Secondly, after laying out the technical foundation, this paper will offer an animistic interpretation of the cameras and their protean bodies. Albeit unusual, this phenomenology of the camera’s various embodied positions enables this paper to demonstrate just how radical and alien their unique perspectives of the world can be.

The birth of pre-cinematic technologies took place within the field of scientific enquiry. Étienne-Jules Marey’s experiments in the late nineteenth century with chronophotography attempted to produce a signature of nature, unearthing and exposing that which escapes the normal parameters of human perception for epistemological and scientific gain. This paper will embrace a form of media archaeology to argue that, although these early impulses of imagistic thinking were jettisoned as cinema became a narrative and spectacular medium, the possibilities of abstraction presented in Marey’s work can greatly inform later artistic manipulation of space and time on film. Specifically, it is in Jean Epstein’s demarcation of cinema as a “lyrical science” that film’s ability to experiment with its material comes to the fore. By exploring these scientific modes of cinematic thinking, this paper will emphasize the epistemological yield of filmic images, analyzing Epstein’s utilization of slow-motion and reverse temporalities as specific forms of thought experiment. The haunting of cinema by its birth in scientific principles thus enables a reorientation of cinema’s productions of thought: expanding human perceptual capabilities and enabling positive knowledge about the world.

Zaman-mekân kavramlarını kronofotograf görüntü tekniği kullanarak üreten günümüz yeni
medya sanatçısı Joseph Butch Rovan’ın yerleştirme çalışmaları, Bergsoncu bir anlayışla
okunur.
Henri Bergson’nun kronofotografa olan tutumuna yenilikçi öneriler getiren sanatçı, işindeki
teknik zemin için Étienne-Jules Marey’in hareket fikrine başvurur. 19. yüzyıl Fransa’sının
birbirine karşıt bu iki büyük zihninin -Marey ve Bergson- hareket, zaman ve mekân üzerine
görüşlerinin bir araya getirildiği, çok katmanlı, okunabilir, görsel bir deneyim oluşturulmuştur.
Farklı zaman dilimlerindeki anları kaydeden Marey’in kronofotograf tekniği, Bergson’un saf
süre anlayışıyla çelişir. Bergson için zamanın bir anının görüntüsü onu mekânsallaştırmak için
yeterlidir.
Bu felsefi zemin üzerinde işlerini üreten Rovan’ın yerleştirmelerinde, duyumsal deneyimlere
açık bir alan görülür. Katılımcıların performansa dayalı etkileşim hareketleri, bedenlerinin
iç hareketlerini ve dinamik hareket akışını ortaya çıkarır. Duyuların yeniden keşfedilme
noktasında etkileşimi sağlayan; mekândaki belirleyici -yönlendirici sesler, sürekliliği olan
görüntüler, dokunsal yüzeyler, yazı ve ışık- uyaranlarıdır. Sanal bedenle bütünleşen fiziki
bedenin algı ve gerçeklik boyutları sorgulanır. Homojen maddi mekân yeniden şekillenir ve
gerçek süreye ait heterojen yapı kendini belirginleştirir. Hareketin etkisiyle katmanlarına
ayrılan ve kristalize olan melez yapı, fiilen gerçeğe dönüşmedeki süre gizilini her şimdi içinde
ortaya çıkarır. Ölçülen zaman ile kendiliğin süresi ayrıştığında; kesintisiz ve sürekli bir şimdiki
zaman hissi, maddi mekândan çıkabilme noktasında yönlendirici olabilir.
Yerleştirmelerin kurulumu, bilimsel ve felsefi bilgiyi taşıyan ara yüzler ve eklemli parçalar,
izleyici ile estetik bir zaman deneyimini yakalamanın bir yolu olarak, mekânda farklı bir
gerçeklik algısının sunulması fikri üzerinden incelenir.

In The Centrifugal Soul, Mat Collishaw utilises the principles of the zoetrope to create a sculpture where birds and plants appear as ghostly forms suspended outside of the sculpture’s tangible base. The technique of the zoetrope allows for the temporal aspects of a 3D-printed topology to transform perceptions of movement from space to space and from form to form as well as to choreograph an overall composition of space and the dance of display. The intersection of the material arts with optical and natural sciences encourages a sophisticated choreography of viewer perceptions that calls not only on what viewers can see but also what they cannot. My interest is to draw upon some of the conceptual and aesthetic possibilities implied by such choreographic promise in the act of perceiving sculpture. The Centrifugal Soul demonstrates a concern with surface as a site of emergence, or potentially sculpture as a site of emergence for new intensities, expanding and thickening the limits of what we can understand as surface or substance. The behaviour of these surfaces in deformation highlights imaginative possibilities for sculpture to unpack the ephemeral and fluid, including where sculpture might become a technological mediation of vision. I conclude that Collishaw choreographs the intervallic nature of image processes and technologies, and the concepts of motion, time, light and darkness potentially to shift our understanding of the identity of sculpture from an ontological foundation to an epistemological one.

Il presente studio é consacrato alla relazione tra fotografia e conoscenza scientifica. La fotografia sarà intesa in quanto strumento non solo atto alla registrazione, ma anche e soprattutto all’investigazione e alla sperimentazione.
Le discipline scientifiche contemporanee costruiscono una tensione tra particolarismo e generalizzazione, cioè tra l’investigazione di un oggetto e il tentativo di modellizzazione e di estensione della conoscenza a un numero di oggetti il più largo possibile. La fotografia potrebbe quindi apparire come capace unicamente di investigare un oggetto, ma non di compiere delle generalizzazioni: nessun potere previsionale o generalizzatore le é concesso dalla doxa dato che la foto non sarebbe in grado di “trasportare lontano gli elementi del contesto di registrazione” (Latour, 1993). La foto sarebbe dunque destinata a rimanere schiava del localismo e del contesto di produzione .
Quello che vorremmo dimostrare in questo breve scritto é invece che la foto puó diventare uno strumento di modellizzazione degli oggetti scientifici e partecipare a un percorso di generalizzazione della conoscenza. Analizzeremo innazitutto la cronofotografia di Etienne-Jules Marey che ha permesso per prima di modellizzare i dati visivi del movimento e renderli in questo modo disponibili alla matematizzazione e in un secondo tempo vedremo quali sono i ruoli della fotografia in astrofisica, tralasciandone l’aspetto più banale, cioé quello che concepisce la fotografia in quanto strumento di registrazione di diverse intensità luminose da sommare in seguito per ottenere uno spettro dell’oggetto il più completo possibile. La prenderemo in considerazione invece nel suo rapporto con la modellizzazione di oggetti solo teorici come i buchi neri. Si tratterà quindi di vedere come la fotografia non solo é il punto di partenza per un percorso di ricerca che va dalla traccia alla matematizzazione (Marey), ma come essa possa essere anche un punto di arrivo nel percorso di investigazione che va dalla matematica alla visualizzazione, come nel caso dei buchi neri, dove la visualizzazione serve a tradurre in spazio i modelli matematici e le teorie della fisica che si sviluppano in un primo tempo in equazioni, poi in diagrammi e infine in quella che é stata definita da Jean-Pierre Luminet (1979) una “fotografia calcolata” dei buchi neri e che si distingue ovviamente da una banale fotografia di sintesi.