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David - first of all, to the uninitiated, who was Eadweard Muybridge?
Eadweard Muybridge was a Victorian photographer.
He was born here in Kingston upon Thames,
but he moved to America - to New York initially
and then to San Francisco - where he really undertook
his entire career over there in the States.
Muybridge was, and probably still is, one of the most
important photographers of all time, born here in Kingston.
He returned to Kingston and died here in 1904.
The reason it's significant to Kingston is that he
bequeathed his personal collection of material from
his entire career - so all that time he spent in the States,
the things that he felt were most important to keep
with him throughout his life and bring back to Kingston -
he left to the town, which is the collection that
Kingston Museum now holds it its archives.
And what's he best known for?
He's most famous for proving that a horse
when it's galloping, when it's in full gallop, lifts all four
of its hooves off the ground and effectively flies.
When people say 'so, he's one of the fathers of cinema'
what's your response?
There were lots of innovations at the time
that fed into what became cinema.
Obviously at the time nobody was trying to invent cinema -
cinema hadn't existed - and so there were all sorts of ways
in which devices were being designed and developed
really to entertain people. A large element of what
Muybridge does was pure entertainment.
And there were several different people all around the
world studying movement, trying in effect to recreate movement
What Muybridge was trying to do was capture time
using these static images, create sequences of them
and then with his zoopraxiscope invention,
which was essentially a visual translation of his
photographs, drawn versions of his photographs,
create the illusion of movement with a projecting device.
which was the first time that had happened,
effectively using photographs as the source material.
So in that sense, that invention - the zoopraxiscope -
precursed cinema. Before the Lumière brothers
invented cinema itself, Muybridge had invented a way
of using his static photographs, his sequences of images,
to create the effect of an image moving.
What we think is most exciting about Muybridge now,
today in the 21st century, is not only his contribution to
the invention of the medium of cinema,
but actually when we go to see a film today
in the 21st century - if we go to see Tim Burton's
'Alice in Wonderland' or we go and see James Cameron's
'Avatar' - what we're watching isn't cinema.
It's not cinema as it was understood throughout most of
the 20th century; it's not photographs moving;
it's quite a different, far more complex medium.
One of the things, for example, that Muybridge
experimented with was - he most famously recorded the
movement of animals and humans by setting up a line of
between 12 and 24 cameras. Opposite the cameras
the person or the animal would move
and with a series of tripwires would trigger the cameras
so that the cameras themselves recorded that motion,
moment by moment.
Muybridge also experimented with the idea of placing
those cameras in a semi-circle around the subject so that in
one moment all of those cameras were triggered simultaneously.
Then towards the end of the 20th century, we started
using computers to recreate images that weren't freely
captured on camera in a normal sense.
So there are films such as 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'
and 'The Matrix' which actually started to present a very
different type of image making within cinema, and using
exactly that technique of photographing simultaneously
a three-dimensional body in movement but then being
able to replay it and holding that body in mid-air still,
ostensibly a freeze frame, but being able for the camera,
the computers to use that information to travel around.
This is something that Muybridge was playing around with,
was experimenting with more than 100 years before.
Let's talk about Muybridge in Kingston.
What can people see when they venture out to Kingston?
The Muybridge in Kingston programme opens now -
this September - and runs through until early February.
It's designed to accompany the first ever major retrospective
of Eadweard Muybridge, which is taking place at Tate
from mid-September this year until early January in 2011.
It's a full four-month programme of associated events,
both here in Kingston and at Tate Britain.
In Kingston itself we have an exhibition at Kingston Museum
of some incredibly rare material, in fact some of which
has never been shown before, that will complement
what people can see at Tate.
So hopefully people once they've seen the Tate show
might come down to Kingston, and vice versa -
people who will have seen the shows down here
would go up to Tate to find out more about what he did
throughout his career.
The exhibition at the Museum is going to focus on
the zoopraxiscope discs, and look at that as a contribution
to moving image history.
Simultaneously at the Stanley Picker Gallery
we've invited two contemporary artists -
Trevor Appleson and Becky Beasley - to make new work
in direct response to the Kingston Museum collection.
Trevor's making a moving image piece.
Trevor, up until now, has been a stills photographer;
and for the first time ever he's made a moving image piece
called 'Dance of Ordinariness'.
He's been working with dancers from
the London Contemporary Dance School.
Here we have studies of Muybridge's where we have
one woman pouring water over another;
men and women walking up and down steps;
a woman sitting, combing her hair.
These are quite particular narratives that have all sorts
of questions around them in terms of their *** politics
and their social rationale.
So Trevor's made a moving image piece,
which is a four-screen installation.
Becky Beasley, completely differently, has picked up on
the end of Muybridge's life; the fact that he came back
to Kingston; and at his house on Liverpool Road
he infamously was apparently digging in his back garden
a scale model of the American Great Lakes.
What we do know is that Muybridge material has actually
been unearthed from the garden throughout the 20th century.
So Becky was fascinated by this story, this model of the
American Great Lakes, and wanted to think about what
that meant in terms of Muybridge's career up until that point,
but also how that resonates with the collection today
and what's significant about that in relation to the
Muybridge in Kingston programme.
So she's making a special installation that will map out the
American Great Lakes on the floor of the gallery.
How important is Muybridge to Kingston, the town and the University, today?
What's so exciting about the Muybridge in Kingston project
is that it's a partnership. Muybridge in Kingston is the
name of the partnership between Kingston University and
the Borough. The collection itself here in Kingston,
we've now established over the past few years,
is undoubtedly one of the most important in the world.
Already this year we've launched a new web portal
called eadweardmuybridge.co.uk, where future studies of
Muybridge can actually start embedding themselves,
and that website is up and running.
It was launched back in May.
But simultaneously we were developing this exhibition
programme to coincide with the Tate show.
And obviously for us at the University,
and at the Stanley Picker Gallery,
it's just very exciting to be able to have an association
with a very important collection.
We've talked about Muybridge in the 21st century -
how to you see yourself engaging children and schools
in what Muybridge did?
Both the Stanley Picker Gallery and Kingston University
have a very strong working relationship with local schools
here in Kingston, and we always run education
programmes related to our exhibitions.
Obviously we have a very special opportunity here
with Muybridge in Kingston in as much as the Museum
and the Gallery have programmes that are inter-related
that school children can visit simultaneously.
They can visit the Gallery and the Museum.
So what we've done is develop an education programme
that works across the two venues.
So we're running all sorts of different events from
beard-making workshops to look like Eadweard Muybridge
to shadow puppet displays.
We have a display in Barkman Computers - it's a shop in
Kingston, but it happens to be the geographic location
where Muybridge was born. What Barkman has very
generously offered us is their window display
to show some of the work that has been made by children
in response to the programme that we're putting together.
So there'll be an opportunity for young Muybridges to
show their own work in Muybridge's own birthplace.
So someone comes to Kingston Museum, they come to the
Stanley Picker Gallery, all they know really is that Muybridge
is the guy who proved that four horse's hooves came
off the ground, what do you hope they might take away?
First and foremost, our main objective is for them to
realise, because many people don't, that this man was
born in Kingston upon Thames.
I think what I would people to understand about
Eadweard Muybridge is the way that he worked
and what he was trying to achieve.
Depending on the perspective from which you look at it,
it changes our understanding of what it was and
what it represents today.
I think that make him a very exciting subject.
Was he an artist?
Was he really trying to be a scientist?
Was he simply an entertainer who was trying to create
new ways of entertaining his audiences?
What was he trying to achieve at the time and did he
understand the impact of what he was doing?
Also famously, and quite infamously at the time,
he shot his wife's lover, Harry Larkins, and was one of
the very last people, in fact I think the last person,
to be acquitted on the grounds of
crime of passion in the States.
If we think about where he was working in
San Francisco and the relationship that those technologies
that he was developing have with contemporary industry
in California in Silicon valley, in Los Angeles - there's the
cinema industry and the computing technology industry -
these are all things that somehow have roots back into
what Muybridge was trying to achieve.
Very beautifully it also relates back to what
Barkman Computers, his birthplace, is now -
it sells computer games. It's a place that sells
games and videos, things that entertain but also innovate,
the technologies that they represent.
All of those things have a link back to the life
and work of Eadweard Muybridge.