Our world is constantly in motion. The National Media Museum’s exhibition In the Blink of an Eye: Media and Movement explores our fascination with movement and the desire to capture it through photography, film, television and new media.
Showing from 9 March to 2 September 2012, this free-to-enter multimedia exhibition showcases the Museum’s unrivalled National Collections alongside specially commissioned works by contemporary artists. It reveals the many ways motion has been captured and simulated through a variety of moving images and images of movement, and examines the relationships between art, science, entertainment, sport and historical record.
In the Blink of an Eye is the National Media Museum’s contribution to imove, Legacy Trust UK’s cultural programme for Yorkshire, and part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. With this programme Legacy Trust UK is creating a lasting cultural legacy from the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games across the UK.
The exhibition offers a unique opportunity for people of all ages to understand more about how movement has been captured and displayed – from Victorian optical toys like the zoetrope, to a CGI motion-capture suit. It will feature new artworks and many rare objects and images from the National Collections of Photography, Television, Cinematography and New Media.
Classic images by photographers as diverse Harold Edgerton, Eadweard Muybridge, Roger Fenton, Richard Billingham and Oscar Rejlander will be shown alongside historic items of equipment, films and interactive displays. The exhibition also examines how high- speed, time-lapse and time slice photography have revealed a world invisible to the naked eye.
For the newly commissioned pieces, artists Quayola and Memo Akten will be unveiling Forms, an interactive video installation inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s seminal studies of movement. Bob Levene and Anne-Marie Culhane have created Time Frame an artwork filmed at the UK Olympic training centre in Loughborough. Barnet Fair is a new animation by Jo Lawrence, which is inspired by the theme of the exhibition.
Together they tell the fascinating story of media and movement.
Image: The Juggler, c1860, Oscar Gustav Rejlander
© Royal Photographic Society collection at the National Media Museum
In the Blink of an Eye: Media and Movement
9 March-2 September 2012
National Media Museum, Bradford
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