Grace Taking Form Reading Response

Grace Taking Form, by Erin Manning, was an interesting read, to say the least. Etienne-Jules Marey sounds like he would've been quite radical in his time. I've always thought of things like studying unperceived forces to be a fairly recent discipline, but from this article I was clearly mistaken. According to the article, a lot of Marey's work serves as the basis for a lot of work in this field, and he even came up with a few new ways of quantifying forces during his experiments. He measured these forces using machines of his own invention. He used these machines because he believed that the human senses obstructed the viewing of these forces, which makes sense, as they are not supposed to be perceivable.

One of the interesting things about Marey's work was the fact that his machines invented new measurements which led to new machines in an odd sort of evolutionary process. Another thing I found interesting was all the mentions of curves and arcs. In another class, 2D Motion for Games, I had to read about the 12 Principles of Animation and there was a lot of stuff about how important arcs are to realistic animation. There were several connections I could see between the principles and Marey's work, especially when talking about how pretty much all organic motion occur along arcs and curves.

While some of the article didn't make a whole lot of sense, especially when phrases like quasi-chaos started popping up, I did enjoy reading it. I think the author could have worded the article a little better, as some of it came off sounding a bit odd. A major example was during quotes and sections where the author talked about movement-passing and movement-passed. I'm think I know what she meant by those, but I can also think of several ways to make those sections easier to understand.