Response To Manning's Grace Taking Form

My initial reaction to this piece was "what in the hell is this person talking about?." However, as i continued reading and by the time i got about 4 pages into it, things began to connect and make sense. Manning was attempting to make some sense out of Marey's experiments documenting movement and spends a considerable amount of time dealing with the concept of the inherent chaos within all movements. I found this to be an interesting concept simply because it takes an everyday action such as simple movement, and breaks it down into measure and rhythm. Rhythm, Manning writes, is borne out of the chaos of movements taking form. "This indeterminacy is a living aspect of the event. It is what rhythm feeds on." (Manning, p 87).


One passage that particularly made sense to me in terms of documenting the chaos that takes place in space during movement, was when Manning describes the process of transcoding. "Transcoding or transduction is the manner in which one milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it, or is constituted in it." (p87). Which basically means the rhythm of the imperceptible chaos taking place within a movement, causes each milieu to seamlessly transition into another.

It is the rhythm of an action or movement that creates the seen perception of movement out of something that is normally imperceptible. This is precisely what Marey was trying to document in his experiments. One can look at his photo's such as the series documenting smoke rising, and wonder if they are meant to be works of art for aesthetic purposes, or simply scientific works, using scientific method, designed to show the imperceptible collective parts of movement. This is because there is a certain aesthetic gracefulness in the smoke images and Manning discusses the concept of grace in detail. "Grace is the experience of a becoming movement taking form." (p88). I immediately thought of a pitcher's windup in baseball, or a basketball player going up for a layup as an example of this. Both actions are an "intensity of process" as Manning writes of grace. Furthermore, there is an inherent grace in Marey's experiment in locomotion that documents the movement within a person's hips while walking. It is the "elasticity of movement" as Manning describes it, that shows a rhythmic force taking form.

Gabe Rosen 9/14