Chronographs: Improvisations on Marey (Live Video Performance)


Performed at 24th Izmir European Jazz Festival, Ahmed Adnan Saygun Art Center, on March 3rd, 2017
Live visuals by Aras Ozgun, music by Yigit Eygi.

Étienne-Jules Marey was a French inventor and physiologist who developed sophisticated gadgets that recorded sequential photographs of moving subjects (animals, birds, insects and humans) in late 19th c. for observing and analyzing locomotion. Since he was particularly interested in mapping the movements of the bodies in time, his inventions and techniques had been designed to register the time dimension of the movement with precision. Thus, he called these techniques "chronographs". Marey's work had been an important step towards the development of cinema. In this live video performance, our intention had been reconstructing and reevaluating these images in the context of a much different technological platform and a much different regime of time.