Dave Lynch

The Horse in Motion is a reworking of Edweard Muybridges 1887 image through mobile projection.

The horse in the moving projection is an animation created from the photographs of Edweard Muybridge in 1887. This was a continuation of his early experiment from 1878 whereby 12 cameras were arranged along a track parallel to the horse’s, and each of the camera shutters was controlled by a trip wire which was triggered by the horse’s hooves. They were 21 inches apart to cover the 20 feet taken by the horse stride, taking pictures at one thousandth of a second. These images lead to the creation of the Zoopraxiscope by Muybridge in 1879, it may be considered the first movie projector. By projecting images from rotating glass disks in rapid succession to give the impression of motion. The stop-motion images were initially painted onto the glass, as silhouettes. A second series of discs, made in 1892-94, used outline drawings printed onto the discs photographically, then colored by hand. The device appears to have been one of the primary inspirations for Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Dickson’s Kinetoscope, the first commercial film exhibition system.