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Fabienne Liptay: Capturing Motion, Shaping Time
Capturing Motion, Shaping Time
(p. 235 – 254)

Fabienne Liptay

Capturing Motion, Shaping Time
From Chronophotography to Digital Film

PDF, 20 pages

  • history of science
  • physiology
  • gaze

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Fabienne Liptay

Fabienne Liptay is professor of film studies at the University of Zurich and member of the Center for the Arts and Cultural Theory (ZKK). She directs the research project Exhibiting Film: Challenges of Format, for which she was awarded an excellence grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Her research focuses on the aesthetics and theory of the moving image, the relationship between film, literature, photography, and performance, the institutional practices and curatorial concepts of film exhibition, and the aesthetic politics of film formats. Her publications include the book Telling Images: Studien zur Bildlichkeit des Films (diaphanes, 2016) and the co-edited volumes Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media (Brill, 2015), Artur Żmijewski: Kunst als Alibi (diaphanes, 2017), and Taking Measures: Usages of Formats in Film and Video Art (Scheidegger & Spiess, 2023).
Other texts by Fabienne Liptay for DIAPHANES
Michael F. Zimmermann (ed.): Vision in Motion

Vision is not mere registration of what enters, via the gateway of our eyes, from the outside world into our inner consciousness. Understanding the act of seeing as mirroring the outside world in mental images overlooks its temporal aspect. From Berkeley to Helmholtz, from Goethe to Cézanne, new discourses based on the physiology of the sense organs lead to new conceptions of vision not only conceived of as a mental process, but as a cognitive activity. Even before Freud interpreted dreams, seeing was conceived of as accompanying our life even when we sleep. However, to understand even the stream of the sensations, we have to configure them in pictures. Since the 19th century, the media reflect about the confrontation of seeing as a diachronic activity and of perception as coded in synchronic images. The contributions to the volume investigate the opposition of the stream of sensations and the configuration of time – from early illustrations of plants to the avant-gardes, from gesture to cinema, from decapitation to dance, from David Hume to Bergson and Deleuze. The main objective is a critical examination of images rendering vision in motion, without reducing them to the temporality of narrative.

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