Giacomo Balla: Dynamism of a Dog 1912

Giacomo Balla: Dynamism of a Dog 1912

Balla, trained as a musician, was a self-taught artist. His early work derived from the Impressionists, especially Seurat’s Pointillism. Around 1909 he started painting in a new style, with concerns to depict motion and speed in the new Futurist style, and in 1912 he joined the Futurists. As a teacher he taught Boccioni and Severini – both to become notable Futurist artists. Dynamism of a Dog, along with Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase of the same year, stand out as radical developments of the leading avant garde Cubist movement, and both clearly show the influence of Etiene-Jules Marey’s chrono-photography of the 1870s
Why does this inspire?
Because it was the first example of applied chrono-photography that I came across – researching the picture as a student, I then discovered Marey and Muybridge, Aaron Scharf’s brilliant Art and Photography (1968), and got seriously interested in technology and art.. The close relationship between the medium and the message, explained for me in McLuhan’s early books The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media, became a lifelong passion.

Ninian Doff + Graham Coxon: What’ll It Take to Make You People Dance? (From A+E) 2012

Ninian Doff + Graham Coxon: What'll It Take to Make You People Dance? (From A+E) 2012

For me, this was one of the first crowd-sourced music videos to really work. Coxon and Doff posted their music track on the web, calling for video-clips of steps to be sent in, and offering signed albums and tour tickets as an incentive. The submitted video-clips were assembled and composited by Doff and Coxon in a montaged video-cubist style promo video, featuring clips from 85 people in over 20 countries.