Mocubix · Exhibit 01 · Eadweard Muybridge, 1887

Sixteen frames of Annie G.

A battery of cameras caught a galloping mare sixteen times in one stride. Scroll, and the stills run. Scroll back, and she runs backwards, frame for frame: where you are on the scrollbar is which frame you are on.

Scroll to run her

/ 16Frame

The stride

Pushing offthe last forehoof leaves the ground Airborneall four hooves off the ground A hind hoof landsthe first touch after the flight Both hinds downthe hind legs carry the weight Hind and forethe weight crosses to the front On the forelegsone forehoof, then the other Pushing offthe last forehoof leaves the ground

The bet that started cinema

In 1878 Leland Stanford wanted to know whether a galloping horse ever has all four hooves off the ground. Muybridge lined a track with twelve cameras tripped by wires, and the card he printed puts it plainly: the negatives were made “at intervals of twenty-seven inches of distance, and about the twenty-fifth part of a second of time.”

Nine years later, at the University of Pennsylvania, he shot Annie G. with the cameras that made the plate above, and it answers Stanford twice over. In frames two, three and four she is airborne, and her legs are gathered beneath her, not stretched out fore and aft the way painters had always drawn a gallop.

Reading a plate like this is exactly the gesture this page hangs on: you move, the animal moves; you stop, it stops; you go back, it goes back.