The Horse in Motion, Eadweard Muybridge, 1878

In June of 1878, Eadweard Muybridge photographed a horse in gallop and became the first author of chronophotography the early predecessor to what would become the motion picture. In doing so he arrived at the idea that humans are above nature, living vicariously through our inventions. Muybridge's photographs of motion have become synonymous with the Industrial Revolution fittingly so as his obsession with defining locomotion throughout the latter half of his career coincides with the invention of leisure time as an antagonist to the idea that we must always be conscious of our productivity. In the early half of his career, Muybridge was primarily concerned with documenting the American West often on government commissions. These other projects also dealt with time and measuring seasonal variation. The railroad seemingly followed Muybridge and with it, the purity of experience was lost. Railroad baron Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University commissioned Muybridge in Palo Alto to document his horse in motion. This being Muybridge's first instance of documenting motion the Sacramento Daily Union reported shortly after that, "It was shown that the supposed superior grace of the horse while running is in reality a delusion: that the feet are gotten into all sorts of queer positions."

I think it's important to consider what was lost as much as what was gained in Muybridge's experimentation. How does unveiling the intricacies of nature steal our imagination? Conflating the subject and the photo of said subject becomes ever more apparent in this era. When showcasing his motion studies of dogs and gymnasts amongst other things he had to make use of a zoopraxiscope, the predecessor of the movie projector. Audiences didn't trust the authenticity of a man walking in the form of a still image. Who could blame them? The human consciousness was excluded from these moments in time, it was constituted only if we considered it and the camera becomes much like a clock."The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things." Argentinian poet and philosopher, Jorge Luis Borge devoted a large portion of his career to answering the question of how the route of applying meaning to knowledge required a willful ignorance that one couldn't possibly know everything. Borge wrote The Library of Babel in 1941, predating the invention of the internet as we know it by 52 years. Yet the contents of his short story strike as strangely relevant today. The Library of Babel details an infinitely expanding space holding an all but countless number of books. Within the tiered hexagonal rooms described by Borge, the library contains all possible knowledge of everything currently written and everything that will be written. Any flight of imagination or commentary on the human condition is documented and cataloged. The crux of The Library of Babel is that the pursuit of knowing everything parallels that of knowing nothing. The vastness of the library assures it's knowledge will remain obscured. For every book that possesses definable content, there exists a multitude of books containing any random arrangement of letters that the reader must traverse. Even if you were to find such a tome of enlightenment would you recognize it? Would it be regarded as useless as for each book that could be rendered as a truthful account there is an indistinguishable amount of fiction present in all forms? Furthermore, there are false dictionaries, diaries, and biographies upholding each other's bias. One could argue that what's considered to be truthful falls under the tent of subjectivity. The lesson that Borge is attempting to instill in the reader is that a pursuit of endless knowledge based in ego will inevitably lead you back to where you started. The library might as well have contained nothing at all. As the medium of photography has grown in the modern age the association of truth with the medium has waned. Despite even the nature of Muybridge's work being related entirely to science as essayist and philosopher Roland Barthes stated "What is reproducible to infinity through photography only occurs once."