Representing Motion in a Static Image: Constraints and Parallels in Art, Science, and Popular Culture

Representing motion in a picture is a challenge to artists, scientists, and all other imagemakers. Moreover, it presents a problem that will not go away with electronic and digital media, because often the pedagogical purpose of the representation of motion is more important than the motion itself. All satisfactory solutions evoke motion—for example, dynamic balance (or broken symmetry), stroboscopic sequences, affine shear (or forward lean), and photographic blur—but they also typically sacrifice the accuracy of the motion represented, a solution often unsuitable for science. Vector representations superimposed on static images allow for accuracy, but are not applicable to all situations. Workable solutions are almost certainly case specific and subject to continual evolution through exploration by imagemakers.

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