Representing Motion

Picking up on the thread of Transect Representation, I recalled that Urban Tick had recently posted a graphic from 'The View from the Road' (Kevin Lynch, Donald Appleyard et al., MIT press, Boston, 1964) - one that I hadn't previously heard of and sounds somewhat applicable to the idea of representational strategies for movement.


:: image via Ephemeral Landscape in the page

The post linked to a longer related post called 'Ephemeral Landscape: in the page' with some additional imagery and a long tangents that include storyboarding and graphic novels to name a few themes. A snippet from the text of Lynch & Appleyard begins to make this link between representation and experience: "The sense of spatial sequence is like that of large-scale architecture; the continuity and insistent temporal fl ow are akin to music and cinema. The kinaesthetic sensations are like those of the dance or the amusement park, although rarely so violent.”

This alludes to the idea of my continual exploration of 'Soundtrack of Spaces' where the sequence can be somewhat choreographed within a design concept. The idea of representation of temporal processes is fascinating, as it's a two-dimensional representation of a four-dimensional process - making it a quite a representational leap. A diagram of t'ai-chi footwork captures the essence of this notational form.


:: image via Ephemeral Landscape in the page

This notation reminds me of the very specifically of Lawrence Halprin's concepts of 'motation' that fused the representational techniques of movement and notation derived from a system of graphically representating dance steps. It's difficult to find many good images of this system to describe it fully, but here's a couple of images from a fascinating study I found from a early 1970s thesis from MIT on "Notation Systems in Architecture" which uses Halprins system of Notation as well as the methods from 'A View From the Road'.






:: images via 'Notation Systems in Architecture' by Premjit Talwar

For architecture, the concepts are broken into four ways of describing environments. These include 1) motion channels, 2) orientation, 3) anatomy of visual space, and 4) form quality. These work in tandem to provide a framework for symbol-based diagramming of spaces that include movement and use (sort of captured in the following two images).




:: images via 'Notation Systems in Architecture' by Premjit Talwar

The scores from Halprin, et.al. cannot be immediately discerned without some deep knowledge, sort of like stenographers short-hand. These are specifically taken from the idea of labanotation, which is commonly used to represent dance, as shown in this snippet from Brittanica "A page from Rudolf Laban’s Schrifttanz (1928), the origin of labanotation, which became the most widespread method of dance notation."


:: image via Encyclopedia Brittanica

I've been fascinated by these notational systems since looking at a volume of Halprin's work back in the mid-90s... along with many years playing tablature for guitar and mandolin... definitely a connection there - but is it a viable methodology for modern representation of spatial and movement dynamics? I'd love to hear more thoughts on what ideas others have for representation of motion (including new media methods for representation).

More to come on this somewhat random line of inquiry.