Étienne-Jules Marey / Eadweard Muybridge
In the history of photography, both of the polymaths mentioned above have contributed a great deal from understanding the locomotive movements of different animals to inventing new devices to measure and observe our surroundings better.
Chronophotography is one such field where the contribution of both is essential, which is defined as “a set of photographs of a moving object, taken for recording and exhibiting successive phases of motion”. It is derived from the Greek word chrónos (“time”) combined with photography.
Marey published La Machine Animale in 1873 which extensively studied the movement and flights caused by organs, muscles and bones. The development of photography later opened the path to various implications in studying humans and developing better tools.
Another pioneer in the field of chromophotography was Albert Londe, a French photographer and medical researcher. He is remembered for his work as a medical photographer at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, funded by the Parisian authorities, as well as being a pioneer in X-ray photography.
X-rays, the high-energy electromagnetic radiation or types of waves shorter than those of UVs and longer than those of gamma rays. Normally ranging from 10 nanometers to 10 picometers with frequencies ranging from 30 petahertz to 30 exahertz and now commonly used for medical diagnosis.
Discovered in 1895 by a German physicist, William Röntgen, when he stumbled upon these unknown invisible rays accidentally and wrote a report “On a new kind of ray: A preliminary communication”. Röntgen referred to the radiation as “X”, to indicate that it was an unknown type of radiation, and since then the name got stuck.
Rontgen discovered their medical use when he made a picture of his wife’s hand on a photographic plate formed due to x-rays. The photograph of his wife’s hand was the first photograph of a human body part using X-rays. When she saw the picture, she said “I have seen my death.”
The Röntgen rays went on with other names such as “shadowgrams” or “electric photography” when a Physical Review published an article entitled “Without lens or light, Photographs Taken with Plate and Object in Darkness” which appeared in San Francisco Examiner.
Types
X-rays with high photon energies above 5–10 keV (below 0.2–0.1 nm wavelength) are called hard X-rays, while those with lower energy (and longer wavelength) are called soft X-rays. The intermediate range with photon energies of several keV is often referred to as tender X-rays. Due to their penetrating ability, hard X-rays are widely used to image the inside of objects (e.g. in medical radiography and airport security).
Art in x-rays
When you combine the x-rays with our modern technological devices, you get a beautiful overview of how our gimmicks so sleek and minimal with their flat colours on the outside are put together, tightly squeezed with all different myriads of components.
Back to the Apple AirPods
The specialist English photographer Nick Veasey takes us inside various hyper-industrial everyday objects without tearing them apart. A window to some crucial, critical discourse in design about the materials(resources), the assembly of the object and the hyper complexity of it which is most unaware to a common user. Having shot more than 4000 objects, the shutterbug is interested in how things work and x-rays show what’s happening under the surface. His website mentions, “By revealing the inside, the quintessential element of my art speculates upon what the manufactured and natural world consists of.”
A phenomenal piece of electrical engineering with barely a micrometre of space wasted, AirPod Pros (pictured, above) remain the most comfortable true wireless designs we’ve ever worn. They’re also not far off the best sounding either, thanks to the adaptive EQ that automatically tunes the low- and mid-frequencies to the shape of your ear. The output is powered by a high-dynamic-range amplifier and high-excursion, low-distortion speaker driver, while also offering up decent ANC that adapts the sound signal 200 times per second and a button cell battery that can last a total of 24 hours.
Contrary to the human body, these industrially made objects could potentially last forever if replacement parts are available, which is not entirely true because technology progresses and things become obsolete (Moore’s law). So, the question how do our technologically obsolete devices die or should die ?! What should be the ceremonial procedures for my 6-year-old laptop ? How to discard them, we know that we can not bury them in the landfill or burn them.
Glass box
As discussed in the texts above, studying the mechanics, of our modern industrial mass-produced objects above mention the uses of photography to help study the workings of internal parts/organs. The X-ray photographs provide us with a glass box perspective, as if an object is placed in the centre of an imaginary glass box and its image is projected on the side of the box. The glass box perspective is great for understanding orthographic drawings of industrial objects but as our technical objects have reached complexities in a greater deal, it fails to provide us with a better view of the resources extracted, the socio-economic situations of that place, the power consumed in manufacturing or its end-of-life removal from our daily use even though partially passive.
The X-ray images of our bones give us a convincing idea of their function and the degree of movement on the contrary, the X-ray images of industrial objects only provide us with a shallow understanding of their working unless you are an expert in electronics. Here, we see the great divide between the mechanics of our bones and the electronic functions of our industrial objects.
RGB-X Classification for Electronics Sorting
This white paper talks about the sorting of electronic parts using machine learning and X-rays to extract rare-earth and other metals to push them back into the circular loop of production. Sorting all the resources in our obsolete industrial gadgets can be very labour and energy-intensive so combining the x-ray vision which distinguishes the material in the RGB spectrum with the assistance of a robotic arm can contribute to better de-manufacturing.
From these scientific and artistic discoveries, a very essential question arises. Is it possible to repair our devices in a better way using X-ray images, if the framework of the gadget is not modular in the first place ?!
Bibliographie
Wikipedia. 2023. “Chronophotography.” Wikimedia Foundation. Last modified November 15, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronophotography
Caldwell, Wallace E.; Merrill, Edward H. (1964). History of the World. Vol. 1. United States: The Greystone Press. p. 394
https://archive.org/details/lamachineanimale00mare/page/n10/mode/1up
Wyman T (Spring 2005). “Fernando Sanford and the Discovery of X-rays”. “Imprint”, from the Associates of the Stanford University Libraries: 5–15
Markel H (20 December 2012). “’I Have Seen My Death’: How the World Discovered the X-Ray”. PBS NewsHour. PBS. Retrieved 23 March 2019
Attwood, David (1999). Soft X-rays and extreme ultraviolet radiation. Cambridge University. p. 2. ISBN 978-0-521-65214-8. Archived from the original on 2012-11-11. Retrieved 2012-11-04
Kevles BH (1996). Naked to the Bone Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century. Camden, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. pp. 19–22. ISBN 978-0-8135-2358-3
Feldman A (November 1989). “A sketch of the technical history of radiology from 1896 to 1920”. Radiographics. 9 (6): 1113–1128. doi:10.1148/radiographics.9.6.2685937
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/apple-airpods-x-ray
https://www.wired.com/2008/08/ff-xray/
https://www.nickveasey.com/
Abhimanyu, FNU, Tejas Zodage, Umesh Thillaivasan, Xinyue Lai, Rahul Chakwate, Javier Santillan, Emma Oti et al. “RGB-X Classification for Electronics Sorting.” ArXiv, (2022). Accessed December 15, 2023. /abs/2209.03509.