The period at the turn of the century was one of great technological change, which inspired artists of the time to create new kinds of works, through new mediums and new ways of representation. In particular, the increasingly wide-spread use of the camera and the new advances in machinery such as the invention of the motor car provided a whole new range of inspiration for artists.
These new developments in technology and in particular the works of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, inspired artists such as Umberto Boccioni, Marcel Duchamp and Giocomo Balla.
By investigating the work in chronophotography by Muybridge and Marey, as well as the new technologies of the camera and advances in machinery which inspired the Futurists, it is possible to see how the artists mentioned have created works that are based on and inspired by technology, and are therefore works which capture the "spirit of the century". .
In the late 1800's, two artists, Eadweard Muybridge in England and Etienne-Jules Marey in France, developed new ways of using the photographic camera in order to capture what looked like the actual sequence of movement. Muybridge set up a line of cameras which took individual photos of a figure, which, when placed next to each other, showed the way that figure moved through space. Marey experimented with multiple exposure photographs: a repeating shutter camera recording a series of prints on a single plate, which made it possible for the flow of movement to be studied in detail. .
Although these developments were made before the turn of the century, they were none the less very important to artists between 1900 and 1940, particularly artists of the Cubist, Futurist and Dadaist movements, who sought to capture such movement in their artworks.
One of the other great developments of the time was the release of cinema, which showed depth, space and time on one flat plane. The visual expression represented by the cinema could not help exploding the vision of the painters, who henceforth sought to represent the unfolding of an action in the closed and simultaneous space of the canvas.
