MUYBRIDGE ANIMATED SOCKS
(Sam Meech, String && Loop, 2021)

Muybridge Animated Socks celebrate the history of the moving image - they can even be transformed into an animation! Fifteen images creating a looping sequence that can be animated using simple stop-motion apps.

These socks feature a repeating pixel art animation sequence based on Eadweard Muybridge’s ground-breaking motion picture photography. Considered as history’s first film, Muybridge’s “The Horse In Motion“ captured individual snapshots of a racing horse and proved all 4 hooves left the ground while it galloped. He was the first person to photograph movement in such a way and laid the groundwork for contemporary film through his innovations.

The socks have been developed in collaboration with String&&Loop, a "soft wear" company based in the US created by Cody Ben Lewis. String&&Loop create socks that explore unusual computative design processes. Cody kindly invited me to translate my knitted horse in motion animation into a sock format.

The design process was trickier than I first thought, taking into account that the socks have a different pixel aspect ratio (wider pixels) and the challenge of making the design loop within the bounds of the sock. I also wanted to really integrate software tools in that process, and so used Isadora (v2.6.1) to directly translate Muybridges original images into a low-res version with the correct pixel aspect ration.