The cinematograph, the "noematograph," and the future of AI art - Big Think

YOU’RE IN PARIS ON the evening of December 28, 1895. It’s cold and windy, and this lull in the year, between Christmas and New Year’s, feels restless and full of possibilities. You are in the Boulevard des Capucines, a few blocks from the shore of the Seine and the Jardin des Tuileries. You stop in front of the Grand Café, a fashionable meeting spot for the elite. Along with thirty-some Parisians, you pay a franc to the mustachioed gentleman at the door before descending into the Salon Indien, an opulent room in the basement decorated with Oriental motifs. Rows of chairs have been set up before a white screen, and there, propped up in the middle of the seats and aimed at the screen, is a strange, boxy machine with a hand crank and a lens. This machine is the cinematograph, which promises to “capture, through a series of instantaneous images, all the movements that during a given time occurred in front of the lens, and then reproduce these movements by projecting their life-sized images

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