Historical Antecedents I The Machine Age & Modernism An Overview of Key Points in Lovejoy & Kittler
MODERNITY???
MODERNITY! Historical era characterized by: Master Narratives Nation-state Progress through science and technology Positivism (faith in “the real”) Industrialization/Mechanization The “Rational Subject”
The Mechanization of Labour Began the during the Industrial Revolution and typically credited to the birth of the Cotton Gin Exacerbated by the birth and rise of Taylorism (in the EU) and Fordism (in America) What does this mean for humans?
The Birth of Photography 1838 in Paris and London Indicative of broader socio-cultural desire born out of the renaissance for more accurate looking images. Marked the culmination of numerous technical and scientific developments Bound up with notions of nationhood Top image: Joseph Niepce, View from the Window at Le Gras, 1826 Bottom image: Louis Daguerre, Boulevard du Temple, 1838
Henry Fox Talbot The Pencil of Nature, 1844-46
Photographic Vision
Làszlo Moholy-Nagy, Untitled Portrait. 1926 Làszlo Moholy-Nagy, Untitled Portrait. 1926. Herbert Bayer, The Lonely Metropolitan, 1936
El Lissitzky (1924) The Constructor: Self-Portrait
Alphonse Bertillon & Anthropometry
The “Birth” of Cinema Thaumatrope – 1824 Zoetrope – 1834 (appx.) Zoopraxiscope (1879) Left: Magic Lantern – 17th Century Below: Edison’s Kinescope – 1891, prototype
The Lumière Brothers A Selection of stills from 1895 Lunch at the Lumiere Factory; Arrival of a Train; The Gardner
The birth of cinema draws, again, upon a complex series of socio-cultural desires and technical and scientific development. This history is so complex that it is difficult to parse and map. Despite this epistemological problem, the rise of film has a significant effect on how philosophers conceive of being and time – particularly in relation to humans. These lines of inquiry have metaphysical and ontological implications.
Coming to terms with the machine!! Margo Lovejoy locates TWO tendencies at the beginning of the 20th century, namely: Artists who still embraced traditional materials, practices, and forms, even though their consciousness had been changed by the deep technological shifts brought about by the machine age. Cubists, fauves, and post impressionists Russian Constructivists and Italian Futurists Those who, as a result of it, developed an “anti-aesthetic.” Dadaists
Pablo Picasso (1912) Still-Life with Chair Caning
Etienne-Jules Marey (1884) Chronographe Geometrique
Georges Braque (1913) Nature Morte (Fruit Dish, Ace of Clubs)
Edward Muybridge (1887) Nude Descending a Staircase
Marcel Duchamp (1912) Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2
Giacomo Balla (1912) Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash
Luigi Russolo (1912) Dynamism of a Car Gino Severini (1915) Armoured Train in Action
Vladmir Tatlin: Art has a social purpose! Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, 1918-20
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1928) Untitled
Photograms (1926)
DADA Marcel Duchamp (1917) Fountain Hannah Hoch (1919) Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the last Weimar Beer-belly Cultural Epoch in Germany
Jean Arp (1933) According to the Laws of Chance
Francis Picabia (1915) Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity
The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (Large Glass) 1934 Impossible machinic interface that conflates body and machine Deferential instructions manual, Green Box, outs it as a technical system of absurdities Instantiation of the “desiring machine”, an allegory for profane love (the only kind of love left in the 20th century.
FRIEDRICH KITTLER 1943-2011 German media theorist Began as literary scholar, takes materialist approach to media Famously stated: Media determine our situation. There is no software Key Texts: Discourse Networks 1880/1900 (1985) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986) Optical Media (2002)