1. Historical Antecedents I
The Machine Age & Modernism
An Overview of Key Points in Lovejoy & Kittler

2. MODERNITY???

3. MODERNITY! Historical era characterized by: Master Narratives
Nation-state
Progress through science and technology
Positivism (faith in “the real”)
Industrialization/Mechanization
The “Rational Subject”

4. 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?

5. 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

6. Henry Fox Talbot
The Pencil of Nature,

7. Photographic Vision

8. Làszlo Moholy-Nagy, Untitled Portrait. 1926
Làszlo Moholy-Nagy, Untitled Portrait Herbert Bayer, The Lonely Metropolitan, 1936

9. El Lissitzky (1924) The Constructor: Self-Portrait

10. Alphonse Bertillon & Anthropometry

11. The “Birth” of Cinema
Thaumatrope – Zoetrope – 1834 (appx.) Zoopraxiscope (1879)
Left: Magic Lantern – 17th Century
Below: Edison’s Kinescope – 1891, prototype

12. The Lumière Brothers A Selection of stills from 1895 Lunch at the Lumiere Factory; Arrival of a Train; The Gardner

13. 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.

14. 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

15. Pablo Picasso (1912) Still-Life with Chair Caning

16. Etienne-Jules Marey (1884) Chronographe Geometrique

17. Georges Braque (1913) Nature Morte (Fruit Dish, Ace of Clubs)

18. Edward Muybridge (1887) Nude Descending a Staircase

19. Marcel Duchamp (1912) Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

20. Giacomo Balla (1912) Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash

21. Luigi Russolo (1912) Dynamism of a Car Gino Severini (1915) Armoured Train in Action

22. Vladmir Tatlin: Art has a social purpose!
Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International,

23. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1928) Untitled

24. Photograms (1926)

25. DADA
Marcel Duchamp (1917) Fountain Hannah Hoch (1919) Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the last Weimar Beer-belly Cultural Epoch
in Germany

26. Jean Arp (1933) According to the Laws of Chance

27. Francis Picabia (1915) Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity

28. 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.

29. 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)