ABSTRACT
But Bauhaus was not the only avant-garde movement interested in experimentation with technology. Dada, especially through Francis
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Picabia, who identified the machine as ‘the genius of the modern world’ (Picabia in Popper 1993: 11), and Constructivism were equally important in promulgating the role of technology within art. Likewise, Cubism, which had grown out of an ‘increasing sense of urban dynamism and the inability of the painter to register the relativity of object-observer movements with the traditional tools of representation’ (Burnham 1968: 206), and Futurism, with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s exaltation of the machine, were both revolutionary in presenting technology as the means to move forward within aesthetic discourse. Then there was Bertolt Brecht’s enthusiasm for science and technology as tools towards the realisation of a Marxist society and hence instruments, in theatre and life, towards the actualisation of progress. Indeed, even before the robot was introduced in Karel Cˇapek’s play R.U.R. in 1923, works presenting figures that resembled robots appeared in paintings by Kasimir Malevich and Fernand Léger, whose The Card Players (1917) ‘most precisely defines the robot in modern form’ (ibid.: 210). Later machine works were created by Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, although it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that ‘the machine overtly entered the iconography of art’ (ibid.: 211). Picabia suggested a ‘certain merging of interests and physical characteristics between machines and future human beings’ (ibid.: 211), a statement that is still at the heart of the contemporary debate about the cyborg. Photography, of course, also played a major role in the synthesis of art and technology, and such pieces as Etienne-Jules Marey’s Gymnast Jumping over a Chair (1883) and Eadweard Muybridge’s Ascending and Descending Stairs and Descending Stairs and Turning Around, from the series Animal Locomotion (1884-5), drew attention to kinetics and the organisation of time and space in art through technology. Finally, experimental cinema was also crucial in furthering the collaboration between art and technology, especially in works such as Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera (1929).
