Direction d'ouvrage
| Résumé : | The century spanning 1850 to 1950 marked a seismic shift in Europe’s aesthetic, philosophical, and technological sensibilities—a “hundred years’ revolution” that continues to echo today. This era saw artistic practice break away from the gravitational pull of beauty, mimesis, and historical continuity, redirecting itself toward experimental models: machines, systems, blueprints, codes, and speculative designs. At the center of this transformation stood the avant-garde—not as a unified movement, but as a constellation of radical experiments across Europe that sought to shape, respond to, and defy the upheavals of modernity.This volume revisits this complex moment of entanglement between avant-garde movements and technology. We aim to explore how artistic vanguards in France, Russia, Germany, Italy, Britain, and elsewhere engaged with the promises and perils of technological modernity—not merely using its tools, but adopting its logics and metaphysics. What emerges from this engagement is not a simple story of progress, but a conflicted terrain of utopian aspirations, ironic subversions, and philosophical ambivalences. The ancient idea of tékhne—a fusion of making and knowing—serves as our conceptual guide through these aesthetic and cultural reorientations. Technology was not just a motif, but a redefinition of perception, authorship, embodiment, and time.The avant-garde did not simply depict the machine; it became machinic. It functioned as an aesthetic laboratory, a performative device, and a speculative engine. This volume invites contributions that critically examine these technocultural convergences and contradictions—essays that are bold in scope, theoretically rigorous, and attuned to the artistic, philosophical, and political tensions that defined this era. |
