Art and Technology: from the Machine Aesthetic to the Cyborg Age

Catalog description

Students will explore the link between art and technology in the 20th century with special focus on the historical, theoretical, and ideological implications. Topics include the body in the industrial revolution, utopian, dystopian, and fascist appropriations of the machine, engendering the mechanical body and machine-eroticism, humanism, the principles of scientific management, the paranoiac and bachelor machine, multiples, mass production, and the art factory, industrial design and machines for living, the technological sublime, cyborgs, cyberpunk and the posthuman. Key theorists to be discussed include: Karl Marx, Norbert Weiner, Reyner Banham, Siegfried Gideon, Marshall McCluhan, Michel Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Donna Haraway, and Martin Heidegger, as well as examples from film (Modern Times, Metropolis, Man with the Movie Camera and Blade Runner) and literature (Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Zamyatin’s We). Artists covered include: Tatlin, Rodchenko, Malevich, Moholy-Nagy, Léger, Sheeler, Picabia, Duchamp, Calder, Ernst, Le Corbusier, Klee, Tinguely, Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Beuys, Kiefer, Lewitt, Fischli and Weiss, Acconci, Nam June Paik, Survival Research Laboratories, Bureau of Inverse Technology, Stelarc, Orlan, Dara Birnbaum, Roxy Paine, Marina Abramovic, Kac and Bill Viola.