High Technē: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the PosthumanIn an age of high tech, our experience of technology has changed tremendously, yet the definition of technology has remained largely unquestioned. High Techne redresses this gap in thinking about technology, examining the shifting relations of technology, art, and culture from the beginnings of modernity to contemporary technocultures. Drawing on the Greek root of technology (techne, generally translated as "art, skill, or craft"), R. L. Rutsky challenges both the modernist notion of technology as an instrument or tool and the conventional idea of a noninstrumental aesthetics. Today, technology and aesthetics have again begun to come together: even basketball shoes are said to exhibit a "high-tech style" and the most advanced technology is called "state of the art." Rutsky charts the history and vicissitudes of this new high-tech techne up to our day -- from Fritz Lang to Octavia Butler, Thomas Edison to Japanese Anime, constructivism to cyberspace. Progressing from the major art movements of modernism to contemporary science fiction and cultural theory, Rutsky provides clear and compelling evidence of a shift in the cultural conceptions of technology and art and demonstrates the centrality of technology to modernism and postmodernism. |
Contents
| 1 | |
The Spirit of Utopia and the Birth of the Cinematic Machine | 23 |
The Mediation of Technology and Gender | 48 |
The AvantGarde Technē and the Myth of Functional Form | 73 |
Within the Space of High Tech | 102 |
Technological Fetishism and the TechnoCultural Unconscious | 129 |
Notes | 159 |
Index | 187 |
Other editions - View all
High Technē: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman R. L. Rutsky No preview available - 1999 |
Common terms and phrases
abstract aesthetic modernism aestheticized André Bazin architecture artistic attempts aura autonomous avant-garde bachelor machine Baudelaire Bazin become Benjamin Blade Runner Burch cathedral cinema complex conception of technology contemporary cultural cyberpunk cyborg defined discourses Donna Haraway dystopian Dziga Vertov Edison elements Enframing eternal example fact False Maria feminine fetishism figured Frankenstein Fredersen Freud functional form Gibson Godzilla Haraway Heidegger high tech Hitler human subject Huyssen idea images Jameson kino-eye Kracauer living logical Lumière films machine aesthetic magical mass production mastery matrix matter mechanical mediation Metropolis modern technology modernist monster monstrous montage movement mutation Neuromancer nology notes notion Oankali object postmodern precisely Press representation represented robot Rotwang Rotwang's science-fictional scientific scientific-technological seems seen sense simply space spirit suggests Suprematism tech-noir technique techno techno-cultural techno-cultural world techno-paganism technological form technological rationality technological reproducibility tion trans uncanny unconscious unsecuring utopian whole William Gibson words York
Popular passages
Page 160 - To perceive the aura of an object we look at, means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
Page 67 - Let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist. Together let us conceive and create the new building of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will rise one day toward heaven from the hands of a million workers, like the crystal symbol of a new faith.
Page 170 - It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning.
Page 47 - It is false to say that the screen is incapable of putting us "in the presence of" the actor. It does so in the same way as a mirror — one must agree that the mirror relays the presence of the person reflected in it — but it is a mirror with a delayed reflection, the tin foil of which retains the image...
Page 29 - By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
Page 116 - A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.
Page 29 - ... on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions.
Page 35 - It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things, or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my...
Page 35 - He had partially unveiled the face of Nature, but her immortal lineaments were still a wonder and a mystery. He might dissect, anatomize, and give names ; but, not to speak of a final cause, causes in their secondary and tertiary grades were utterly unknown to him.
Page 25 - In the second place, if this is indeed the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche ['homely'] into its opposite, das Unheimliche, for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.