New Technologies, New Techniques
This panel will investigate the role that technology played in the art and architecture of a post-war situation that had to cope, on the one hand, with the memories of the destructive potential of technology and, on the other, with its highly developed and assimilative nature. After the war, European nations experienced an unprecedented level of economic growth and industrial development. The subsequent colonization of everyday life and the captivation of the popular imagination by technology and science evoked a variety of reactions. Ranging from enthusiastic celebration to skeptical critique, these reactions in turn prompted the development of new techniques and materials that greatly impacted both the spatial and figurative understandings of art and architecture. Lucio Fontana’s Spatial Environments, the Independent Group’s interest in the illustrations of popular science fiction, and Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon represent some of the strategies that were generated in response to the prominence of technology. Topics to be addressed include the development and implementation of new media and production techniques; conceptions of the space age and other technological advances; and the way that artists and architects critiqued conventional means of production in the face of the radical transformation of daily life on earth.
Panel Presentations:
- Welcome to the Machine: Art and the Technological Society in Post-War Europe by Dr. S. Petersen, University of Delaware
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A “Regional Multi-National?” The Design Geography of IBM Europe by J. Harwood, Columbia
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Realism “Through the Immaterial” by K. Cabañas, Princeton
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May 1968 and the Question of the Image by V. Scott, SUNY Binghamton
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Out of the Studio and Into the Factory: The Rise of Panel-Techology in 1950s Czechoslovakia by Kimberly Zarecor, Columbia
Panel
Chair: Dr. Stephen Petersen, University of
Delaware
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