Hal Foster: Prosthetic Gods (2004)

“How to imagine not only a new art or architecture but a new self or subject equal to them? In Prosthetic Gods, Hal Foster explores this question through the works and writings of such key modernists as Gauguin and Picasso, F. T. Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, Adolf Loos and Max Ernst. These diverse figures were all fascinated by fictions of origin, either primordial and tribal or futuristic and technological. In this way, Foster argues, two forms came to dominate modernist art above all others: the primitive and the machine.

Foster begins with the primitivist fantasies of Gauguin and Picasso, which he examines through the Freudian lens of the primal scene. He then turns to the purist obsessions of the Viennese architect Loos, who abhorred all things primitive. Next Foster considers the technophilic subjects propounded by the futurist Marinetti and the vorticist Lewis. These “new egos” are further contrasted with the “bachelor machines” proposed by the dadaist Ernst. Foster also explores extrapolations from the art of the mentally ill in the aesthetic models of Ernst, Paul Klee, and Jean Dubuffet, as well as manipulations of the female body in the surrealist photography of Brassai, Man Ray, and Hans Bellmer. Finally, he examines the impulse to dissolve the conventions of art altogether in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, the scatter pieces of Robert Morris, and the earthworks of Robert Smithson, and traces the evocation of lost objects of desire in sculptural work from Marcel Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti to Robert Gober.

Although its title is drawn from Freud, Prosthetic Gods does not impose psychoanalytic theory on modernist art; rather, it sets the two into critical relation and scans the greater historical field that they share.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2004
ISBN 0262062429, 9780262062428
455 pages

Key terms:
Max Ernst, Art Nouveau, Robert Gober, Medusa, Ornament and Crime, Wyndham Lewis, surrealist, psychoanalysis, primitivist, phallus, modernist, Hans Bellmer, Adolf Loos, Dadaist, Le Corbusier, apotropaic, Dada, Paul Gauguin, Paul Klee, vorticist

Reviews: Cohen (CAA Reviews 2005), Bowring (Frieze 2005), Hopkins (Papers of Surrealism 2005), Cooper (Art Bulletin 2006).

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David A. Mindell: Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (2002)

Today, we associate the relationship between feedback, control, and computing with Norbert Wiener’s 1948 formulation of cybernetics. But the theoretical and practical foundations for cybernetics, control engineering, and digital computing were laid earlier, between the two world wars. In Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics, David A. Mindell shows how the modern sciences of systems emerged from disparate engineering cultures and their convergence during World War II.

Mindell examines four different arenas of control systems research in the United States between the world wars: naval fire control, the Sperry Gyroscope Company, the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and Vannevar Bush’s laboratory at MIT. Each of these institutional sites had unique technical problems, organizational imperatives, and working environments, and each fostered a distinct engineering culture. Each also developed technologies to represent the world in a machine.

At the beginning of World War II, President Roosevelt established the National Defense Research Committee, one division of which was devoted to control systems. Mindell shows how the NDRC brought together representatives from the four pre-war engineering cultures, and how its projects synthesized conceptions of control, communications, and computing. By the time Wiener articulated his vision, these ideas were already suffusing through engineering. They would profoundly influence the digital world.

As a new way to conceptualize the history of computing, this book will be of great interest to historians of science, technology, and culture, as well as computer scientists and theorists.

Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002
ISBN 0801868955, 9780801868955
439 pages

Mindell’s lecture about the book at MIT (video, 78 min, 2002)

Review (Larry Owens, History of Science and Technology)

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Jane Arthurs, Iain Grant (eds.): Crash Cultures: Modernity, Mediation and the Material (2000)

We are surrounded daily with crashing vehicles, economies, computers and bodies. At the intersection of speed, development, design and automation, the crash punctuates cultural and technological change with the automated mundanity of death, risk and destruction. Yet the only studies conducted into crashes concern safety measures and the mythology of prevention. This volume aims therefore to investigate crashes to the fullest extent of their invasion of the everyday, to document their commemoration and productivity, and to offer accounts of the significance of these extreme yet banal moments.

Published by Intellect Books, 2000
ISBN 1841500917, 9781841500911
202 pages

Key terms:
English Patient, heterotopia, Amelia Earhart, death drive, Pleasure Principle, Un Chien Andalou, animist, Kensington Palace, mass media, Camera Lucida, Saipan, BBFC, jouissance, Roland Barthes, Negative Dialectics, semiotic, Rodney King, Paul Mantz, Jackie Cochran, Tokyo Rose

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