Pontus Hultén (ed.): The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (1968)

Exhibition catalogue of one of the most important exhibitions of the 1960s dealing with art and technology. The show was held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 25 November 1968 – 9 February 1969. Its curator K.G. Pontus Hultén described it as a “collection of comments on technology by artists of the Western world,” particularly in the modern age when “the mechanical machine – which can most easily be defined as an imitation of our muscles – is losing its dominating position among the tools of mankind; while electronic and chemical devices – which imitate the processes of the brain and the nervous system – are becoming increasingly important.”

The exhibition traveled to Rice Museum, Rice University, Houston, 25 March – 18 May 1969; San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, 23 June – 24 August 1969.

Publisher Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1968
218 pages
via MoMA

Review: William A. Camfield (Art Bulletin, 1971).
Exh.review: Time (1968).

Publisher

PDF (53 MB, updated on 2016-9-23: pagination corrected, bookmarks and metadata added, file optimized, page 59 still missing)

After Us: Art—Science—Politics, 1 (2015) [English/Spanish]

“Through essays, pictorials and fiction, After Us hopes to look beyond the horizon, exploring developments in science and technology, new forms and expressions in art, and alternative political thinking. In print and online.”

Contents: Essays by Nora N. Khan on artificial superintelligence, Liam Young on architecture for machines, Nick Srnicek on neoliberalism and aestheticism, Benedict Singleton on modern film archetypes. Interview with Walter Murch by Dave Tompkins. Fiction by Juan Mateos. Art by Timothy Saccenti & Sam Rolfes, Lawrence Lek. Illustrations by Stathis Tsemberlidis, Adam Ferriss, Alex Solman, Patrick Savile.

Publisher Optigram, London, Sep 2015
32 pages

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PDF (English, 10 MB)
HTML (Spanish, expand menu item “translations” to browse contents)

See also Issue 2.

Craig Buckley: Graphic Apparatuses: Architecture, Media, and the Reinvention of Assembly 1956-1973 (2013)

“This study examines the work of a number of architects who sought to rethink the physical, visual, and historiographic problems of assembly at a moment when the discipline was being destabilized by changing cultural politics and the proliferation of new electronic media.

Through a series of case studies, it analyzes buildings, images, publications, prototypes, and films made from the late 1950s to the early 1970s by architects in London (Theo Crosby and Edward Wright), Vienna (Hans Hollein, Gunther Feuerstein, Walter Pichler), Paris (the Utopie group), and Florence (the Superstudio group).

I argue that during these years the making of composite images was intensely identified with imagining new forms of construction, a dynamic informed by concepts of montage pioneered by the historical avant-gardes. Rather than compare postwar experiments to those of the 1920s, the dissertation considers how emerging media practices responded to the absorption of montage into postwar mass culture. The rethinking of montage paralleled a changing attitude toward machines, in which an earlier 20th-century ambition to master mechanization through design and prefabrication gave way to an attitude emphasizing a more flexible combination and rearrangement of parts, materials, and concepts drawn from a wide range of sources. Assembling an image out of disparate photomechanical elements graphically enacted the manner in which architects imagined appropriating technologies and materials from outside the domain of architecture in a bid to transform the discipline. During these years architects engaged montage as a mode of working both within and against the space of architectural publicity; one that was less illustrative than it was performative.

If efforts to reinvent problems of assembly aimed to shift discourse within the discipline, they were also shaped by changes in the technological apparatuses of mechanical reproduction, notably the displacement of industrial letterpress by photo-offset lithography. In retrospect, grasping changing ideas of assembly helps to comprehend how during these years the status of building shifted within architectural culture, while also prefiguring how habits of “cut and paste,”–the continual combination and alteration of ready-made visual material–would become central to the operational culture of digital tools in our own time.”

Publisher Architecture Department, Princeton University, 2013
Advisors: Beatriz Colomina and Spyros Papapetros
316 pages

Publisher

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