(Download) "Cruel Media: On F. T. Marinetti's Media Aesthetics (Essay)" by Annali d'Italianistica ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Cruel Media: On F. T. Marinetti's Media Aesthetics (Essay)
- Author : Annali d'Italianistica
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 199 KB
Description
On February 20, 1909 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti urgently appealed in his Futurist Manifesto (published in the French newspaper Le Figaro) to his Futurist friends: "Andiamo [...]. Andiamo, amici! Partiamo!" (Futurismo 3). This call to action--as urgent and spontaneous it may seem--was written almost three months earlier. Marinetti had waited to publish his new radical concepts rather than risking an earlier publication of the manifesto in December 1908, when daily press and public discourse were very much preoccupied with a recent earthquake that had shaken southern Italy. He waited in order to ensure that his founding manifesto would be received within an atmosphere in which nothing could have distracted the reader of Le Figaro from the news of the birth of a new artistic movement. (1) This example shows that Marinetti had a clear idea of how the medium of the newspaper operated: he recognized that the best ideas are worthless when nobody notices them. Moreover, this management of mass communication foreshadowed strategies of Futurist poetry and theater; namely, that Futurist art privileged the transmission of stimuli over the actual content of the sent message. Furthermore, these stimuli were supposed to affect the recipient in an immediate or tactile way. Futurist art did not address a particular sense but sought to excite the entire nervous system of the recipient. Although certainly no advocate of Futurist art, most famously Walter Benjamin, in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction," recognized the importance of tactility as the privileged mode of sense perception for the modern industrialized world in general. Benjamin understands "tactility" not merely as the sense of touch but as a stimulus that triggers the entire apparatus of perception. The perceiving subject does not have to contemplate to process tactile data, but rather intuitively reacts to it (241-43). This insight is not genuine to Benjamin; rather, it is part of a central discussion in the avant-garde from Futurism to Bauhaus. (2) Most importantly for the Futurist context, Marinetti developed his own idea of a tactile form of art in the manifesto "Tattilismo." (3) Here, he tries to establish a training program for human sensitivity that starts out from refining the sense of touch but should lead to the discovery of completely new or unknown psychic abilities of mankind. These concepts of sense perception had consequences for Futurist aesthetics, and in this article I will show that the search for an interface that embedded the entire nervous system of the audience into the performance provides the basis for Futurist aesthetics. Such strategies can already be found in Marinetti's poetics; however, they become of paramount importance in the Futurist theater, and culminate in Marinetti's radiophonic experiments in the thirties.
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