This book deals with the ways in which visual artists have reflected on the cultural meaning of technology, and the particular aesthetic of machines, throughout the twentieth century. It is the first comprehensive treatment of Machine Art and covers the most important historical developments as well as the key concepts of machine aesthetics. The book examines a variety of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century artworks that articulate people’s changing relationship with technical devices and infrastructures. It traces historical lineages that connect art of different periods, looking for co ... More

This book deals with the ways in which visual artists have reflected on the cultural meaning of technology, and the particular aesthetic of machines, throughout the twentieth century. It is the first comprehensive treatment of Machine Art and covers the most important historical developments as well as the key concepts of machine aesthetics. The book examines a variety of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century artworks that articulate people’s changing relationship with technical devices and infrastructures. It traces historical lineages that connect art of different periods, looking for continuities that link works from the end of the twentieth century to developments in the 1950s and 1960s and to works from the avant-gardes of the 1910s and 1920s. The investigation focuses on four specific domains of artistic engagement with technology: algorithms and machine autonomy; image, vision, and the advent of technical imaging; the human body in its relation to machines; and ecology. The book argues that systems thinking and ecological theories have brought about a fundamental shift in the cultural meaning of technology, which has also caused a change in the way technology impacts the formation of human subjectivity. This changing relationship between technology and subjectivity has been articulated by the different types of "machine art" throughout the twentieth century.