The European Avant-Garde(s) and Technologies: Unfinished Modernity and the Idea of Tékhnē—the One Hundred Years’ Revolution, 1850–1950

Dear Colleagues,

Exposé

The century spanning 1850 to 1950 marked a seismic shift in Europe’s aesthetic, philosophical, and technological sensibilities—a “hundred years’ revolution” that continues to echo today. This era saw artistic practice break away from the gravitational pull of beauty, mimesis, and historical continuity, redirecting itself toward experimental models: machines, systems, blueprints, codes, and speculative designs. At the center of this transformation stood the avant-garde—not as a unified movement, but as a constellation of radical experiments across Europe that sought to shape, respond to, and defy the upheavals of modernity.

This volume revisits this complex moment of entanglement between avant-garde movements and technology. We aim to explore how artistic vanguards in France, Russia, Germany, Italy, Britain, and elsewhere engaged with the promises and perils of technological modernity—not merely using its tools, but adopting its logics and metaphysics. What emerges from this engagement is not a simple story of progress, but a conflicted terrain of utopian aspirations, ironic subversions, and philosophical ambivalences. The ancient idea of tékhne—a fusion of making and knowing—serves as our conceptual guide through these aesthetic and cultural reorientations. Technology was not just a motif, but a redefinition of perception, authorship, embodiment, and time.

The avant-garde did not simply depict the machine; it became machinic. It functioned as an aesthetic laboratory, a performative device, and a speculative engine. This volume invites contributions that critically examine these technocultural convergences and contradictions—essays that are bold in scope, theoretically rigorous, and attuned to the artistic, philosophical, and political tensions that defined this era.

Below, we describe the main design concepts of the proposed project, clustered in eight major areas of focus:

I. The Avant-Garde’s Embrace of Technology: Contents and Discontents

The avant-garde’s turn to technology was never a mere fascination with mechanical novelty. It was a metaphysical wager: that the machine, far from negating the aesthetic, could become its crucible. This reorientation cast the artist not as a romantic exile but as an engineer of perception, a designer of collective futures. Art was no longer a monument but a model; it was less an object than an experiment. Creation became procedural, recursive, and open-ended.

In appropriating the languages of science, mathematics, and architecture, avant-garde forms often paralleled or anticipated technological shifts. Yet, these idioms were not merely mimicked—they were defamiliarized, ironized, and aestheticized. Technology has become both medium and metaphor, tool and topos, a means of production and a symbolic site of modernity’s contradictions. The figure of the artist merged with that of the coder, the builder, and the machinic performer. The avant-garde sought not to humanize the machine but to mechanize the human: to reconceive thought, perception, and affect through the rhythms and structures of technology.

II. Transnational Cartographies: The Main Countries of Avant-Garde Experimentation

The avant-garde was never monolithic. Its forms emerged in heterogeneous responses to local conditions, even as a transnational conversation evolved across Europe. France, Russia, Germany, Italy, and Britain each produced distinct yet overlapping visions of technological modernity. In France, Parisian modernism fused literary experimentation with visual abstraction. Apollinaire, Picabia, and Duchamp deployed collage, irony, and typographic innovation to evoke the fragmentation of urban life and the surreal aura of mechanized modernity. In the Russian Empire, after the 1917 Revolution, technology emerged as both utopia and existential threat. Constructivists like Tatlin, Rodchenko, and Lissitzky sought to merge art with industry, while poets such as Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov imagined language itself as a machine. Meyerhold’s biomechanics and Gastev’s labor theories blurred performance and productivity, poetics and Taylorism.

In Germany, the Bauhaus under Gropius and Moholy-Nagy pursued a synthesis between art, architecture, and technology. German Expressionism, in contrast, confronted mechanization with existential critique. Photography, film, and kinetic art became tools of both integration and resistance. Italian Futurism, spearheaded by Marinetti, offered a hyperbolic embrace of speed, violence, and mechanical energy. Yet theatricality and irony undercut its technophilic zeal. Even at its most militant, Italian Futurism remained rhetorically unstable, laced with contradictions.

In the UK, British modernism oscillated between mechanophilia and melancholia. The Vorticists channeled mechanical power into abstraction, while figures like T.S. Eliot explored the spiritual vacuity of industrial civilization. British responses often tempered innovation with elegy. Together, these national formations reveal a network of responses to technological modernity diverse in language and ideology, but unified in their desire to reimagine art’s role in the machine age.

But what exactly happened at the “periphery”, in countries less readily known for their radical avant-garde practices?

A shift of attention from the mainstream avant-garde centers to the (geographical) periphery is very much required.

III. Aesthetic Transfigurations: 1850–1950

Between 1850 and 1950, the arts were not merely shaped by new content but by new epistemic conditions. Technologies such as photography, the phonograph, cinema, aviation, and telegraphy redefined perception, temporality, and subjectivity. They altered not just what could be represented, but how representation itself functioned. Art began to mirror the logic of modern systems: grids, montages, codes, and feedback loops. Movements like Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism internalized the rhythms and ruptures of technological life. Traditional notions of medium, authorship, and aesthetic autonomy grew unstable. Yet this transformation was not seamless. Dada, Surrealism, and Expressionism resisted the rationality of the machine with absurdity, dream-logic, and grotesque deformation. The avant-garde did not merely celebrate the machine; it interrogated it. Art became the site where modernity’s promises and threats were negotiated—where aesthetic innovation encountered the trauma of mechanized war, the alienation of industrial labor, and the hollowing of symbolic meaning.

IV. Poggioli and Habermas: Incomplete Projects

Renato Poggioli’s theory of the avant-garde remains a foundational point of departure. For Poggioli, the avant-garde is not simply a historical formation, but a structural impulse—marked by rupture, experimentalism, and the interplay of utopianism and nihilism. In his essay “Technology and the Avant-Garde”, he posits that the machine operates not only as an object but as a principle. The artist becomes an engineer of failure and possibility, creating in a register of epistemic risk.

This notion resonates with Jürgen Habermas’s influential formulation of modernity as “an incomplete project.” Habermas critiques the avant-garde’s failure to integrate its aesthetic negations with lasting cultural reconstruction. Poggioli, less normative but equally wary, highlights the danger of avant-garde novelty calcifying into cliché. Yet both thinkers remain invested in the avant-garde’s potential—as a ferment of critique, a space for renewal, and a site where the contradictions of technological modernity are rendered visible and disputable. For Poggioli, this means resisting both technicism and tradition. For Habermas, it involves reactivating the Enlightenment’s communicative ideals without succumbing to instrumental rationality.

V. Humor, Irony, and the Machine

Irony occupies a vital, if underexplored, place in the technological avant-garde. Particularly in Russia, the myth of the machine was subjected to comic deflation and grotesque inversion. Khlebnikov’s linguistic neologisms, Kharms’ absurdities, and Mayakovsky’s bombastic self-parody exemplify a poetics of malfunction.

This ironic “humorism”, as Poggioli termed it, operates not as levity but as critique. It mocks the dream of rationalizing desire or standardizing subjectivity. Tatlin’s Letatlin—a beautiful, impractical flying machine—stands as a poetic emblem of a failed utopia. Similarly, Shklovsky’s analogies are both mechanistic and enchanting, estranging perception through theoretical wit.

Elsewhere, Dada’s nonsense and anti-art provocations, Italian post-Futurist theatricality, and British modernist melancholy continue this ironic dialectic. The machine is not rejected but rendered uncanny. Modernity’s order yields absurdity, its rationalism, bureaucracy. Irony becomes the scalpel with which the avant-garde dissects its own ideals.

VI. Shklovsky’s Device: Defamiliarization as Method

The Russian Formalist concept of the device (priyom)—as developed by Viktor Shklovsky in his paradigmatic “Art as Technique”—offers a potent framework for understanding avant-garde technopoetics. The device, especially in the form of defamiliarization (ostranenie), disrupts perceptual habits and restores visibility to the world. When applied to avant-garde technology, it becomes structural. Machines are not merely depicted but incorporated into form. Apollinaire’s typography, Khlebnikov’s syntactic explosions, Meyerhold’s biomechanics, all operate as aesthetic devices that reorder cognition. These are not mere stylistic flourishes, but epistemological machines. Shklovsky’s own prose functions as an ad hoc device: recursive, circuitous, filled with breakdowns. His theory resists instrumental meaning in favor of estrangement and interpretive openness. In this context, the device mediates between organic perception and mechanical logic—between code and chaos.

VII. Poetics of the Machine: Khlebnikov and Tatlin

For major avant-garde figures like Khlebnikov and Tatlin, technology was less a system of control than a speculative field of metaphor and transformation. Khlebnikov’s “cities shaped like trees” and numerical poetry were diagrams of cosmic rhythm, not blueprints. His machines failed beautifully: they worked on the level of thought, not function. Tatlin, though more materially grounded, shared this vision. His Monument to the Third International—the spiraling Tatlin Tower—embodied both utopian architecture and poetic impossibility. Likewise, his Letatlin evoked communion with the sky more than flight. These were machines that signified rather than served. Their poetics resided in failure, curvature, and metaphor—what Roman Jakobson might call the metaphoric axis of language.

VIII. Mechanized Bodies: Meyerhold and Gastev

The avant-garde’s interrogation of the machine extended to the body. Vsevolod Meyerhold’s biomechanics and Aleksey Gastev’s labor aesthetics offer two starkly contrasting visions of mechanized gesture. Meyerhold rejected psychological interiority in favor of stylized, repeatable movement. His actors became semiotic machines—gestures transformed into pictograms. Gastev, by contrast, envisioned the worker as a standardized extension of the machine, subject to rigorous scientific management. His poetics effaced the body into diagram. Meyerhold’s aesthetic ambiguity resisted this erasure. His mechanical gestures were theatrical, ironic, and choreographic. While Gastev scripted the worker, Meyerhold estranged the stage. The tension between them reflects a broader Soviet dialectic: between standardization and stylization, automation and autonomy. In this space, the body becomes a site of ideological and aesthetic contestation.

Invitation to contribute

We welcome submissions that engage critically, creatively, and rigorously with the rich intersections between avant-garde aesthetics and technological modernity across the “long century” from 1850 to 1950. We invite contributors that revisit this “one hundred years’ revolution” with theoretical rigor and historical insight.

• How did the European avant-garde absorb, resist, and reimagine technology?
• How did tékhne reshape perception, subjectivity, and form?
• What can the avant-garde teach us about the paradoxes of modernity and its unfinished futures?

Contributions may focus on national case studies, specific figures, artistic devices, philosophical paradigms, or transdisciplinary frameworks.

We particularly welcome essays that reflect on the unfinished project of modernity, the poetics of devices, and the estrangement of the machine—that is, on how the idea of tékhnē was reconceptualized across literature, visual arts, performance, theory, architecture, and sonic media.

Topics for the future papers may include but are not limited to the following:

• Technological metaphors in avant-garde literature;
• Aesthetic devices and formal experimentation;
• Utopian and dystopian constructions of the machine;
• Intermediality and the avant-garde;
• Embodiment, gesture, and mechanized performance;
• The concept of the engineer–artist;
• Political aesthetics and technological iconographies;
• Poetics of failure, irony, or malfunction;
• Theoretical engagements with Shklovsky, Poggioli, Jakobson, Habermas, etc.;
• Comparative analyses of national traditions versus transnational ones;
• Imaginaries of future cities, machines, or devices;
• Materiality and the metaphysics of form.

Please send proposals of up to 500 words, along with a detailed biographical note, by July 1, 2025 to Prof. Dr. Dennis Ioffe at Denis.Ioffe@ulb.be.

About the Guest Editor:

Prof. Dr. Dennis Ioffe is Chair of Russian Studies (Titulaire de la Chaire de langue et littérature Russe) at Université libre de Bruxelles. Since 2016, he has been a co-Editor-in-Chief of Slavic Literatures (1st Quartile Scopus Scimago), Elsevier Science BV. Since 2017, he has been Senior Scientific Evaluator at The European Commission (EC), The EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, Brussels. Before coming to ULB, Dr. Ioffe served as a post-doctoral Research Fellow and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Languages and Cultures (Slavic and East-European), The Faculty of Arts, Ghent University. Aside from UGent, Dennis Ioffe has held lecturing and research appointments at the University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom), Memorial University (Canada), and the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands).

He has authored more than 150 scholarly articles and edited/co-edited numerous academic collections, which were released by major academic publishers in Western Europe and the US. Dennis Ioffe currently works on a number of Russia and Eastern Europe-related research projects focused on the intersections between art and politics and culture and activism, which spread chronologically from historical modernism to contemporary protests. During the last decade, Dennis has delivered more than 100 conference presentations and invited lectures at major international venues in the USA, Germany, Belgium, Russia, the UK, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, South Korea, Israel, Finland, Serbia, Spain, France, and Canada.

Prof. Dr. Dennis Ioffe
Guest Editor

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• Tékhnē
• defamiliarization
• experimentalism
• metaphoric technology
• aesthetic device
• biomechanics
• humorism
• constructivism
• performative modernity
• technopoetics
• poetic Machines
• avant-garde infrastructure

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