Humanity’s Liberation or Decline?: Representations of Technology in East/Central European Cultures in the Early 20th Century

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Discussing diverse modes of artistic expression (literature, film, art, and photography), the panel focuses on the representations of technology in East/Central European Cultures in the early 20th century. With subjectivity as a point of reference, the essays investigate modern technologies (urban infrastructure, medical discoveries, and media) as simultaneously offering potential solutions to the epistemological crisis of the turn of the century and posing threats to the subject as a category. Subjectivity mediated through film and photography with its inaccuracies, distortions, and idiosyncratic connection to time and space was of particular interest to Polish avant-garde poets (Tytus Czyżewski, Mila Elin, and Bruno Jasieński) as well as to Russian poet and artist Maximilian Voloshin’s photographic theory and practice. The motif of dismemberment as construction of selfhood was a central concern for, among others, Aleksandr Beliaev’s novella The Head of Professor Dowell (1925), Aleksei Gastev’s labor writings, and Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain (1926), while the dehumanizing aspect of urbanization finds its representation in overwhelming, depopulated metropolitan spaces in Mstislav Dobuzhinsky’s art. Additionally, the presentations raise the question of to what extent the turn to avant-garde in aesthetics shifts the perspective, changing the approach to technology, and in what ways technological anxiety was a significant current in experimental cultural production in the 1920s.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Andrzej Brylak, U of Southern California

Papers

• The Uncanny Lenses: Film and Photography in the Polish Avant-Garde Poetry of the 1920s - Agnieszka Karolina Jezyk, U of Washington

• Demon Ex Machina: Maximilian Voloshin and the Anxiety of Technology - Elena Leonenko, UC Berkeley

• Ghosts in the Urban Machine: Mstislav Dobuzhinsky’s Images of Technological Modernity - Lucas Plazek, UC Berkeley

Discussant

• Andrzej Brylak, U of Southern California