ISBN: PB: 9783037787465
ISBN: HB: 9783037784334
July 2023
192 pp.
29,7x21,0 cm
420 colour illus.
PB:
£46.00
QTY:
HB:
£28.00
QTY:
Sensing the Future
Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts
Life in the digital economy of information and images enriches us but often induces a sense of being overwhelmed. "Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts" considers the impact of technology by exploring ways it was addressed in the practice of the Hungarian polymath artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), a prominent professor at the Bauhaus and a key fi gure in the history of Modernism. Moholy-Nagy felt that people needed guidance to cope with the onslaught of sensory input in an increasingly technologized, mediatized, hyper-stimulating environment. His ideas informed media theorists such as Walter Benjamin, John Cage, Sigfried Giedion, and Marshall McLuhan, who anticipated digital culture as it emerged. Should we then regard Moholy-Nagy as a pioneer of the digital? His aesthetic engagement with the technology/body problematic broached the notions of immersion, interactivity and bodily participation, innately offering a critique of today's disembodiment. Was he then both a pioneer and a proto-critic of the digital? This book is intended to introduce this seminal fi gure of post-medial practices to younger generations and, by including responses to his work by contemporary artists, to refl ect on the ways in which his work is relevant to artistic practice now.
About the author
Oliver Botar is Professor of Art History at the University of Manitoba in Canada. He is the author of "Technical Detours: The Early Moholy-Nagy Reconsidered" (2006, in Hungarian, 2007) and "A Bauhausler in Canada: Andor Weininger in the 50s" (2009), and is co-editor of "Biocentrism and Modernism" (with Isabel Wunsche, 2011) and "Telehor" (with Klemens Gruber, 2013). He has published numerous articles, curated exhibitions and has lectured widely.