Cubism and futurism were closely related movements that vied with each
other in the economy of renown. Perception, dynamism, and the dynamism
of perception--these were the issues that passed back and forth between
the two. Cubism, Futurism, and Technologies of the Spirit: Spiritual
Machines and the Cinematic Effect shows how movement became, in the
traditional visual arts, a central factor with the advent of the cinema:
gone were the days when an artwork strived merely to lift experience out
the realm of change and flow.
The cinema at this time was understood as an electric art, akin to
X-rays, coloured light, and sonic energy. In this book, celebrated
filmmaker and author Bruce Elder connects the dynamism that the cinema
made an essential feature of the new artwork to the new science of
electromagnetism. Cubism is a movement on the cusp of the transition
from the Cartesian world of standardized Cartesian coordinates and
interchangeable machine parts to a Galvanic world of continuities and
flows. In contrast, futurism embraced completely the emerging
electromagnetic view of reality.
Cubism, Futurism, and Technologies of the Spirit examines the
similarity and differences between the two movements' engagement with
the new science of energy and shows that the notion of energy made
central to the new artwork by the cinema assumed a spiritual dimension,
as the cinema itself came to be seen as a pneumatic machine.
