Modernist avant-garde aesthetics and contemporarymilitary technology: technicities of perception

This book analyses the operation of mechanical and electronic technologies inconnection with two seemingly disparate fields: state-of-the-art military equipment of the 20th and 21st centuries and the experimental art, music and writing of the late-19th and early-20th century. A basic aim of visual technologies is to collapse the sphere of perception with that of the perceived object. Modernist aesthetics, working the same terrain, shows that there always remainsan irreducible element of time and space. Military technology tends towards the impossible goal of eliminating this dimension, while modernist aesthetics exploits it. Placing military operations alongside modernist aesthetics revealsthe civic sphere suspended between two incompatible desires. Through close readings of the art and writing of Djuna Barnes, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Mina Loy, Stephane Mallarme, the Italian Futurists and H. G. Wells against Apache attack helicopters, Network-Centric Warfare, satellites, decoys, sirens and radios, this book addresses issues such as targeting, surveillance, visibility and the invisible, broadcast and media, the military body, diasporas, geopolitics and beauty.

• ISBN: 978-0-7486-3988-5
• Editorial: Edinburgh University
• Encuadernacion: Cartoné
• Páginas: 288
• Fecha Publicación: 01/03/2010
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés