Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde - (Avant-Gardes in Performance) by A Niebisch (Paperback)

About the Book

"The avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century inhabited the media discourses of their time like parasites, constantly irritating and taking from them. Dadaists ripped images of a mechanically reproduced world out of newspapers and magazines and reassembled them in their collages. Futurists instrumentalized the brevity of telegraph messages for their free word poetics. Artists such as F.T. Marinetti, Raoul Hausmann and Luigi Russolo constantly abused existing media technologies and hijacked public communication. This study traces these subversive tactics from avant-garde poetry to media technological experiments with radio tubes"--

Book Synopsis

Niebisch retraces how the early Avant-Garde movements started out as parasites inhabiting and irritating the emerging mass media circuits of the press, cinema, and wired and wireless communication and how they aimed at creating a media ecology based on and inspired by technologies such as the radio and the photo cell.

Review Quotes

"Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde is a highly original study combining three areas of research that should have been merged long ago: Michel Serres' theory of the parasite, Friedrich Kittler's contribution to our understanding of the military origins of modern media, and historical analyses of Dadaism and Futurism. Giving a new twist to an old story, Niebisch turns heroic rebel-artists into profiteers of media parasitism: the new technologies create the disturbances that are then refunctionalized and codified as art." - Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, professor, German Studies, University of British Columbia

"Cultural analysis at its best: this book suspends the study of media culture from technological determinism by focusing on 'parasitic' uses and creative misuses of new technologies in early 20th century avant-garde e.g Futurism, Dada, while at the same time cross-checking such media artistic practices against the engineering evidence. Some hitherto neglected or even unknown discoveries from the archive are being revealed, ranging from poetical and optical to acoustic (and even 'optophonetic') devices. Thus the reader is provided with rich material and suggestions to judge himself if 'noisy' avant-garde uses and modifications of technology are indeed 'subversive' interventions in the cultural order and in the ecology of media, or if they act on a just metaphorical level." - Wolfgang Ernst, chair of Media Theories, Humboldt University, Berlin

About the Author

Arndt Niebisch is an assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA.