Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology: Technicities of Perception

In this book, mechanical and electronic technologies forge connections between two apparently unrelated and chronologically disparate fields of production: today's state-of-the-art military technologies and the experimental art, music, and writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The vast surveillance and killing machines of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries found both resources and resistance in the work of early avant-garde poetics. Modernist aesthetics addressed the conditions of possibility that are most dramatically actualized by contemporary military technology, which both appropriates and combats a technology of the senses. This book shows how certain artworks foreshadow modern technologies in unforeseen and incalculable ways, from Mina Loy and James Joyce to Marcel Duchamp and H.G. Wells, and performs extended readings of weapons systems, attack helicopters, and targeting technologies.