| Description |
1 online resource (294 pages) : illustrations, maps |
| Contents |
The architecture machine: industrial design and theories of racial evolution -- The Bauhaus and the aura of authorship: class and race in the age of technological reproducibility -- Post-war European modernism: or, what the primitive hut really said -- Bricolage, megastructure, interface: Yona Friedman and the humanitarian machine -- The earth unfolded: Aspen, Africa, and the geopolitics of environment -- Harlem speaks to Aspen: environmental politics versus environmental design -- Pentecostal technologies: the architecture machine (again) -- Technological sovereignty and the global south -- Conclusion: the present and future of spiritual ergonomics |
| Summary |
An examination of how concepts of "the savage" facilitated technological approaches to modernist design Attempting to derive aesthetic systems from natural structures of human cognition, designers looked toward the "savage mind"--a way of thinking they associated with a racialized subaltern. In Savage Mind to Savage Machine, Ginger Nolan uncovers an enduring relationship between "the savage" and the development of technology and its wide-ranging impact on society, including in the fields of architecture and urbanism, the industrial arts, and digital design.Nolan focuses on the relationship between the applied arts and the structuralist social sciences, proposing that the late-nineteenth-century rise of Freudian psychology, ethnology, and structuralist linguistics offered innovations and new opportunities in studying human cognition. She looks at institutions ranging from the Public Industrial Arts School of Philadelphia and the Weimar Bauhaus to the MIT Media Lab and the Centre Mondial Informatique, revealing a persistent theme of twentieth-century design: to supplant language with more subliminal, aesthetic modes of communication, thereby inculcating a deep intimacy between human habit and new technologies of production, communication, and consumption.This book's ultimate critique is of the development of the ergonomics of the spirit--the design of the human cognitive apparatus in relation to new aesthetic technologies. Nolan sees these ergonomics as a means of depoliticizing societies through aesthetic technologies intended to seamlessly integrate humans into the programs of capitalist modernity. Revising key modernist design narratives, Savage Mind to Savage Machine provides a deep historical foundation for understanding our contemporary world |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Description based on print version record |
| Subject |
Aesthetics, Modern -- 20th century.
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Ethnic attitudes.
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Human engineering.
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Technology -- Social aspects.
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Aesthetics, Modern.
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ergonomics.
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Aesthetics, Modern
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Ethnic attitudes
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Human engineering
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Technology -- Social aspects
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9781452965505 |
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1452965501 |
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