"The book presents a different history of the Russian avant-garde and its cultural encounters with the sciences. It is focusing on the entanglements of architects, filmmakers and philosophers with experimental psychologists and physiologists in the 1920swhich are hardly known yet. Famous avant-garde artists like El Lissitzky, Vassily Kandinsky and Dziga Vertov helped propagate a movement in Russia - psychotechnics -, that was actually coming from Germany and America and can be characterized as "psychotechnical boom". At the end of the story told in this book, it becomes clear, that this boom has not finished until today. By analyzing concrete co-operations between artists and scientists and on the basis of not yet published archival material, this book challenges the notion of socialist sciences. At the same time, it gives an entirely new picture of what was thought to be modern art and makes clear, that artistic experimentation had much more than a metaphorical meaning in the arts of the Russian 1920s.In 2007 the book was acknowledged with an award for interdisciplinary research by the Wilhelm-Ostwald-Society, Grossbothen. In 2011 the book received funding by the VolkswagenStiftung to be translated into English and Russian (the Russian edition was published by NLO books in 2019). The book got reviews in NZZ, NTM, Derive, Junge Welt, Sehepunkte"--
The book presents a different history of the Russian avant-garde and its cultural encounters with the sciences. It is focusing on the entanglements of architects, filmmakers and philosophers with experimental psychologists and physiologists in the 1920s which are hardly known yet.
Recenzijas
Much has been written on the relations between the arts and sciences. Margarete Vöhringer's ambitious book goes further and explores ways, at a particular time and place, in which there were not separable related activities but a common experimental practice with material things, in which all was art. The purpose is not to dissolve differences but to specify, in historical detail, the sharing and modification of material practices and instrumentation as they carry from one cultural setting to another.
Roger Smith, The British Journal for the History of Science, 2023:1-2
Introduction.
1. Feed(ing) Back: Nicolai Ladovskys Psychotechnical
Laboratory for Architecture, Moscow 19211927
2. Networking: Vsevolod
Pudovkin's Mechanics of the Brain Film as Reflexology, Leningrad/Moscow
19251926.
3. Grafting: Alexander Bogdanov's Circular Blood Transfusions,
Moscow
19241928. Conclusion: Feeding Back, Networking and Grafting as
Cultural Techniques.
Margarete Vöhringer is currently Professor for the Materiality of Knowledge at Georg-August-University Göttingen. Her research interests include materiality and aesthetics of the sciences, connections between art and science, history of collecting and exhibiting, Russian avant-garde, and cultural techniques of seeing. She has co-edited several anthologies: Sehstörungen. Grenzwerte des Visuellen in Künsten und Wissenschaften (with Anne Kathrin Reulecke, Berlin 2019); Wissenschaft im Museum Ausstellung im Labor (with Anke Te Heesen, Berlin 2014) and Phantome im Labor: Die Verbreitung der Reflexe in Hirnforschung, Kunst und Technik. Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 32(1), 2009 (with Yvonne Wübben).
