Technology's Pulse: Essays on Rhythm in German Modernism (Volume 5)

by Michael Cowan

Modernity, as has often been observed, was fundamentally concerned with questions of temporality. The period around 1900, in particular, witnessed numerous efforts both to rationalize time and to liberate non-rational temporal experience. Within this broader framework, 'rhythm' came to form the object of an intense and widespread preoccupation. Rhythmical research played a central role not only in the reconceptualisation of human physiology and labour in the late nineteenth century, but also in the emergence of a new leisure culture in the early twentieth. The book traces the ways in which ideas about 'rhythm' were mobilised both to conceptualise modernity and to forge a new understanding of temporal media that came to mark the mass-mediated experience of the 1920 a conception of artistic media as mediators between the organic and the rational, the time of the body and that of the machine.

254 pages, Paperback

First published December 16, 2011

About the author

Michael Cowan is Reader in Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews. He is the author of numerous books and collections including, most recently, Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-garde - Advertising - Modernity.