Unfinished Modernity and the Idea of the Tékhnē. From Multiple Realities to Fourth Dimension: (East)European Avant-Garde Cases.

The Avant-garde’s turn toward technology was not simply an infatuation with mechanical novelty. It was a metaphysical gambit—a wager that the machine, far from annihilating the aesthetic, might become its crucible. The embrace of technology was, in this sense, a profound act of reorientation: artists and thinkers who had once viewed machinery as the emblem of alienation began to see in it the raw material for a new poetics of the modern. This shift was neither naïve nor univocal. It was strategic, ironic, often messianic. From the Futurists’ eroticization of engines to Constructivist visions of social reengineering, the avant-garde absorbed technology not as passive infrastructure but as a mode of being – a way of thinking, seeing, and producing. The mechanical was no longer merely instrumental; it became symbolic, even sacred. The factory displaced the cathedral and the diagram supplanted the allegory. The importance of this embrace lies in the way it recast the very function of art. The artist was no longer a romantic visionary exiled from history, but an engineer of perception, a constructor of alternative realities, a designer of collective futures. Art became procedural, recursive, and open-ended – less a monument than a model, less an object than an experiment. The technics of creation took precedence over representation. In appropriating the idioms of science, mathematics, and architecture, the avant-garde enacted a formal revolution that paralleled, and sometimes prefigured, technological change. Yet it also subjected these domains to defamiliarization, subversion, and wonder. The mechanical was aestheticized even as aesthetics were mechanized. This dialectic gave rise to new genres, materials, and media, but also to new subjectivities – hybrid figures of the artist-engineer, the poet-coder, the machinic performer. Technology thus became both a tool and a topos - a means of artistic production and a symbolic terrain on which the contradictions of modernity played out. The Avant-garde did not seek to humanize the machine so much as to machinize the human: to reimagine perception, cognition, and affect in terms of rhythm, precision, and structure. This was not an abandonment of the aesthetic, but its reinvention in technical form.