Mechanical Motion as Aesthetic Experience. Futurism and the Kinetic Revolution of the Machine, between Art History and Modern Metaphysics

This paper traces the connection between mechanical motion and aesthetic experience in modernity, particularly in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's futurist movement and in some of Wim Delvoye's contemporary artworks. Since the interest in mechanical motion pervades the field of modern aesthetics, thus shaping a certain experience, our aim is to demonstrate that this process is not unequivocal and therefore to highlight two possible interpretations of it. Firstly, the Heideggerian view on modern metaphysics and technology allows us to grasp a specific meaning of the concepts of motion and space in the modern Zeitgeist in order to depict futurism as the aesthetic achievement of a nihilistic technocracy. A less radical approach, as developed by the art historian Horst Bredekamp, could nevertheless trace the history of early Western modernity's interest in mechanics in order to reveal a paradoxical relation to Antiquity and classical artworks. The nodal point of the seemingly divergent approaches to the aesthetic status of mechanical motion in both early and late modernity is to be found in a conception of a new truth of art, which pertains to a kind of vitalism expressed in Marinetti's futurism through a mechanical motion regarded as an extension of artist's own physiology.