*This seventy-five-year-old declaration sounds remarkably New Aesthetic. It's an argument: machines surround us now, we spend all our time with machines, more and more are coming along faster and faster, and it's old-fashioned not to recognize that. Creatives should get on with accustoming themselves to the new realities of vision and production. If you took out the term "machine" and substituted "software," you'd almost be there.
*The emphasis on glitching – "re-route them into functioning in irregular ways" – and the projection of animism and vitalism onto non-human things, that's an especially New Aesthetic attitude. The bit about machines as reproducing insects sounds rather Singularitarian.
*It's of interest that, during his entire lifetime, nobody was ever able to figure out what Bruno Munari was really doing, or what Munari was quite getting at. Munari was famous, busy, productive and even quite popular, but always remained somehow indefinable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Munari
Manifesto del Macchinismo
Manifesto of Machinism
Bruno Munari, 1938
"Today's world is a world of machines.
"We live among machines, they help us with everything we do in our work and recreation. But what do we know about their moods, their natures, their animal defects, if not through arid and pedantic technical knowledge?
(((In English that sentence may sound like a train wreck, but in Italian it goes down like gelato. "Ma cosa sappiamo noi dei lore umori, della lore nature, dei lore difetti animali, se non attraverso cognizioni tecniche, aride e pedanti?")))
"Machines reproduce themselves faster than mankind, almost as fast as the most prolific of insects; they already force us to busy ourselves with them, to spend a great deal of time taking care of them; they have spoiled us; we have to keep them clean, provide them with nourishment and rest, continually attend to them and meet their every need. In a few years' time we will become their little slaves.
"Artists are the only ones who can save mankind from this danger. Artists have to be interested in machines, have to abandon their romantic paint-brushes, their dusty palettes, their canvases and easels. They have to start understanding the anatomy of machines, the language of machines, their nature, and to re-route them into functioning in irregular ways to create works of art with the machines themselves, using their own means.
"No more oil paints but blowtorches, chemical reagents, chroming, rust, coloring by anodes, thermal alterations.
"No more canvases and stretchers, but metals, plastics, synthetic rubbers and resins.
"The form, color, movement, noise of the world of machines no longer viewed from without and deliberately reproduced, but harmoniously composed.
"Machines today are monsters!
"Machines must become works of art!
"We shall discover the art of machines!"
