The Avant-Garde and Its "Mis-Use" of Existing Technology

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The history of the avant-garde and its varied uses of technologies is not a simple narrative of technological progress. From the very beginnings there is an ambivalence towards technological norms. On the one hand, the avant-garde embraces new technologies, being aware that it owes its very own possibility to technological innovation. On the other, in order to transform passive consumer equipment into creative tools it often refers to less sophisticated techniques and practices falling deliberately short of technological standards. As Peter Wollen (1980) has pointed out, “avant-garde film has had other technological implications [than standard film]“; most prominently it figures in what Wollen calls a “mis-use of existing technology.” Already the very first avant-garde films, Corra’s and Ginna‘s lost filmic experiments from 1911, were films made without the use of a camera. Since then, a wide range of artists have put their trust in the technique of direct film (handmade or autogenerative), among them Len Lye, Norman McLaren, Harry Smith, Stan Brakhage, Kurt Kren, and David Gatten, to name just a few. Not only direct film, but expanded cinema too has rejected the usual tools of filmmaking and, equally, of exhibition practices (projector, screen). Another form of the creative mis-use of existing technology can be seen in László Moholy-Nagy’s suggestion (in his article ‘Production – Reproduction,’ 1922) regarding the gramophone record: that is, to cut sound grooves directly into the wax plate so as to produce sounds entirely independent of any sonic event. Another type of mis-use mentioned by Wollen is the “hyperbolic use” of existing technology, which occurs, for example, in the exaggerated utilization of the zoom lens in Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967). In addition to these forms of mis-use one can think of further cases against the usual grain of viewing and listening machines: a modification of existing apparatuses (cf. Walter Ruttmann’s homemade light table); a deliberate under-use of the equipment (cf. Morgan Fisher’s Production Stills, 1970); or even belated invention, such as Vinyl Video (from 1997 onwards), a media archaeological/artistic venture by a collective of European artists, who encode black and white video data into the grooves of vinyl records.

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Methode, Machines, Dispositives: New Perspectives for a New Technological Histor

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