Happiness Is A Warm Machine

Bret has this post at Skeptical Eye.

It reminded me of the Italian Futursists of the early 20th century:

Italian Futurism was initially a literary movement created by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909 with the manifesto Le Futurisme [1]. The intentions of this manifesto was a wake-up call to Marinetti's countrymen to make them aware that they had been 'wearing second-hand clothes for too long.' It was time for them to create a new art for themselves, forged out of the beauty of speed and a glorification of war: Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice. That the manifesto was first written in French and published in the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro before any of the new Futurist art existed, typified Marinetti's understanding of the power of the media to work for him and disseminate his ideas.


F. T. Marinetti along with the artists that he gathered around him, wrote manifestos not only on literature, music, dance, performance, painting, architecture, etc. but also on almost all aspects touching everyday life, such as clothing, food [2], smells, war and lust [3]. Futurism was the first attempt in the 20th century to reinvent life as it was being transfixed by new technologies and conceive of a new race in the form of machine-extended man. Futurism succinctly reiterated a cognate set of ideas which reverberates all through a multitude of forms in 20th century art expression.