Abstract

This essay attempts to reflect on a comparison commonly used in daily language between
human actions and mechanic attributes: I acted automatically. If we define architecture
as the design process of space which receives individual and social desires, and through
which the human body and notion is effectively affected, the research on the affinity
between the human body and the machine can be seen to acquire importance. Therefore,
the subject of this essay is the correlation of the human body and the machine, literal or
not, as it was expressed in artistic practices and everyday body practices, during the first
decades of the 20th century. The aim of this research is to detect the concepts that follow
this affinity and the way they shape the body, individual or collective.
The first chapter of the essay refers to the work of artists from the field of visual arts and
theater. At first, it is attempted to analyse the work of Futurist Fillipo Marinetti and Vorticist
Wyndham Lewis, during the First World War. Marinetti and Lewis depict the human body in
relatively different ways, however they both claim that it should be united with the
machine for the bodily senses to reach new qualities. Through their work that portrays a
machine-body, they construct a new self which is believed to be protected from outer or
inner impulses. Consequently, the work of Dadaist Max Ernst is examined, during the same
historic period. His collages not only depict a machine/body but also a mechanic artistic
process through which they are produced. Max Ernst criticizes the way technology or
techniques of body movement management, which progress during this period, affect the
human body and its perception. Following the reference to the work of these visual artists,
the correlation of the body with the machine is researched in the field of theater,
particularly in the work of Naturalist Konsantin Stanislavsky, Constructivist Vesvold
Meyerhold and Oscar Schlemmer from the Bauhaus movement. Stanislavsky who was the
first who tried to systematize the actors education, believed that the actor was a natural
machine. His teaching method consists of body exercises which, through intensive
repetition, would lead the actor to true feelings during performance. Meyerholds
Biomechanics method reduced the actors body movements to basic, finite parts, so that
the actor would be able to consciously control every one of them. Finally, Oscar Schlemmer
perceives the human body as an assemblage of mechanic relations. In his productions at
the theater of the Bauhaus, he focused on the design of the performers costumes which
affected drastically their movement.

The second chapter of the essay concerns the affinity of the body and the machine, literal
or not, in the field of everyday body practices. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the
specific historic and social frame in which the for mentioned tendency in the arts was
developed.

At first, a determinate description of modernity 1, is attempted, especially focusing on the

tendency to body education throughout European countries. The application of scientific
method to fields other than the disciplines of science is very characteristic of this period.
Particularly, Frederick Taylors method of scientific management of workers movements
during work is a prime example. At the same time, significant progress is made in
technological inventions that record body movement in relation to time, like Etien-Jules
Mareys chronophotographic gun.
Consequently, we question this scientific management of the body in a larger frame, in
every day body practices. According to Marcel Mauss (1934), the ways we use our body in
everyday practices, like walking or eating, consist of body techniques which are predefined
by society. The means that conduct these techniques to the body, according to Nobert Elias
(1939), differ through the ages and, particularly, they are affected by changes in societys
structure and technological equipment. Lastly, in research of a more detailed description
on how technology affects body techniques and body perception we approach Katherine
Hayles analysis on body knowledge and contemporary digital technologies.
The last chapter of the essay concerns the way the for mentioned scientific/mechanic
management of the body affects public space. In research of this relation, we appeal to
Hannah Arendts (1958) philosophical analysis on human condition.
-In conclusion, it is comprehended that a historical period, which is characterized by
industrialization and scientific progress, had a great impact in the contemporary artistic
movements. The artists that were analyzed above depicted those significant changes
through a representation or perception of the human body as a machine, either through a
utopia or a dystopia of the body. According to the utopian approach, the human body
should adopt automatic reflexes in order to be protected from the outer world, or to
handle its inner impulses. On the contrary, according to the dystopian approach, this
mechanic body has lost its uniqueness. Furthermore, it is appreciated that the
scientific/mechanic management of the body not only was attempted in arts but also in
everyday practices. The human body is adopted in socially specified kinetic assemblages,
which differentiate through time. This fact shapes a faceless public space in which bodies
interact by repeating those kinetic prototypes. Finally, it is comprehended that in this kind
of public shape, which lucks personal action, the adopting mechanism is shifted in an
illusion way to the prototype.

1 Modernity is typically defined as the pasttraditional, past-Middle Age historical period, which is
characterized by the transition from feudalism to capitalism, industrialization, urbanization,
rationalization, national/state organization and the analogous form of institutionalized supervision.
(Barker 2005, 444). Particularly, this historic era is periodized into three conventional phases, Early
modernity (15001789), Classical modernity (17891900) and Late modernity (19001989).
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