Jazzy

Watching this video made me think of how far we have come from the obsession with machines of the mid-20th century. The avant-garde used to see the machine as a beautiful alternative to the messy, flawed, and often sinister work of human beings, but now machinery has come to seem almost sinister itself. The "handmade" is such a fetish object now, and handmade has a very particular aesthetic meaning: raw, imprecise, unique. But I think we forget that there is a range of machines, many very simple and requiring human oversight or operation. And even the most complex machine is still the product of the human mind and hand. I feel a little nostalgic for that Modern appreciation of the machine. There is a sort of rhythm and purity to machine-produced items, and a repudiation of our fixation on individuality, that I still find very appealing.



(via AT)