Bruno Taut, Glass House, 1914
The Medium Has No Message: The Bauhaus Invention of Media Politics
What do we mean when we say twitter, screens, cellphones, images, change the way we see? If our world is “image saturated”—as we are told over and over—does that really change the way we understand reality? This talk looks at the origins of the line of thinking—from Kandinsky through The Bauhaus—that says media fundamentally shape what we do, think, and believe. As I will argue, the assumptions about the role that media and images play in our lives should be reexamined.
Todd Cronan is Associate Professor of art history at Emory University. He is the author of Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism (2013) and articles on subjects like photographic "previsualization," chance photography, orthodoxy, Brecht, Rodchenko, Max Ernst, Minor White, R. M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, the Eameses, Merleau-Ponty, Santayana, Simmel, and Valéry. He recently completed a book on Brecht, Rodchenko and Eisenstein and another on architectural modernism in Southern California. He is a founder and editor-in-chief of nonsite.org.
