Technology's pulse

Rhuthmos

Modernity, as has often been observed, was fundamentally concerned with questions of temporality. The period around 1900, in particular, witnessed numerous efforts both to rationalize time and to liberate non-rational temporal experience. Within this broader framework, rhythm came to form the object of an intense and widespread preoccupation. Rhythmical research played a central role not only in the reconceptualisation of human physiology and labour in the late 19^th century, but also in the emergence of a new leisure culture in the early 20^th. The book traces the ways in which ideas about rhythm were mobilised both to conceptualise modernity and to forge a new understanding of temporal media that came to mark the mass-mediated experience of the 1920s : a conception of artistic media as mediators between the organic and the rational, the time of the body and that of the machine.