Overview

The book presents a different history of the Russian avant-garde and its cultural encounters with the sciences. It is focusing on the entanglements of architects, filmmakers and philosophers with experimental psychologists and physiologists in the 1920s which are hardly known yet. Famous avant-garde artists like El Lissitzky, Vassily Kandinsky and Dziga Vertov helped propagate a movement in Russia - psychotechnics -, that was actually coming from Germany and America and can be characterized as "psychotechnical boom". At the end of the story told in this book, it becomes clear, that this boom has not finished until today. By analyzing concrete co-operations between artists and scientists and on the basis of not yet published archival material, this book challenges the notion of socialist sciences. At the same time, it gives an entirely new picture of what was thought to be modern art and makes clear, that artistic experimentation had much more than a metaphorical meaning in the arts of the Russian 1920s. In 2007 the book was acknowledged with an award for interdisciplinary research by the Wilhelm-Ostwald-Society, Großbothen. In 2011 the book received funding by the VolkswagenStiftung to be translated into English and Russian (the Russian edition was published by NLO books in 2019). The book got reviews in NZZ, NTM, Derive, Junge Welt, Sehepunkte.