Avant-Garde and Psychotechnics

Margarete Vöhringer is currently Professor for the Materiality of Knowledge at Georg-August-University Göttingen. Her research interests include materiality and aesthetics of the sciences, connections between art and science, history of collecting and exhibiting, Russian avant-garde, and cultural techniques of seeing. She has co-edited several anthologies: Sehstörungen. Grenzwerte des Visuellen in Künsten und Wissenschaften (with Anne Kathrin Reulecke, Berlin 2019); Wissenschaft im Museum – Ausstellung im Labor (with Anke Te Heesen, Berlin 2014) and Phantome im Labor: Die Verbreitung der Reflexe in Hirnforschung, Kunst und Technik. Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 32(1), 2009 (with Yvonne Wübben).

Much has been written on the relations between the arts and sciences. Margarete Vöhringer's ambitious book goes further and explores ways, at a particular time and place, in which there were not separable ‘related’ activities but a common experimental practice with material things, in which all was ‘art’. The purpose is not to dissolve differences but to specify, in historical detail, the sharing and modification of material practices and instrumentation as they carry from one cultural setting to another.Roger Smith, The British Journal for the History of Science, 2023:1-2

• Introduction. 1. Feed(ing) Back: Nicolai Ladovsky’s Psychotechnical Laboratory for Architecture, Moscow 1921–1927 2. Networking: Vsevolod Pudovkin's Mechanics of the Brain – Film as Reflexology, Leningrad/Moscow 1925–1926. 3. Grafting: Alexander Bogdanov's Circular Blood Transfusions, Moscow 1924–1928. Conclusion: Feeding Back, Networking and Grafting as Cultural Techniques.