The Dream Cafe: Lessons in the Art of Radical Innovation

KKINETIC

Art that Moves

Simply put, kinetic art is art that involves or engages with physical movement, or the illusion of movement. Kinetic art has its roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century cafés of Paris and Zurich. At different times and places, artists and intellectuals began to question the old orders that insisted art was limited to a style that followed classical tradition and was predicated on stasis. The context of rapid technological progress has fundamentally changed most people's ability to conceive of the relationship between time and space by making rapid movement and mechanized facilitation a part of everyday experience.

Mechanization provided a major source of inspiration for the arts. While dystopian scenarios were relatively commonplace, the excitement created by the new technologies of transport and communication proved to be inspirational for artists in all spheres. Pace was possibly more important than product, as witnessed by the excitement of the Italian Futurists: ‘We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals’ (F. T. Marinetti, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, 1909).

Another key source of avant-garde challenge was the DADA movement. This approach was more politically motivated and exploited the potential of pseudo ...