The Aesthetics of the Machine in the 20th Century Art based on Don Ihde’s Ideas

The increasing growth of technology in the twentieth century has brought about profound developments in the relations between man and the world. These developments, which included large industries and automatic and semi-automatic machines, necessitated the question of technology not only by intellectuals, but also by artists. Thus, different approaches to technology were formed, all of which were subdivided into two types of determinist  approaches, namely the utopian and the dystopian that each predicted a certain destiny for humans alongside technology. The utopianists considered technology as the key to human success and dreams, whereas the dystopianists saw nothing in the technologic world but destruction and decay. But the passage of time, the changes that took place in role of technology, as well as the developments which transformed human life-world, all are evidences of the insufficiency of these approaches in analyzing human-world relations through technology. The same is also true for the changes in the analytical context of the 20th century art, when the combination of art and technology took its first steps. Now the question is,how to lay the theoretical foundations of the 20th century machine art, in order to reach an analytical framework beyond deterministic viewpoints. In this regard, it seems that the ideas of those thinkers who besides technology are concerned with the human knowledge, are applicable. Meanwhile, Martin Heidegger’s ideas are especially valuable, in that he recognizes an ambiguity in the nature of technology that eventually results in emancipation of technology from the clutches of the determinists. Following Heidegger’s theory of technology will lead our way to Don Ihde, who not only is heavily under Heidegger’s influence, but also believes that he goes beyond Heidegger in facing with the deterministic approaches. By a phenomenological method in his philosophy of technology that could be considered as a synthesis of husserlian and heideggerian types, Ihde shows that his quadruple system which accords the relations between man, the world and technology, reveals a more complete picture of the aforementioned relations than deterministic approaches. Thus, by employing Ihde’s philosophy of technology and his phenomenological method, the present study tries to explain the presence of the machine as a symbol of technology in the works of the Avantguard artists of the first half of 20th century, regardless of a deterministic look to the implications of technology. The theoretical framework of this study, which attempts to take steps in the path of phenomenology, is based on Ihde’s quadruple relations in his philosophy of technology, and at the same time there is an effort to show its advantages over deterministic standpoints. Eventually, what is extracted from Ihde’s ideas in order to found an aesthetics for the machine art, is the ambiguity that lies within the heart of technology; the ambiguity which is recognizable and common in all the artworks that deal with the machine.