Primary/ Secondary Perspective (large scale)

Many of the great modernist artists, including the abstract painters, explored an inner psychic space removed from technological development. Yet despite their differences modernists in all the art forms shared one chief objective; to find new modes of representation that might reflect the changed world around them.

Science was seen not as the enemy of art but its vivifying current. The artists who joined Marinetti in the Futurist movement looked to science and technology for their inspiration. High speed photography, cinema and the xray revealed new dimensions of movement and perception; the paintings produced by Bella, Boccioni, Severini and Carra in the period 1909-14 were informed by these insights.

Yet by absorbing the properties of the machine into their art, they built a prototype that is still being used by artist. Technology and technological processes could now be both the subject and material of art, as cyberartists continue to demonstrate in the digital age.

The other group of modernists with a direct relation to technology were the Constructivists, who flourished in the decade following the 1917 Russian Revolution. Like the Italian futurists before them, the Constructivists longed to drag their rural nation into the machine age; like the futurists they had a utopian faith in the powers of industrial technology to shape a marvellous new world.