Session III : Posthumanism

‘Dehumanisation is the chief symptom of the Modern World’ (‘The New Egos’, p.141). This phrase is attributed to Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), a leading figure of Vorticism, the British avant-garde art movement. It appeared in Blast No. 1, published in 1914. Lewis practiced geometric abstraction as pursued by the avant-garde groups of his contemporaries. Moreover, at the beginning of the 20th century, he predicted the advent of a new world in which complex sensory media and machines would dominate humanity. In a modern society where machines undertake labour, there is no need for human bodies; ‘machinery went straight to nature and eliminated the middleman, Man’ (Diabolical Principle, p.162). In Blast, mechanised humans were described as‘dehumanized’and visualised in insect-or robot-like forms. Lewis’s prediction about this future humanity—referred to as New Egos—being governed alongside animated machines by an elite hierarchy and ultimately merging seems like something out of a science fiction novel. However, this dystopia has partially been realised in the 21st century. Nevertheless, Lewis’s prescience has remained buried and unnoticed in the history of modern and contemporary art and design for a long time. This paper examines Lewis’s conception of new urban design from the 1910s to the 1950s regarding both his graphic and literary works and crystalises their emergent ideas. Examining specific examples will reveal that his ideas are linked to the negative aspects of contemporary digitally connected society, culminating in his own use of sarcasm and satire.