Ruidos y susurros de las vanguardias - Medialab Prado

5) to physical courage, to fighting and to war (with gigantic, dangerous and
a g g r e s s i v e t o y s t h a t w i l l w o r k o u t d o o r s ) .
The Futurist toy will be very useful to adults too, keeping them young, agile,
jubilant, spontaneous, ready for anything, untiring, instinctive and intuitive
The artificial landscape
By developing the first synthesis of the speed of an automobile, Balla created the
first plastic ensemble. This revealed an abstract landscape composed of cones,
pyramids, polyhedrons, and the spiral of mountains, rivers, lights and shadows.
Evidently a profound analogy exists between the essential line-forces of speed
and the essential line-forces of a landscape. We have reached the deepest
essence of the universe and have mastered the elements. We shall thus be able
to construct.
The metallic animal
Fusion of art + science. chemistry, physics, continuous and unexpected
pyrotechnics all incorporated into a new creature, a creature that will speak, shout
and dance automatically. We Futurists, Balla and Depero, will construct millions of
metallic animals for the greatest war (conflagration of all the creative energies of
Europe, Asia, Africa and America, which will undoubtedly follow the current
marvelous little human conflagration).
The inventions contained in this manifesto are absolute creations, generated
entirely by Italian Futurism. No artist in France, Russia, England or Germany
anticipated us by inventing anything similar or analogous. Only the Italian genius,
which is the most constructive and architectural, could invent the abstract plastic
complex. With this, Futurism has determined its style, which will inevitably
dominate the sensibility of many centuries to come.
Torbjorn Hallberg.
Rotating Plastic Complex. (Plastica Complessità girante), 1914.
Investigating Depero's motor-noise machine by Torbjorn Hallberg.
MATERIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE PLASTIC COMPLEX
MATERIALS NEEDED: Colored strands of wire, cotton, wool, silk, of every
thickness. Colored glass, tissue paper, celluloid, wire netting, every sort of
transparent and bright material, fabrics, mirrors, sheets of metal, colored tin-foil,
every sort of gaudy material. Mechanical and electrical devices; musical and
noise-making elements, chemically luminous liquids of variable colors; springs,
levers, tubes, etc. With these means we will construct:
ROTATIONS
l. Plastic complexes rotating on a pivot (horizontal, vertical, oblique).
2. Plastic complexes rotating on several pivots: : a) in the same direction, with
different speed; b) in opposite directions; c) in the same and opposite directions.
(Fragment extracted from: Balla Depero futurist abstracts Milan, Published for
the first time in a loose leaf of the Direzione of the Futurist Movement, Milan, 11
March 1915. Included in the book La mirada nerviosa de Francisco Javier San
Martín, Diputación Foral de Guipúzcoa.)
PROCESS OF INVESTIGATION AND CONSTRUCTION.
T.H: In the manufacturing process I have used metallic connecting levers, metal
bearings, and plastic to make the device/machine.
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By means of a mechanical gear, solved in spite of its complexity in a motor-noise
solution. Generating a zigzag sound coming from the friction of the levers of both
metallic cones. Springs, levers, and tubes complete the formation of Rotating
Plastic Complex (Complessità plastica girante), 1914. Depero's machines are
predefined in themselves, concepts that turn out to be a clear antecedent of what
is interdisciplinary and multimedia.
Pilar Crespo Ricart
A spring garden: The noises of nature and life.
This work proposes the intuition of the "Magical transformable motor-noise
flower".
It is not an interpretation, it is not a version, it is not a reconstruction, it is an
intuition that starts from Balla and Depero's proposals of their Futurist
Reconstruction of the Universe in Milan, on 11 March 1915, and the sensations of
our own experience in Valencia, during the spring of 2004.
Balla and Depero in their Futurist manifesto mention dynamic plastic complexes,
with their definition and their material construction, with the means and their
forms. And they describe their creative methodology and say: "The
discoveryinfinite systematic invention Using complex, constructive, noiseproducing
abstraction, in short, the Futurist style. Each action developed in the
space, each experienced emotion, will be for us the intuition of a discovery.
Example: A garden in spring under the wind allowed us to intuit the Magical
transformable motor-noise flower
But when reading this proposal we cannot forget Russolo with his manifesto The
Art of Noise in 1913 and his reflections on "the noises of nature and life" in his
1916 book also entitled The Art of Noise. He distinguishes between the noises of
nature and those of a modern city to make us understand that in both cases we
can find complex and rhythmical noises.
Nature without noises would be completely silent, and he mentions the
thunderclap; the wind with its whistles and howls; rain, calm and perpendicular
with its monotonous rhythm, with its crescendo and disminuendo of intensity by
the increase or decrease of the amount of water that falls, or when accompanied
by wind this controls, dominates and gives its rhythm to water falling, pushing it
with violence against the walls, the windows, the glasses; the water that
represents in nature the most frequent cause, most varied and richer of noises
with the symphonies of the sea, cascades with their deep noises, a spring and a
brook with their small and diverse noises; in the forest, the leaves with the different
noises that are distinguished in the way different trees shake, black poplars with
their eternal perpetual motto, weeping willows with their long and delicate
shuddering, cypresses vibrate and sing, oaks and plane trees have abrupt and
violent agitations followed by unexpected calm; they not only give different
timbres to different trees, these timbres are different according to the season,
thus, in spring very delicate tenuous murmurs, in summer harder rustlings,
tangled, complex, in autumn dry noises, crackling and metallic.