Organic Modernism

"This open access book studies the transdisciplinary culture of "morphogenic modernism," a strain of creative interaction across fields in twentieth-century Britain that began in the German Bauhaus during the 1920s. With the emigration of figures from the Bauhaus to London during the 1930s, a new field of creative action unfolded according to the logic of biological emergence. The precepts of modern German design took hold among a group of embryologists, geneticists, crystallographers, and physicists creating a panoply of pioneering exhibitions, publications, laboratory experiments, and art and design projects. Terranova shows how such collaborations created extraordinary outcomes in the arts, humanities, and sciences. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Edith O'Donnell Institute of Art History"--

Charissa N. Terranova is Margaret M. McDermott Distinguished Chair in Art and Aesthetic Studies and Professor of Art and Architectural History at the University of Texas at Dallas, USA. She researches the relationship between culture and science, focusing on the history of evolutionary theory and biology in art and architecture. She is author of Art as Organism: Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image (2016) and Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art (2014), and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture (2016), and the Biotechne series with Meredith Tromble.