Photopoetry and the Bioscopic Book: Russian and Czech Avant-Garde Experiments of the 1920s.

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on three select examples of avant-garde poetry books—Mayakovsky’s and Rodchenko’s "About This" (1923), Mayakovsky’s and Rozhkov’s "To the Workers of Kursk" (1924-7) and Nezval and Teige’s "Alphabet" (1926), all illustrated by photomontages or diverse techniques involving photographic material. By way of three distinct case studies, it examines the avant-garde photo-poetry works from the angle of the bioscopic book, a concept envisaged in a programmatic manner by El Lissitzky in 1923. Through historically contextualized close readings, the analysis proposes that the 1920s bioscopic book should be understood as a theoretical, if not visionary, concept of a visual technology approximated in the series of experiments within the avant-garde photo-poetry genre. The dissertation conceptualizes the bioscopic book as an alternative cinematic apparatus through examining its materiality and dynamic conceptual design. By elaborating on different avant-garde “programs,” embodied in the medium’s conceptual design, the analysis demonstrates how these three selected examples, despite being differently designed apparatuses, all invite the reader/viewer to operate as a producer by joining the collective authorship of the poet and graphic designer in conducting perpetual transfer from one medium to another. In managing such interpretative transduction from one semiotic system to another, this dissertation argues, the reader/viewer both takes part in the topography of the bioscopic book and becomes a part of its conceptual-material circuit. The reader/viewer participates in the re-creation of the cinematic “projection” by setting the alternating current of the bioscopic book in motion. I argue that the bioscopic book is a technology “programmed” to function as a “suggestion apparatus” for a two-way communication between the different media and the reader/viewer, who herself becomes a channel, a medium, an active “influencing machine,” a prosumer. The dissertation offers a theory of the bioscopic book concept as a technology for 1) the formulation and re-production of “montage thinking” as a new cognitive model by which we interact with the outside world, 2) the augmentation of intermedial and interpersonal dialogue, and 3) the transformation of readers/viewers into prosumers.