Avantgarde Machines: On the Integration of Technology and Art

The article proposes a theoretical conceptualization of an epistemological shift within avant-garde culture, wherein machine attains the status of not merely a theme, but a fundamental principle of artistic language. The methodological framework of the study is an original three-level model that reconstructs the logic of technology's transformation from an object of representation into a subject of form-creation and, ultimately, into a cognitive matrix. The level of «Technology-as-Muse» foregrounds the process of thematization and poeticization of the machine world, where technology functions as a new iconographic resource and a source of affective energy (e.g., Alexander Labas, Dziga Vertov). The level of «Technology-as-Co-author» reveals a paradigm of hybrid authorship, in which stage and pictorial constructions act as agents that actively constitute the aesthetic experience and impose upon the work an immanent logic of material and procedure (e.g., Vsevolod Meyerhold, Lyubov Popova, Sergei Eisenstein). At the level of «Technology-as-Model-of-Thought,» art transitions into onto-technical design, interiorizing engineering rationality as the basis of the creative act; artistic production converges with social engineering (e.g., Alexei Gastev) and biocosmic utopias, and the artwork is conceptualized as an operational protocol or blueprint for a new reality (e.g., Pavel Filonov, the ballet The Steel Step). The article demonstrates that the proposed model describes not a chronological sequence, but a logic of increasing complexity in the ways technical rationality is integrated into artistic consciousness, the result of which was a change in the ontological status of the artwork — from representing the world to actively constructing it.