L’électrification du corps et de l’art dans l’URSS des années 1920

The article examines the representations of electricity in both poetic and prose texts, as well as in artistic and scientific experiments in the USSR in the 1920s. For various artists and writers, electrification became a metaphor for the essential transformation of space, time, and the human body, which now interacted with electrified mechanisms. Solomon Nikritin’s and Sergey Luchishkin’s “Projectionist Theater” at the Central Institute of Labor in Moscow; Kliment Redko’s art group “Electroorganism”; the poetry of Alexei Gastev and Velimir Khlebnikov, as well as Andrei Platonov’s prose, all outlined a new reality and new relationships between humans and machines, echoed in both mass culture and in the image of robots in films and plays. The incorporation of electricity into simulators, as well as into the psychotechnical and diagnostic equipment at CIT ; Alexei Gastev’s radical manifestos and instructions ; the experiments conducted in various Soviet scientific institutes in the 1920s in order to cyclograph the movements of actors, dancers, and musicians, all demonstrated the reality of effective interactions (and even union) between the body and the electrified machine.