From Here on, Material Culture!

Second Semester, another blog. Sorry dudes.

History infected me at young age, but on the path that led to my Graduate Studies other viruses paraded in and created a strange spectrum of intellectual interests. Mainly I perceive this weakness of my immune system as a virtue, but sometimes I wonder if a more focused interest would lead to an easier life. Academically I studied Art History as an undergraduate in Italy, then History as Masters with a thesis on a roman insurrection in 1867. Outside of academia I pursued a passion for electronics, programming, art, and poetry; I worked as a 3D and 2D graphic artist trying to combine the technological side of my soul with the intellectual one.

Modeling objects in 3D exercises both observation and analysis, because as a good forger the attempt to recreating reality in the virtual world requires a good attention to and understanding of details. This kind of craftsmanship, united to the education as art historian, led to an interest in the history of technology, which intersected the interest for military history. Technology always accompanied soldiers onto the battlefield, but in the second half of the nineteenth century a revolution changed the world: technology permeated the lives of people all around the globe in a whirlwind that excited the masses. Then the First World War arrived and these new technologies contributed to the massacre; the world acknowledged the danger hidden in the new things: the iron that created bridges and skyscrapers casted guns, while the chemistry that fueled the abundance of food and material created powerful explosives and poisons.

Times of change are always interesting: the second industrial revolution changed the vision and ideas of people, yet it evolved on a stream of objects which innovated the technical possibilities small step by small step. For this reason my expectations from the class are high; one must understand the language of things to decipher not only the messages coded between the words of the documents, but also those that follow the curves of an old telephone, or are ingrained in the patterns left on a metal surface by a precision lathe. If ideas shaped the world, objects made it in such a way that is as obvious as it is overlooked by historians, moreover those interested in warfare. With a powerful toolset that enables me to talk about weapons and technology with proficiency I will perhaps be able to nudge the discussion of military history from maps and maneuvers towards a social and technological history of the battlefield.

As an object to analyze during the semester I chose the issue of “La Domenica del Corriere” of 5-12 March 1916, the most popular Sunday edition of a newspaper in Italy at the time, with two beautiful colored illustrations on the cover and the back.