Art Movement Tuesday considers the promise of the machine against the fear of its shadow.
Futurism: Machine as Muse
The year is 1909. On February 20, Le Figaro prints a manifesto unlike anything Europe has seen. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti calls for the destruction of museums, the rejection of ancestral reverence, and the embrace of industry as the new religion. For Italy, a nation unified only decades earlier, the words are a challenge to cast off the shadow of the Renaissance and declare itself modern, formidable, and fast.1
Visual Art and Style
Futurism’s leading figures—Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini—translate this fervor into a visual grammar fracturing form into speed. Figures blur into motion, shapes splinter into angular planes, color becomes a pulse. In Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), Boccioni’s bronze strides forward as if propelled by both wind and steel. In Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912), a single street scene multiplies into arcs of repeated paws, tails and steps, capturing time in a single frame. The palette favors bold, unblended colors—deep reds, electric blues, yellows and metallic tones—arranged in jagged rhythms.2
Performance and Literature
Futurism is more than static images. It is an attitude, a staged provocation. The serate futuriste—public evenings of poetry, manifesto reading, noise music and confrontation—become central to the movement. Audiences are baited into rapture or outrage. Marinetti’s own Zang Tumb Tumb (1914) experiments with sound poetry and typographic design, breaking lines into blocks and diagonals mimicing mechanical rhythms. Fortunato Depero brings Futurism into graphic design, producing posters and advertisements with bold geometry and striking text layouts anticipating modern commercial aesthetics.3
Architecture and Design
In architecture, Antonio Sant’Elia’s visionary drawings from 1912 to 1914 propose vertical cities of spiraling towers, rooftop runways, and glass-walled speedways. These designs are functional yet theatrical, a blueprint for cities remade in the image of the machine. Furniture, clothing and interior design also receive Futurist attention. Giacomo Balla produces angular, brightly colored garments and household objects transforming daily life into an extension of the movement’s aesthetic.4
Film
A notable cinematic work within the Futurist sphere is Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Thais (1917), one of the few surviving examples of Futurist film. Though narrative in form, it uses abstract set designs, angular architecture, and bold geometric patterns to create a sense of psychological velocity. Costumes and backdrops merge into a single visual field, collapsing figure and environment into the same dynamic rhythm. While the majority of Futurist films are lost, Thais stands as a rare glimpse into how the movement’s principles of motion, fragmentation and industrial form could be translated to the screen.5
Music
In music, Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori performances brought the soundscape of the modern city into the concert hall. Debuting in 1913 after his manifesto The Art of Noises, these hand-built acoustic machines replicated the hum of engines, the grind of machinery, and the clatter of urban life. Performances often shocked audiences, replacing melody with mechanical rhythm and metallic timbre. Russolo’s work expanded the Futurist ethos beyond the visual, declaring the roar of industry was as worthy of artistic attention as any symphony.6
Fashion
In fashion, Giacomo Balla’s Futurist designs promoted clothing as kinetic sculpture. Jackets and dresses featured asymmetrical cuts, fabrics printed in sharp diagonals, and color schemes meant to vibrate with movement. Clothing became a personal extension of the movement’s fascination with speed and transformation, turning the body itself into a site of visual propulsion.7
The Ethos and Reach
Futurism’s ethos is anchored in certainty: Progress is inevitable. The machine will liberate. The city is the cathedral. Velocity is its prayer. This optimism, however, merges with political realities. Many Futurists embrace Italian nationalism and later align with Fascism, seeing in its authoritarian order the embodiment of the new society they envision. The movement’s official period runs from 1909 until the death of Boccioni in 1916 and the devastation of World War I, though its influence continues into the 1930s and early 1940s in painting, design and propaganda.8
Legacy
Futurism’s visual language echoes in mid-century advertising, postwar industrial design, and even in mid century typography and late 20th-century graphic art. Its fusion of technology, movement and spectacle anticipated much of modern visual culture, even as its political entanglements complicated its legacy.
Cyberpunk: Shadow of Decay
The 1980s arrive under the fluorescent glow of computer screens, the hum of modems, and the quiet encroachment of corporate empires. Cyberpunk does not announce itself with a singular manifesto. It emerges instead from an accumulation of visions concerned about where culture and technology is going through novels, films, games and illustrations often capturing a near-future where high technology meets urban decay. Its core years span from roughly 1982 to the mid-1990s, though its influence radiates far beyond. The ethos is encapsulated by the phrase “high tech, low life”: A world in which dazzling advances in computing, robotics, and biotechnology coexist with crumbling infrastructure, environmental collapse, and deep social inequality.9
Literary Origins and Visionaries
Cyberpunk’s foundation is literary. William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) becomes its blueprint, introducing “cyberspace” and a terse, neon-lit prose style feeling as fast and synthetic as the world it describes. Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades anthology (1986) consolidates the movement’s voice, bringing together authors like Pat Cadigan, John Shirley and Rudy Rucker. Their futures are not utopias, but instead are dense, polluted and wired, populated by hackers, mercenaries, rogue AI, and street-level innovators who exploit the cracks in the system.10
Visual Art and Design
While Cyberpunk’s origins are in text, its identity quickly becomes visual. The defining aesthetic—dark cities under perpetual night, saturated neon, kanji and katakana signage, reflective puddles, rusted metal overlaid with holographic advertisements—owes much to the concept art and set design of films like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), heavily influenced by futurist artist Syd Mead. Mead’s “retro-fitted” cityscapes—buildings layered with additions and modifications over decades—become a visual shorthand for the genre. In Japan, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988) brings the look to animation: Vast, overcrowded cityscapes where glowing billboards and collapsing overpasses coexist in the same frame. Illustrators like Masamune Shirow (Ghost in the Shell) and Yoshitaka Amano merge high-tech precision with sensual, flowing linework, further refining the genre’s visual palette.11
A significant precursor folds into the Cyberpunk aesthetic through revival: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). The film’s original towering cityscapes, mechanized underworld, and the machine-human transformation of the robot Maria anticipated many of Cyberpunk’s later hallmarks—vertical megacities, class stratification, and the blurred line between human and machine. Its return to circulation in the 1980s, most notably through Giorgio Moroder’s 1984 restoration, incorporates color tinting, synthesized music and a pop-rock soundtrack by artists such as Freddie Mercury, Pat Benatar and Adam Ant. This reinterpretation visually and sonically aligns the silent-era classic with the era’s neon-soaked futurism, placing it in aesthetic conversation with Blade Runner and Akira. While the original Metropolis predates Cyberpunk by decades, its revival gives it retroactive membership in the movement’s canon, cementing its role as both ancestral influence and contemporary touchstone.12
The film Johnny Mnemonic (1995), adapted from William Gibson’s 1981 short story of the same name, brings one of Cyberpunk’s foundational authors directly to the screen. Starring Keanu Reeves as a data courier with a cybernetic brain implant, the film visualizes Gibson’s world of information smuggling, corporate warfare and body augmentation, translating the genre’s literary grit into a stylized, mid-90s cinematic form warning of the cost in ignoring technology’s shadow.13
Fashion and Street Style
Cyberpunk fashion filters from fiction into real streets during the late 1980s and 1990s, often intersecting with club culture. The look draws on functional military gear, leather, PVC, reflective fabrics and layered streetwear mirroring the scavenged, improvised wardrobes of its fictional antiheroes. Black and metallic tones dominate, accented with neon trims, visor-like sunglasses and augmented silhouettes. Designers like Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto contribute to the futuristic silhouette with asymmetry, oversized proportions, and unconventional materials. In the West, the emerging “techwear” subculture, later embodied by brands like Acronym, takes Cyberpunk from page and screen into a wearable urban armor.14
Music and Sonic Identity
Cyberpunk’s sound is as important as its visuals. In the 1980s, synth-heavy electronic music, especially the cold, mechanical beats of Kraftwerk, the industrial clang of Throbbing Gristle and the darkwave tones of Clan of Xymox—provide a sonic blueprint. Film scores like Vangelis’ work for Blade Runner layer lush synth chords over the sound of rain and machinery, creating an atmospheric, immersive soundtrack for the genre’s imagery. By the 1990s, acts like Front 242, Nine Inch Nails and The Prodigy infuse cyberpunk’s ethos into industrial, techno and breakbeat scenes. In Japan, the Akira soundtrack by Geinoh Yamashirogumi uses traditional instruments alongside experimental electronics, underscoring the collision of old and new.15
Architecture and Built Reality
Though much of Cyberpunk’s cityscape exists in fiction, elements of it appear in real-world architecture. Tokyo’s Shinjuku and Shibuya districts, with their vertical layering of shops, elevated walkways, flashing signage and constant motion—often stand in for fictional settings. Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City (demolished in 1994) had become a living Cyberpunk reference: A dense, self-built maze of corridors, electrical wires and ad-hoc construction. In the West, late-20th-century megastructures like the Centre Pompidou in Paris (Renzo Piano and Rogers, 1977) and the Lloyd’s Building in London (Richard Rogers, 1986) embody a “techno-exposed” design language of pipes, ducts and structural skeletons visible as part of the exterior aesthetic.16
Graphic Design and Corporate Iconography
Cyberpunk also leaves a mark on graphic design. Logos in the genre often combine corporate minimalism with multilingual typography, referencing both global commerce and street-level bricolage. Early video game companies such as Sega and Namco—with arcade titles like Virtua Cop and Tekken adopt sharp, metallic fonts and high-contrast visuals matching the genre’s energy. The rise of desktop publishing in the late 1980s enables zines and small-press art books to spread Cyberpunk’s fragmented, cut-and-paste aesthetic, echoing the visual chaos of the worlds it depicts.17
Ethos and Legacy
The Cyberpunk ethos thrives on paradox. It revels in the beauty of the technological sublime while distrusting the systems which produce it. It rejects the sanitized “tomorrow” of mid-century futurism, instead portraying futures assembled from the detritus of the present—retro-fitted, hacked, improvised. Its characters and creators alike dwell in the liminal space between corporate power and street survival, where innovation happens outside official channels.18
Though its peak period as a discrete movement may have faded by the late 1990s, Cyberpunk remains embedded in popular culture—from the slick neon cities of The Matrix trilogy to the sprawling open-world of Cyberpunk 2077. Its language, imagery and sound continue to shape how we imagine the intersection of humanity and machine.
Faith v. Warning
Visually, both movements embrace fragmentation. Futurists fracture figures into planes to show them moving forward. Cyberpunks fracture them into glitch, noise or interference to show it being swallowed. In one, light reflects off polished chrome. In the other, it stutters across broken surfaces, caught in perpetual drizzle. As Futurism’s architecture soars skyward with geometric precision, Cyberpunk’s cities sag under the weight of improvisation—layers of construction, decay and repair piled until no original structure remains. It is the complete opposite of the clean slate Futurism imagined. Rather than be erased, through Cyberpunk history is compacted into an overwhelming, inescapable now.
Both movements are answers to moments when technology surges ahead of society’s ability to govern it. Futurism speaks from the bright edge of possibility, intoxicated by the idea speed, itself, will elevate humanity beyond its past. Cyberpunk speaks from the shadow of the same acceleration, warning speed without control hollows the human core. The Futurists paint locomotives and propellers as icons of freedom. The Cyberpunks write of megacorporations and neural implants as evidence of a bargain gone wrong. Yet each understands technology as destiny, whether worshipped or resisted.
The dialogue between them is not closed. In the long arc of cultural history, movements often pose questions which are answered decades later—sometimes in the form of caution, others as a renewed embrace of what was once feared. If Futurism’s question was how far humanity could rise on the wings of invention, Cyberpunk’s answer is how far it might fall when those wings are owned by another. Our own era, with artificial intelligence woven into daily life, may be the next turn of the cycle, one asking its own questions in reply: Are we standing in the glow of Futurism’s promised dawn, or in the neon-lit alleyways of Cyberpunk’s rain-soaked night?
Or have we stepped into the space where both are true, awaiting the answer of the next movement still to come?
The city of tomorrow rises from the questions yesterday could not resolve.
The Thumbnail image is an overlay of a Film Still from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and a Futurist painting by Umberto Boccioni, Charge of the Lancers, 1916. Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
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Bibliography—
Akira Kurosawa, ed. Akira: The Art of the Animated Film. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1988.
Arnold, Rebecca. Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the 20th Century. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
Balla, Giacomo. Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash. 1912. Oil on canvas. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY.
Balla, Giacomo. Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing. 1914.
Berghaus, Günter. Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996.
Berghaus, Günter. Futurism and the Technological Imagination. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009.
Boccioni, Umberto. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. 1913. Cast bronze. Museo del Novecento, Milan.
Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, dir. Thais. Rome: Cines, 1917. Film.
Chessa, Luciano. Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
Depero, Fortunato. Depero Futurista. Milan: Dinamo-Azari, 1927.
Gibson, William. “Johnny Mnemonic.” In Burning Chrome, 1–21. New York: Arbor House, 1986.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984.
Girard, Greg, and Ian Lambot. City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City. Hong Kong: Watermark Publications, 1993.
Hanson, Matt. The End of Celluloid: Film Futures in the Digital Age. Lausanne: AVA Publishing, 2004.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005.
Jodidio, Philip. Architecture: Art. Cologne: Taschen, 2016.
Lista, Giovanni. Cinema e Fotografia Futurista. Milan: Skira, 2001.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism. Le Figaro, February 20, 1909.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. Zang Tumb Tumb. Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia, 1914.
McGilligan, Patrick. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
Mead, Syd. Syd Mead’s Sentury. Pasadena, CA: Oblagon, 1993.
Moroder, Giorgio, restoration. Giorgio Moroder Presents Metropolis. Directed by Fritz Lang. Los Angeles: Cinecom Pictures, 1984. Film.
Otomo, Katsuhiro, dir. Akira. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1988. Film.
Person, Lawrence. “Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto.” Nova Express 6, no. 1 (1998): 1–5.
Poole, Steven. Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000.
Reed, S. Alexander. Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Russolo, Luigi. The Art of Noises. 1913.
Sammon, Paul M. Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. New York: HarperPrism, 1996.
Sant’Elia, Antonio. Manifesto of Futurist Architecture. 1914.
Schnapp, Jeffrey T. Building Fascism, Communism, Liberalism: Architecture and Politics in Italy, 1914–1943. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Shelton, Barrie. Learning from the Japanese City: Looking East in Urban Design. London: Routledge, 1999.
Shirow, Masamune. Ghost in the Shell. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1991.
Spiller, Neil. Cyberpunk. London: Carlton Books, 2000.
Sterling, Bruce, ed. Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. New York: Ace Books, 1986.
Steele, Valerie, ed. Japan Fashion Now. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.
Taylor, Joshua C. Futurism. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961.
Yoshitaka, Amano. The Illustrated Works of Yoshitaka Amano. Tokyo: Shufunotomo, 1999.
Johnny Mnemonic. Directed by Robert Longo. Culver City, CA: TriStar Pictures, 1995. Film.
Metropolis. Directed by Fritz Lang. Berlin: UFA, 1927. Film.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, Le Figaro, February 20, 1909.
Joshua C. Taylor, Futurism (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), 45–48; Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913, cast bronze, Museo del Novecento, Milan; Giacomo Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912, oil on canvas, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Zang Tumb Tumb (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia, 1914); Fortunato Depero, Depero Futurista (Milan: Dinamo-Azari, 1927); Günter Berghaus, Futurism and the Technological Imagination (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 213–218.
Antonio Sant’Elia, Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, 1914; Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Building Fascism, Communism, Liberalism: Architecture and Politics in Italy, 1914–1943 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 33–37.
Giovanni Lista, Cinema e Fotografia Futurista (Milan: Skira, 2001), 145–149; Thais, directed by Anton Giulio Bragaglia (Rome: Cines, 1917), film.
Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, 1913; Luciano Chessa, Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 43–51.
Giacomo Balla, Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing, 1914; Ester Coen, Futurism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 178–181.
Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996), 112–119.
Bruce Sterling, ed., Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (New York: Ace Books, 1986), ix–xiii; Neil Spiller, Cyberpunk (London: Carlton Books, 2000), 6–11.
William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984); Bruce Sterling, ed., Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (New York: Ace Books, 1986).
Paul M. Sammon, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (New York: HarperPrism, 1996), 54–59; Syd Mead, Syd Mead’s Sentury (Pasadena, CA: Oblagon, 1993), 102–107; Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1988), film; Masamune Shirow, Ghost in the Shell (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1991); Yoshitaka Amano, The Illustrated Works of Yoshitaka Amano (Tokyo: Shufunotomo, 1999).
Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang (Berlin: UFA, 1927), film; Giorgio Moroder Presents Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang, restored by Giorgio Moroder (Los Angeles: Cinecom Pictures, 1984), film; Patrick McGilligan, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 217–222.
Johnny Mnemonic, directed by Robert Longo (Culver City, CA: TriStar Pictures, 1995), film; William Gibson, “Johnny Mnemonic,” in Burning Chrome (New York: Arbor House, 1986), 1–21.
Rebecca Arnold, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the 20th Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 142–146; Valerie Steele, ed., Japan Fashion Now (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 85–89.
S. Alexander Reed, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 97–102; Paul Sammon, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (New York: HarperPrism, 1996), 119–122; Akira Kurosawa, ed., Akira: The Art of the Animated Film (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1988), 211–214.
Barrie Shelton, Learning from the Japanese City: Looking East in Urban Design (London: Routledge, 1999), 54–59; Greg Girard and Ian Lambot, City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City (Hong Kong: Watermark Publications, 1993), 12–19; Philip Jodidio, Architecture: Art (Cologne: Taschen, 2016), 210–213.
Matt Hanson, The End of Celluloid: Film Futures in the Digital Age (Lausanne: AVA Publishing, 2004), 88–91; Steven Poole, Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000), 102–105.
Lawrence Person, “Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto,” Nova Express 6, no. 1 (1998): 1–5; Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 384–389.