Futurism Essay

Introduction
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the world experienced change that radically impacted in all aspects of human life socially, politically, culturally and economically. Advances and innovations in technology and science further transformed the state of commerce and industry in making life much easier for all people in societies. Visual art and design also experienced a series of creative movements that questioned long-held values and approaches to organizing space as well as the role of art and design in society. Among the modern and first art movements that occurred during these early decades of the twentieth century were cubism and futurism, which directly influenced the graphic language of form and visual communication

In origin, “Futurism began its transformation of Italian culture on February 20th, 1909, with the publication of the Futurist Manifesto, authored by writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. It appeared on the front page of Le Figaro, which was then the largest circulation newspaper in France, and the stunt signalled the movement 's desire to employ modern, popular means of communication to spread its ideas. The group would issue more manifestos as the years passed, but this summed up their spirit, celebrating the "machine age", the triumph of technology over nature, and opposing earlier artistic traditions. Marinetti 's ideas drew the support of artists Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, and Carlo Carrà, who believed that they could be translated into a modern, figurative art which explored properties of space and movement. The movement initially centered in Milan, but it spread quickly to Turin and Naples, and over subsequent years Marinetti vigorously promoted it abroad” (The Art Story,

Even though earlier photographers like Eadweard Muybridge had shot series of photos of people or animals moving, the Futurists depicted moving figures and machines at multiple moments of time all in one image. You could say they took a cinematic sequence and compressed it into a single shot” (Wilder 2007:309). “Committed to the new, its members wished to destroy older forms of culture and to demonstrate the beauty of modern life - the beauty of the machine, speed, violence and change. Although the movement did foster some architecture, most of its adherents were artists who worked in traditional media such as painting and sculpture, and in an eclectic range of styles inspired by Post-Impressionism. .” Nevertheless, they were interested in embracing popular media and new technologies to communicate their ideas. ” (The Art Story, 2015). According to Piper (2004:400) “Futurist techniques owed much initially to Neo-impressionist practice – breaking down the colours into small fragmentary