Dr Tamara Trodd in conversation with Dr Dominic Paterson: 'Technology and Aesthetics from Duchamp to the Digital'

Dr Tamara Trodd (University of Edinburgh) discusses her new book, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Technology and Aesthetics from Duchamp to the Digital, in conversation with Dominic Paterson. The book, published by University of Chicago Press in Autumn 2015, counters the modernist view that the medium provides advanced art with "resistance" against technological pressures. Instead, Trodd argues that we should view art and its practices as imaginatively responding to the potential that artists glimpsed in mechanical reproduction, putting art into dialogue with the commercial cultures of its time. The Art of Mechanical Reproduction presents case studies of the work of Paul Klee, Hans Bellmer, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Smithson, Gerhard Richter, Chris Marker, and Tacita Dean. Trodd weaves a rich history of the experimental networks in which these artists worked, and shows for the first time how extensively technological innovations of the moment affected their work.

The event offers a chance to encounter this important book's themes and arguments through a dialogue with its author.