Shock Factory

Industrial music appeared in the mid-1970s, and far from being a simple soundexperimentation phenomenon, it quickly spawned a coherent visual culture operating at theintersection of a multitude of media (collage, mail art, installation, film, performance, sound,video) and initiated a close inspection of the legacy of modernity and the growing, pervasiveinfluence of technology. Originally British, the movement soon outgrew Europe, extending intothe United States and Japan during the 1980s. The sound experiments conducted byindustrial bands - designing synthesizers, manipulating and transforming recorded soundsfrom audio tapes, either recycled or laid down by the artists - were backed up by a rich arrayof radical visual productions, deriving their sources from the modernist utopias of the first partof the 20th century. Such saturated sounds were translated into abrasive images, manipulatedthrough the détournement of reprographic techniques (Xerox art), that investigated polemicalthemes: mind control, criminality, occultism, pornography, psychiatry and totalitarianism,among others. This book introduces the visual and aesthetic elements of 1970s and 1980s industrialculture to a general history of contemporary art by analysing the different approaches takenand topics addressed by the primary protagonists of the movement, who perceptivelyanticipated the current discourse concerning the media and their collective coercive power.