The Baroque Sensorium: Televisual Ambience, Bioelectronics, and Ecstasy in Francoist Spain (1948-1982)

Dissertation Proposal by Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco Princeton School of Architecture Advisor: Spyros Papapetros December 5, 2016 It is the premiere of José Val del Omar’s Fuego en Castilla [Fire in Castile] at the 1961 Cannes Film

Festival. Extinguished torches emit a strong resin smell. Vegetal patterns flood the walls, ceiling

and main floor of the auditorium. Sound comes from the front of the room, but also from the back.

On the screen, seventeenth century Spanish Baroque sculptures flicker at such a frantic speed that

viewers have trouble grasping their actual forms. At their entrance to the room, spectators had been

given a leaflet identifying the “electronic” film as the “ardent firmament to Mysticism [el firmamento

ardiente a la Mística].”1 On the back of the leaflet, the word “TactilVisión” was superimposed on the

picture of a caged macaque. Indeed, the transformation of the movie theater into a multi-sensory

environment was meant to reinforce what Val del Omar described as the tactil effects of the film:2

synesthetic experiences attempting to recover the original haptic qualities of vision by creating a

bodily response approaching religious ecstasy. Ultimately, Val del Omar wished that this synesthetic

system and its mystical import would quickly expand through the wide-spread adoption of

television in Spain.

This dissertation examines the spatial discourses tethered to the introduction of electronic

media in Spain during the 1950s, focusing on the theoretical, technical, and artistic practice of José

Val del Omar (1904–1982). Consultant at large of the Ministerio de Información y Turismo

[Ministry of Information and Tourism] since its constitution in 1952, Val del Omar would after

1956 concentrate on advising the creation of Television Española [Spanish Television Channel].

1 [He aquí el firmamento ardiente a la Mística.] José Val del Omar, “Programa de Mano de Fuego en Castilla” (1961).

Javier Ortiz-Echagu ̈e (ed.), Escritos de Técnica, Poética y Mística (Madrid: Ediciones de La Central MNCARS, 2010), p. 235.

2 In coining the neologism tactil ('tak til)—which resulted from the removal of the accent of the Spanish táctil (tak 'til)—Val del Omar intended to give a better semantic response to an alternate mode of synaesthetic apperception entangling sight and touch. By displacing the stress of the term to the snap of the vowel i, Val del Omar believed that the sounding of the word produced a haptic, shocking reaction: this particular orthography transformed the term into a synesthetic device in and of itself. Román Gubern, Val del Omar, Cinemista (Granada: Diputación de Granada, 2004), p. 67.

Over the course of his long career, both in individual practice and institutional engagement, Val del

Omar attempted to redesign every element configuring the cinematic and televisual apparatuses.

During the 1960s, the work of Reyner Banham on technological and environmental comfort

(consolidating the influence of the media theories of Marshall McLuhan in the architectural field)

prompted a conceptual dematerialization of architecture into energy flows, information, and

environmental forces. More recent architectural history has attempted to show how these narratives

undergirded the development of a variety of spatial artifacts, from multimedia spaces to American

corporate architecture. While these works pose technological and scientific advancements as the

attendant outcomes of processes of rationalization, the specific case of Spain proves how these fields

also contributed to the survival of certain forms of religiosity including mystic rituals and ecstatic

experiences. Particularly in Spain, the introduction of media technologies was imbricated with

emerging scientific disciplines such as bionics while infusing electronic media with spiritual import.

Through its resulting spatial products, this dissertation investigates the reconciliation of the

Francoist construction of the political subject—oscillating between a strict Catholic asceticism

controlled by ecclesiastic orders and fascist body politics—with the robust consumerism promoted

by the expansion and implementation of new US-led global networks in Spain. Furthermore, my

study uses the figure of Val del Omar to elucidate the tensions created by his entanglement of

technology and science with mysticism and forms of popular religiosity. Unlike with other

European totalitarianisms, Spain’s fascist party, La Falange, was only able to gain power through

the formulation of Nacional Catolicismo [National Catholicism], a conflation of State apparatuses

and Catholic ecclesiastic power that, partially adopting the traits of fascism, monopolized culture,

education, and science during the early years of the regime.3 Although acknowledging the

importance of the modernizing effects of this new order in the 1950s, Francoism still stuck to

Spain’s religious exceptionalism within this post-industrial global network, continuously singling

out the country’s role as the “spiritual promontory of Europe.”4 During the first years of the regime,

the Francoist State attempted a “Christianization” of science and technology, commanded by the

Consejo Superior de Administraciones Científicas [Superior Council of Scientific

3 The relation of Spanish Francoism to German Nazism and Italian Fascism is still a matter of contention. Although

there are a large amount of commonalities between Francoism and the fascist regimes that emerged in Germany and Italy during the beginning of the twentieth century, the heterogeneous base undergirding the Spanish dictatorship requires a distinct approach. See the positions of Tony Judt, Postwar Europe since 1945 (London: Heinemann, 2005); Raymond Carr, Modern Spain, 1875-1980 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

4 [“España, promontorio espiritual de Europa, proa avanzada del alma continental, es el umbral natural de Europa, nexo y soldadura espiritual de tres continentes, momento clave en el existir histórico del mundo, de este mundo, de este planeta que vosotros habéis contribuido a unificar, a hacer más apretado, más compacto y solidario.”] “Esta Mañana Salen de España los Tres Astronautas Para Seguir su Viaje.” ABC (September 29, 1969), p. 34.

Administrations]. Its director, the soon-to-become-priest José María Albareda, was in charge of

integrating scientific and technological development under a single, theological umbrella ruling

every aspect of the Francoist State in a strict manner.5 In that sense, mysticism and popular

religiosity dissented from Weber’s notion of modernity as a process of “disenchantment” and

proposed a different kind of political order from Nacional Catolicismo in offering the subject direct

access to a the Divine independently from any hierarchical mediation.

After the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration sought to consolidate a geostrategic alliance

with the Franco dictatorship to ensure the curtailment of potential communist expansion

throughout Western Europe. Following the 1953 Madrid Agreements [Pactos de Madrid] that

settled US military bases in Spanish sovereign territory, the Franco administration received

economic aid and technical tutelage from the United States in order to modernize the country’s

crippled economic and industrial infrastructures. In 1957, the substitution of fascist-affiliated

ministers with technocrats associated with the ultra-conservative Catholic institution Opus Dei

perfectly converged with capitalism’s “theological value of work.”6 Through the guidance of US

state agencies like the International Cooperation Administration, and the action of a conglomerate

of institutions—including the Ford Foundation, UNESCO, the World Bank, and companies like

IBM and Remington Rand7—Spain’s preexisting scientific and technologic research was suddenly

plugged into a system constructed upon economic globalization, the consolidation of information

technologies, and the revalorization of communication.8

The 1964 agreement between Spain and the US that allowed Spain to use American satellite

bandwidth, and the 1965 installation of data circuits linking Spanish territories and US military

5 Recent work by historian of science Lino Camprubí has explored the connections between the Consejo Superior de

Administraciones Científicas and logics of religious redemption. In her work attempting to unfold the entanglement between ideology and architecture in early Francoism, architectural historian Maria González Pendás has analyzed the relationship between Albareda and architect Miguel Fisac, who designed the majority of buildings of the Consejo Superior. See María González Pendás, Architecture, Technocracy, and Silence: Building Discourse in Franquista Spain (New York: Columbia University. PhD Dissertation, 2016); Lino Camprubí. Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014).

6 The Opus Dei is a religious organization founded in 1928 by José María Escribá de Balaguer to promote spirituality through daily actions. José V. Casanova posed the highly provocative thesis that modernization was only possible in Spain due to the convergence of capitalism’s undergirding protestant ethics, as formulated by Max Weber, and Opus Dei’s ethics, breaking from the traditional “bad conscience” of the wealthy Catholic. José V. Casanova, The Opus Dei Ethic and the Modernization of Spain (New York: New School for Social Research. PhD Dissertation, 1982).

7 Felicity D. Scott recently surveyed the role of institutions such as the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, and the UN in the architectural and territorial implications of US postwar hegemony, especially in relation to the developing world. See Felicity D. Scott, Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity / Architectures of Counterinsurgency (New York: Zone Books, 2016).

8 The new forms of subjectivity resulting from the organization of power as deployed under these new parameters have been described by Gilles Deleuze in “Control and Becoming” and “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” both reproduced in Negotiations 1972-1990. Translated by Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 169-182.

bases to the American mainland, cemented a popular fascination with real-time transmission.

During the 1960s, attempts to render these seemingly immaterial processes perceptible haunted the

rhetoric of the Francoist regime. Francoist administrators insisted on the invasion of the Spanish

“fortress” by “the power of waves, film and television” that “flies through the spaces … vitiating the

purity of our ambient environment [ambiente].”9 After 1960, when the Spanish government and the

Eisenhower administration agreed to build a NASA tracking station on Great Canary Island, there

was an increasing infusion of real-time transmission with a spiritual import: Val del Omar saw in

the transmission capacities of the first artificial telecommunications satellite Telstar (launched into

orbit in 1963) a prophetic guidance to mystically orient the subject of the television era.10 Basque

sculptor Jorge Oteiza insisted that the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, encountered the fourteenth

century figure of the Count of Orgaz in outer space “set into orbit” by El Greco’s Baroque pictorial

visions.11

Although primarily developed during the 1950s and ‘60s, Val del Omar’s project was more

acutely tied to the avant-garde cinematic experiments, especially to Dadaist and Surrealist film of

the 1920s and 1930s, than to the offspring of their postwar deferred action.12 Advocating for

alternatives to symbolic meaning, the filmmaker reconfigured cinema as a non-textual form of

communication supported by forms of popular religiosity and mysticism.13 According to Val del

Omar, the use of textual symbolic systems based on code repetition limited the subject’s freedom of

expression, suggesting that the association between instinctual reactions and words helped

9 [“Hoy tengo que preveniros de un peligro: con la facilidad de los medios de comunicación, el poder de las ondas, el cine y la

televisión se han dilatado las ventanas de nuestra fortaleza. El libertinaje de las ondas y de la letra impresa vuela por los espacios y los aires de fuera penetran por nuestras ventanas viciando la pureza de nuestro ambiente.”] Francisco Franco, Discursos y Mensajes del Jefe del Estado. 1955- 1959. Dirección General de Información (Madrid: Publicaciones Españolas, 1960), p. 122. For an account of Franco’s progressive embracement of television, see Manuel Palacio, “Francisco Franco y la Televisión.” In Archivos de la Filmoteca: Revista de Estudios Históricos sobre la Imagen, No. 42-43, Vol. 2 (2002), pp. 72-95.

10 Jorge Oteiza, “Yuri Gagarin y Velázquez.” El Bidasoa (April 22, 1961), p. 1. Reprinted in Jorge Oteiza, Oteiza en Irún, 1957-1974. Edited by Jaime Rodríguez Salís (Iru ́n: Alberdania, 2003), pp. 120-124.

11 [“El profeta del Telstar les señalizaba misteriosamente: “El camino más corto de los hombres pasa por las estrellas”]. José Val del Omar, “El Firmamento de una Técnica con T Mayúscula” (1960s). Escritos, p. 164. The importance of El Greco in twentieth-century Spain has been surveyed in Lubar, Robert S, “La Presencia de El Greco en el Arte Español del Siglo XX,” in José Álvarez Lopera et al., El Greco (Madrid: Fundación Amigos del Museo del Prado, 2003), pp. 445-62.

12 Film critic Thomas Beard has pointed to the singular “breadth and trans-generational nature” of Val del Omar’s work. In a career that spanned from the 1920s to the early 1980s, his work was in dialogue with the early cinematographic efforts of the Dadaists and Surrealists in the 1930s, with the cinematic experiments of the 1940s and 1950s, like those of Peter Kubelka and Kenneth Anger, and with the Expanded Cinema experiences of Stan VanDerBeek during the 1960s and 1970s. Thomas Beard, “José Val del Omar A lo Largo de Tres Vanguardias.” In Eugeni Bonet et al, Desbordamiento de Val del Omar (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2010), pp. 40-47.

13 Appearing at the same historical conjuncture, the work of Val del Omar bears similarities with Walter Benjamin’s notion of mimetic faculty as well as with Antonin Artaud’s formulation of the theater of cruelty, both constructed around a dialectics between magic and language. See Antonin Artaud, “Letters on Language” in The Theater and its Double. Translated by M. C. Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958), pp. 105-121; Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty” (1933), in Selected Writings Vol. 2, Part 2, 1931-34. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 720-722.

assimilate the individual to the masses.14 But the recording and transmission of instincts enabled by

the cinematic apparatus allowed spectators to relate to their environment, and to unconsciously

absorb it through the establishment of simpatía, the Spanish term used to render Wilhelm

Worringer’s notion of Einfühlung (as mistranslated by philosopher José Ortega y Gasset). Despite

Val del Omar’s repeated use of this term, simpatía has been overlooked in scholarly accounts of his

film theories. After the Spanish Civil War, Val del Omar responded to the effects on science and

technological infrastructures of military agreements with the United States with theories on

perception that sought to combine mysticism with new developments in science, as well as pseudo-

scientific experimentation on the senses, demonstrating a growing interest in para-psychological

phenomena such as telepathy and clairvoyance.15

To give scientific credibility to his thesis on simpatía, Val del Omar resorted to the progressive

development in Spain of bionics and bioethical discourses (such as for example, the building habits

of primates). These scientific disciplines displaced the prevailing natural theological axioms that

interpreted the design “precision” in animals’ building techniques as grounded in a divinely

bestowed instinct.16 Val del Omar characterized animal vision as exemplifying a commotional,

purely instinctual communication to be enacted through new media, which the human subject had

retained in her phylogenetic structure during its evolution from ameba to hominid. Furthermore,

this perceptual system—understood as capable of bypassing the codes of language instilled by

education in the human mind—would be able to overcome the “unethical” uses of spectacle on the

subject and its impact on the subject through imitation.

Val del Omar’s ideas on the sensorium were first tested in the transformation of movie theatre

architecture through the implementation of new cinematic technologies, (such as Cinemascope,

Cinerama and Vista-Visión), introduced by the American film industry during the 1950s to win

back popular audiences increasingly seduced by network television.17 Val del Omar was deeply

14 Val del Omar, “Sentimiento de la Pedagogia Kinestésica,” Escritos, p. 40. 15 Val del Omar tied the development of bioelectronics to a “clarification of the telepathic phenomenon,” directly

pointing to the work of Leonid Vasiliev as “discover[ing] that telepathy, suggestion and clairvoyance are functions of the modest instinct.” José Val del Omar in “Dilema y Poder.” Sáenz de Buruaga, Gonzalo, and María José Val del Omar (ed.), Val del Omar: Sin Fin (Granada: Diputación Provincial de Granada, 1992), pp. 221-222.

16 Naturalist priest Jesús Simon went so far as stating that “insects have no intelligence, but they suppose that of God.” Jesús Simon, A Dios por la Ciencia. Estudios Científico-Apologéticos (Barcelona: Lumen, 1954), p. 315. On natural theology in Spain within the frame of anti-Darwinism, see Francisco Blázquez Paniagua, “A Dios por la Ciencia: Teología Natural en el Franquismo.” Asclepio. Revista de Historia de la Medicina y de la Ciencia, vol. LXIII, No. 2 (July-December, 2011), pp. 453-476.

17 Although televisual infrastructures were still underway in Spain, the new commercial ties between that country and the US accelerated the implementation of these audiovisual systems. For a comprehensive history on the introduction of these multiple projection formats, see John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Alison Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University

critical of solutions focusing on the enhancement of the material qualities of the image that

overlooked the psychic-physiological, ethical, and sociological possibilities ingrained in the same

medium. Val del Omar would attempt to restore these social qualities via a complete overhaul of

the existing cinematic apparatus. In this regard, the filmmaker argued for the spatial singularity of

the movie theater, converting its space into a multi-sensory environment through the intensification

of its darkness and illumination, and the implementation of unique sensorial devices such as

“surround sound,” seat equipment with vibratory effects, the release of inductive smells, or the

catering of specially flavored snacks.18 By extension, the filmmaker’s interests would shift from

cinema to televisual space after the introduction of the television broadcasting system by the

Francoist administration in the mid-1950s. Val del Omar proposed the creation of a national social

club, whose members would communicate in real-time through the coordination of TV with radio,

telephone, and 8/8 cameras. This program sought to convert every space on the televisual network

into a point of audiovisual data transmission and reception, dismantling the binary distinction

between studio production and domestic reception. This system anticipates the modes of network

connectivity that would reign supreme with the implementation of fiber-optic circuits.

Methodologically, the aim of this dissertation is not to offer a monographic survey of Val del

Omar, but to use his multifaceted production as a means to uncover discourses on space and

perception that emerged from the introduction of electronics in Spain by a totalitarian regime,

emphasizing his involvement with aesthetic ideologies and political institutions. Though he

patented more than seventy audio-visual inventions, actively participated in different state

organizations, and wrote prolifically, preexisting scholarship on the artist has reduced his work to

his filmic production. The quasi-hagiographic depiction of Val del Omar as a solitary genius has

obscured some of the larger debates surrounding his multi-media practices with a number of

interlocutors in a variety of disciplines.

More recently, there have been a few attempts to rebuild a potential intellectual milieu

framing Val del Omar’s work within wider historical circles. For example, in his reorganization of

the permanent collection of Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Museum director Manuel Borja-Villel

attempted to position Val del Omar within a wider international artistic context, however this

Press, 2008); and John Belton, Sheldon Hall, and Steve Neal (eds.), Widescreen Worldwide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).

18 Although some of his propositions preceded these devices, Val del Omar was well acquainted with architectural projects retrospectively hinged in histories of the expansion of the moving-image: he had personally visited Edgar Varèse’s multimedia Poème Électronique featured at Le Corbusier and Iannis Xennakis’ Philips Pavilion in Brussels ‘58 as well as the Eames’ Think at the IBM Pavilion in the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and was fully aware of the technical innovations conforming Robert Breer and Billy Klüver’s E.A.T.’s Pepsi Pavilion in Expo Osaka ’70.

restitution overlooked the filmmaker’s mysticism, which sits uncomfortably within modernist

narratives. Esperanza Collado situated Val del Omar’s practice within an international history by

tracing the transformation of film to Expanded Cinema.19 Javier Ortiz-Echagüe situated the work

of the filmmaker next to the practice of artists Yves Klein and Jorge Oteiza under the pretext that

they shared an interest in the space race.20 Despite the inclusiveness of recent expanded aesthetic

discourses, however, these accounts largely neglect to address in depth Val del Omar’s involvement

with state institutions, and fail to account for the effects of his work within the Francoist context.

Moreover, such scholarship has evaded a spatial and architectural account of Val del Omar’s

ambient projects, which is the main undertaking of this dissertation.

Chapter Structure

The dissertation parcels Val del Omar’s work into five different synchronic chapters. In avoiding a

strictly chronological order, it attempts to depart from merely biographical readings so as to map a

simultaneous engagement with overlapping discourses and institutions. Either in an explicit manner

or by emphasizing Val del Omar’s discourse within specific historical and social contingencies, each

chapter focuses on the filmmaker’s engagement with a particular institution, including state

agencies and international corporations.

Trying to situate the Spanish case within a wider international context, the first chapter,

“Media Space (1949-1964),” examines the transformation of the movie theater under the pressures

of emerging televisual infrastructures during the 1950s and early 1960s. Val del Omar’s arguments

at the time coincided with some of the social, aesthetic, and institutional preoccupations with

cinematic space shared by the pioneers of “expanded cinema” such as Robert Breer and Stan

VanDerBeek, with whom Val del Omar attended the II International Experimental Film

Competition at the 1958 Brussels World Exhibition.21 This chapter also relates the spatial and

architectural concerns in Val del Omar’s own projects—including the sound piece Auto Sacramental

Invisible, “with 8 reproduction channels and indications of lightning, smell and flames”(1949), and

the overflowing projections configuring the mise-en-scène of the short film Fuego en Castilla

19 Esperanza Collado, Paracinema: la Desmaterialización del Cine en las Prácticas Artísticas. Madrid: Trama, 2012. 20 Ortiz-Echagüe, Javier. Yuri Gagarin y el conde Orgaz: Mística y Estética de la Era Espacial (Jorge Oteiza, Yves Klein,

José Val del Omar) (Alzuza: Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza Fundazio Museoa, 2014). 21 Val del Omar participated in the contest with Aguaespejo Granadino/La Gran Seguiriya. Although scholars like

Thomas Beard and Esperanza Collado have pointed to the similarities between the work of Val del Omar and American filmmakers Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, and Stan VanDerBeek, their shared presence at the 1958 Brussels World Exhibition has passed unnoticed.

(1961)22 —with the commissions by the Ministerio de Información y Turismo such as the ten

experimental installations placed in the Spanish Pavilion at the 1964 New York World Fair. In

addition, the chapter also inspects Val del Omar’s relation to the itinerant theaters, cinema domes,

and exhibition spaces simultaneously developed for the Ministerio by architect Emilio Pérez Piñeiro

(1935-1972).23

Although primarily developed during the 1950s and 1960s, Val del Omar’s theories of

perception were inchoate during his involvement with the Misiones Pedagógicas [Pedagogical

Missions], an educational initiative set up by the Second Republic to alleviate the levels of illiteracy

in rural Spain. Val del Omar identified the ecstatic reactions of the villagers attending their first

screening as the outcome of cinema’s appeal to the subject’s unconscious. The second chapter of

this dissertation, “Theories of Perception (1948-1982),” examines Val del Omar’s theories through

a close interpretation of the relation between religious ecstasy and instinctual communication as it

appears in his writings.24 At the end of the 1940s, Val del Omar started to refer to the villagers’

ecstatic experience of cinema (while for example, watching films of Charlie Chaplin) as similar to

religious ecstasies associated with the Baroque era of seventeenth-century Spain. Since the turn of

the twentieth century, art historians have insisted on connecting seventh-century Spanish Baroque

to the descriptions of rapture by Saint Theresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross, and have

interpreted the work of artists like El Greco as the psycho-physiological by-product of ecstatic

experience.25 At first glance, this approach towards Baroque aesthetics seems to align with Nacional

Catolicismo’s revival of Imperial Baroque architecture and art, invoked to recall the entanglement of

religious, military, and political hegemony of the Spanish Empire. The deeply reactionary character

22No graphic documentation of these events has survived.23 Emilio Pérez Piñero participated in the Competition for the Design of an Ambulant Theater at the Union

International des Architectes, UIA Congress in London in 1961. The jury, comprised of Félix Candela, Buckminster Fuller, and Ove Arup, considered Piñero’s Unfolding Structure entry “a first order technical contribution.” Emilio Pérez Piñero, “Project for a mobile theatre.” AD: The Architectural Design, vol. 31, No. 12 (1961), p. 570.

24 Five archival folders of Val del Omar’s written production remain unexplored (Email exchange with Piluca Baquero Navarro, Director of the Val del Omar Archives. June 8, 2016). The volumes that contain a selection of Val del Omar’s writings are: José Val del Omar, Sin Fin; José ́ Val del Omar; Javier Ortiz-Echagu ̈e (ed.), Escritos de Técnica, Poética y Mística (Madrid: Ediciones de La Central MNCARS, 2010); José Val del Omar; Elena Duque (ed.), Val del Omar. Más Allá de la Órbita Terrestre (Buenos Aires: Ministerio de Cultura de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, BA Festival de Cine Independiente, 2015). The poems written by Val del Omar had also been edited as José Val del Omar; María José Val de Omar and Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga (eds.), Tientos de Erótica Celeste (Granada: Diputación Provincial de Granada, 2012).

25 This line of inquiry was started by one of Val del Omar’s mentors, Manuel B. Cossío. During the late 1940s and 1950s, scientific interests emerged around Baroque sculpture and painting. Some of the volumes published in this regard that Val del Omar was acquainted with are: Luis de Castro’s Un Médico en el Museo [A Doctor in the Museum] (1954), a psycho-physiological study of the Baroque sculptures at the National Museum of Religious Sculpture of Valladolid using modern psychology; doctor Gregorio Marañon’s dressing up the patients of El Nuncio Mental Asylum in Toledo—most of them affected by the modern traumatic experience of war neurosis—in order to prove that the deformed physiologies of El Greco’s figures responded to mentally-ill models; and Aldous Huxley’s writings on El Greco, which situated the painter as a precedent of the heightened forms of perception enabled by modern sensory alteration.

of this restitution of the Baroque made it significantly different from other stylistic revivals such as

the Italian “neo-Baroque,” emerging in the 1950s.26 Val del Omar’s pseudo-scientific

reconstructions of seventeenth century Baroque sensorium were actually used to prove the

corruption of vision provoked by unethical uses of cinema. Val del Omar refuted, for example, the

idea that all figures in El Greco’s paintings were deformed due to the artist’s presumed

“astigmatism”–a theory promoted by quasi scientific art historical accounts from the beginning of the

century.27 On the contrary, the filmmaker argued that it was modern vision that flattened El

Greco’s paintings and perceived them as deformed. For several of his films, Val del Omar invented

systems of rotating convex and concave mirrors that would produce deformed images meant to

recover the Baroque’s original visual order.

In the 1960s, Val del Omar’s practice started to move towards recent developments in science,

with special attention to animal psychology and physiology. According to the filmmaker, the

introduction of sciences such as bionics confirmed the knowledge already intuited by Spanish

mystics.28 The third chapter of this dissertation, “Animal Instinct (1955-1982),” addresses the

impact of different scientific and philosophic discourses on the animal in the reformulation of

environmental perception. Val del Omar’s work elucidates the tensions and convergences between

two contradistinctive approaches to this topic at the time. On one side, the filmmaker accepts the

equivalence between animal and automata undergirding bionics, following which perception is cast

as a data-processing device capable of high environmental adaptation. On the other, Val del Omar’s

work responds to the ethical redefinition of notions of culture as to include the social and

instrumental behavior of certain animals. The main objects of study in this chapter are a group of

Val del Omar artifacts from the series Óptica Biónica Energética Ciclo-tactil [Ciclo-tactil Energetic

Bionic Optics] (1969), and their correspondences with scientific electronic replicas of the visual

organs of horseshoe crabs and higher mammals made by the Laboratorio de Bioelectrónica y

Biónica [Laboratory of Bioelectronics and Bionics] in Madrid. Val del Omar’s engagement with

these animals is absent from any scholarly account of the artist, as is his relation to the Laboratorio,

whose almost intact archive is informally kept at the Museo de Informática «García-Santesmases»

(MIGS) in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

26 See Alexandre Cirici, La Estética del Franquismo La Estética del Franquismo (Barcelona: Gustau Gili, 1977) in comparison to Gillo Dorfles, Barocco nell’Archittetura Moderna (Milan: Politecnica Tamburini, 1951).

27 The work that first started this discourse is Germán Beritens. El Astigmatismo del Greco: Nueva Teoría que Explica las Anomalias de las Obras de Este Artista (Madrid: F. Fé, 1914).

28 Val del Omar stated, “Now researchers in bionics discover what Saint John of the Cross already knew, that clairvoyance is a function of the humble vital instinct that orients the flight of creatures.” [Ahora los investigadores de la Biónica descubren lo que San Juan de la Cruz ya sabía, que la clarividencia es función del humilde instinto que guía el vuelo vital de las criaturas.] José Val del Omar, “Alrededor de la Cultura de la Sangre. Palabras a propósito de la proyección de las películas en el colegio Pio XII (1965).” Escritos, p. 247.

Discourses on television gained momentum after the mid-1960s, when public broadcasting

was finally normalized in Spain. The fourth chapter, “Television (1956-1982),” inspects the spatial

products resulting from the introduction of this medium during the late 1960s. It examines Juan

Velasco Viejo’s design for the Ciudad de los Periodistas [Journalists’ City] (1968-70). The project

intended to offer housing tailored to the professional profile of the Asociación de Prensa de Madrid

[Madrid’s Press Association] increasing number of members. In 1972, Val del Omar moved to the

Ciudad to start the construction of the Laboratorio PLAT (Picto-Lumínico-Audio-Tactil) (1972-

1982), a technological merzbau centralized around a rudimentary cockpit where the filmmaker

reassembled all of his former inventions. Although the filmic production resulting from the PLAT

technology has been recently studied, these approaches evade a sustained interpretation of the

design and spatial logics of this assemblage of media instruments, recently reconstructed in the

Centro Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia.

During the early 1970s, popular culture interpreted real-time transmission as cluttering the

environment with dematerialized audiovisual content. New lighting technologies, like holography

and laser, offered a visualization alibi representing the invisible data surrounding the subject. The

fifth chapter, “Static Electricity (1962-1982),” inspects the epistemologies derived from the use of

technological apparatuses that apparently rendered environmental systems perceptible. Val del

Omar’s investigations of visibility and invisibility, which were the object of his experiments with

lasers, are used to disentangle discussions on the manifestation of environmental conditions around

the IBM Headquarters in Madrid (1966-68). The building was designed by Miguel Fisac, with

whom the filmmaker participated in the 1961 Sonimag [International Fair of Sound and Image] in

Barcelona. Right after its construction, the IBM Headquarters needed to be refurbished, as the

building proved uninhabitable due to the high level of static electricity caused by the large

concentration of computers, lightning infrastructures, and electrical circuitries.

Archives

Archivo General de la Administración. Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), Spain. Archivo Central de Cultura. Ministerio de Información y Turismo (1951-1977), IBM Corporate Archives. Somers, New York. Fondo Laboratorio de Electricidad y Automática, Museo de Informática “García-Santesmases,” Universidad

Complutense de Madrid. Fondo Museo Nacional de Escultura. Valladolid, Spain. Fondo Instituto de la Cultura Hispánica. Madrid. Fondo Radio Nacional de España. Prado del Rey, Madrid. Research Laboratory of Electronics. Records, 1944-1979. AC186, MIT, Cambridge, MA. Archivo Miguel Fisac. Fundación Miguel Fisac, Ciudad Real, Spain. Archivo Alejandro de la Sota. Fundación Alejandro de la Sota, Madrid. Archivo Val del Omar: María José Val del Omar–Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga, Museo Nacional Centro de

Arte Reina Sofía. Fons personal de Jordi Sabater Pi, Universitat de Barcelona. Warren McCulloch Papers, MSS. B. M139. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA. Archivo Emilio Pérez Piñero. Calasparra (Murcia), Spain. Journals and Periodicals

ABC. Madrid: Grupo ABC, 1891- Arbor. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1944- Arquitectura. Órgano del Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid. Madrid: Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos,

1959- Arriba. Madrid: Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista, 1935-

1979. Boletín de la Dirección General de Arquitectura. Madrid: Dirección General de Arquitectura, 1946-1955. Cuadernos de Arquitectura. Barcelona: Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Cataluña y Baleares, 1944-1970. Destino. Barcelona: Publicaciones y Revistas, SA. Espectáculo. Boletín del Sindicato del Espectáculo. Madrid: Sindicato Nacional del Espectáculo 1951- Imagen y Sonido: Revista Mensual de los Medios y Procedimientos Audio-Visuales. Barcelona: Imagen y Sonido,

1963-1975. Hogar y Arquitectura. Madrid: Ediciones y Publicaciones Populares, 1955-1977. La Vanguardia. Barcelona: Grup Godó, 1881- Luz: Revista de Información del Instituto de Óptica Daza de Valdés. Madrid: Consejo Superior de

Investigaciones Científicas, Patronato “Juan de la Cierva” de Investigación Técnica, 1960-1978. Memorias de la Secretaria General CSIC. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1942- Noticias IBM España. Madrid: IBM, 1963-68. Noticias IBM España Informe para la Administración Pública. Madrid: IBM, 1963-68. Nueva Forma: Arquitectura, Urbanismo, Diseño, Ambiente, Arte. Madrid: Nueva Forma, 1968-1975. Revista Nacional de Arquitectura. Madrid: Dirección General de Arquitectura, 1941-1958. Preliminary Bibliography

Monographies on Val del Omar

Bonet, Eugenio, et al. Desbordamiento de Val del Omar. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2010.

Gubern, Román. Val del Omar, Cinemista. Granada: Diputación de Granada, 2004. Sáenz de Buruaga, Gonzalo (ed.). Galaxia Val del Omar. Madrid: Instituto Cervantes, 2002. __________. Ínsula Val del Omar: Visiones de su Tiempo, Descubrimientos Actuales. Madrid: Consejo Superior

de Investigaciones Científicas, Semana del Cine Experimental, 1995. __________. Val del Omar y las Misiones Pedago ́gicas. Murcia: Dirección de Proyectos e Iniciativas Culturales,

Murcia Cultural; Madrid: Publicaciones de la Residencia de Estudiantes, 2003.

Sáenz de Buruaga, Gonzalo, and María José Val del Omar (ed.). Val del Omar: Sin Fin. Granada: Diputación Provincial de Granada, 1992.

Tranche, Rafael R. La Pantalla Abierta: Aproximación a la Obra de José Val del Omar. PhD Dissertation. Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Facultad de Ciencias de la Información. Departamento de Comunicación Audiovisual y Publicidad, 1995.

Val del Omar, José. Val del Omar: Elemental de España. [DVD] Barcelona: Cameo Media [Distributor]; Madrid: Archivo María José Val del Omar & Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga, 2010.

__________. Escritos de Técnica, Poética y Mística. Edited by Javier Ortiz-Echagu ̈e. Barcelona: Ediciones de La Central; Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; Pamplona: Universidad de Navarra, 2010.

__________. Tientos de Erótica Celeste. Edited by Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga and María José Val del Omar Granada: Diputación Provincial de Granada y FA, 1992.

Val del Omar, José; Sa ́enz de Buruaga, Gonzalo (ed.). José Val del Omar: Tríptico Elemental de España. Granada y Madrid: Diputación de Granada y Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 1996.

AVDO Books owned by Val del Omar, kept in Archivo Val del Omar: María José Val del Omar–Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Architecture, Art, and Totalitarian Politics in Francoist Spain (and beyond)

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966. Bonet Correa, Antonio, and Gabriel Ureña. Arte del Franquismo. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1981 Carr, Raymond. Modern Spain. 1875-1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Capitel, Antón. Arquitectura Española. Años 50-80. Madrid: MOPU, 1986. Chueca-Goitia, Fernando. Invariantes Castizos de la Arquitectura Española. Madrid: Dossat, 1947. Cirici, Alexandre. La estética del Franquismo. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1977. Doménech, Lluís, Carlos Sambricio, and Antón Capitel. Arquitectura Para Después de una Guerra, 1939-

1949. Special issue in Cuadernos de Arquitectura y Urbanismo 121 (1977) Flores, Carlos. Arquitectura Española Contemporánea. Bilbao: Aguilar, 1989 [1961] Fullaondo, Juan Daniel, and María Teresa Muñoz. Historia de la Arquitectura Contemporánea Española. 3

Volumes. Madrid: Munillalería, 1995. Giménez Caballero, Ernesto. Arte y Estado [1935]. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2009. González Pendás, María. Architecture, Technocracy, and Silence: Building Discourse in Franquista Spain. New

York: Columbia University. PhD Dissertation, 2016. Judt, Tony. Postwar: a History of Europe since 1945. New York: Penguin Press, 2005. Llorens, Tomás. “La Arquitectura del Franquismo: a Propósito de una Revisión.” Arquitecturas Bis, No. 28

(1979), pp. 12-19. Marzo, Jorge Luis and Patricia Mayayo. Arte en España (1939-2015): Ideas, Prácticas, Políticas. Madrid :

Cátedra, 2015. Pérez Escolano, Victor. “La Arquitectura Española del Segundo Franquismo y el ‘Boletín de la Dirección

General de Arquitectura,’ 1946-1957.” In Revista de Arquitectura, No. 16 (2014), pp. 25-40. Rabinbach, Anson. “Moments of Totalitarianism.”History and Theory 45:1 (February 2006), pp. 72-100. Riquer, Borja de. La Dictadura de Franco. Madrid: Crítica/Marcial Pons, 2010. Sambricio, Carlos. “A Propósito de la Arquitectura del Franquismo: Carlos Sambricio responde a Tomás Llorens y Helio Piñón.” Arquitecturas Bis 26 (1979), pp. 25-27. Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism,” The New York Review of Books, No. 22, Vol. 1 (February 6, 1975), pp.

23-30. Chapter 1. “Media Space (1947-1961)”

Aguirre, Javier. Anti-Cine: Apuntes para una Teoría. Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1972. __________. “The Expanded Field of Cinema, or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square,” in X-Screen: Film

Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s (Vienna: MuMOK, 2004): 152-176. Belton, John. Widescreen Cinema. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Belton, John, Sheldon Hall, and Steve Neale (eds.). Widescreen Worldwide. Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 2010.

de Bruyn, Eric C. H. “Empire’s Hologram,” in Cinema in the Expanded Field. Edited by François Bovier, and Mey Adeena (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2016), pp. 14-53.

Colomina, Beatriz. “Enclosed by Images: The Eameses’ Multimedia Architecture.” Grey Room, No. 02 (Winter 2001), pp. 6-29.

Collado, Esperanza. “Film and its Resonance in Space: Notes on Expanded Cinema in Spain.” Experimental Conversations website, No. 13. Winter 2014. Accessed September 26, 2016, http://www.experimentalconversations.com/article/9/.

__________. Paracinema: la Desmaterialización del Cine en las Prácticas Artísticas. Madrid: Trama, 2012. Elcott, Noam M. “The Phantasmagoric Dispositif: An Assembly of Bodies and Images in Real Time and

Space.” Grey Room, No. 62 (Winter 2016), pp. 42-71. Elsaesser, Thomas. “The Institution Cinema,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas

Elsaesser. London: BFI, 1990. Joselit, David. “Yippie Pop: Abbie Hoffman, Andy Warhol, and Sixties Media Politics.” In Grey Room, No. 8

(2002), pp. 62-79. Joseph, Branden W. “‘My Mind Split Open:’ Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” Grey Room, No. 8

(Summer, 2002), pp. 80-107. Kracauer, Siegfried. “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin's Picture Palaces.” In The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays.

Translated and edited by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 323-328.

Pérez Piñero, Emilio. “Project for a Mobile Theatre.” Architectural Design, No. 12, vol. 31, p. 570. __________. “Cúpula Reticular de Directriz Esférica.” Aquitectura, No. 112 (April 1968), pp. 8-9, 13. __________. “Teatros Desmontables.” Informes de la Construcción, No. 231 (June 1971), pp. 18-40. Rees, A. L. “Expanded Cinema and Narrative: a Troubled History.” In Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance,

Film (London: Tate Gallery, 2011), pp. Sutton, Gloria. The Experience Machine: Stan VanderBeek's Movie-Drome and Expanded Cinema. Cambridge,

Massachusetts; London, England: The MIT Press, 2015. Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. Introduction by R. Buckminster Fuller. New York: Dutton, 1970. Uroskie, Andrew V. Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art. Chicago;

London: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Chapter 2. “Theories of Perception (1948-1982)”

Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and its Double. Translated from the French by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958. Originally printed as Théa ̂tre et son Double.

Benjamin, Walter. “On the Mimetic Faculty” (1933). Translated by Edmund Jephcott. In Selected Writings Vol. 2, Part 2, 1931-34. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 720-722.

__________. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (First Version [1935]).” Grey Room 39 (Spring 2010), pp. 10-37.

Beritens. Germa ́n. El Astigmatismo del Greco: Nueva Teoría que explica las Anomalías de las Obras de Este Artista. Madrid: Librería de Fernando de Fe ́, 1914.

Caillois, Roger. “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” Translated by John Shepley. October 31 (Winter, 1984), pp. 16-32. [Originally published as “Mimetisme et Psychasthenie Legendaire” in Minotaure 7 (1935), pp. 5-10.

de Castro, Luis. Un Médico en el Museo: Estudio Biológico-artístico del Museo Nacional de Escultura de Valladolid. Prologue by Gregorio Marañón. Introduction by Francisco de Cossío. 2 Volumes. Valladolid: Miñón, 1954.

de Castro, Luis. El Enigma de Berruguete. La Danza y la Escultura. Valladolid: Ediciones Ateneo, 1953. Cossío, Manuel B. El Greco. 2 volumes. Madrid: Fortanet, 1908. Cossío, Manuel B. Una Antología Pedagógica. Edited by Jaume Carbonell. Madrid: Servicio de Publicaciones

del Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, 1985. __________. De su Jornada (Fragmentos). Madrid: Blass, 1929. Eisenstein, Sergei. “El Greco y el Cine” (1937-41) in Cinématisme: Peinture et Cinéma, ed. François Albera,

trans. Anne Zouboff (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1989), pp. 16-17.

Florisoone, Michel. Esthétique et Mystique: D'Après Sainte Thérèse d'Avila et Saint Jean de la Croix, Suivi d'une Note sur Saint Jean de la Croix et le Greco et d'une Liste Commentée des Oeuvres de Saint Jean de la Croix. Paris: E ́ditions du Seuil, 1956.

Fray Luis de León et al. Los Místicos Españoles. Fray Luis de León, Santa Teresa de Jesús, San Juan de la Cruz. Girona: Dalmáu Carles; Madrid: Biblioteca de Clásicos para la Juventud, 1936.AVDO

Huxley, Aldous. “El Greco.” Life (April 24, 1950), pp. 86-96. Reprinted in Themes and Variations. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950.

__________. “Meditation on El Greco.” Saturday Review. Reprinted in Music at Night. __________. El Tiempo y la Máquina. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1961.AVDO

Losada, Matt. “The Technological Mysticism of José Val del Omar’s Tríptico elemental de España.” Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 7.2, pp. 101-115.

Marañon, Gregorio. El Greco y Toledo. Madrid, Espasa-Calpe, 1956. Mendelson, Jordana. Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation, 1929-1939.

University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Muehlenbeck, Philip. Religion and the Cold War. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012. Ortega y Gasset, José. “Arte de Este Mundo y del Otro.” El Imparcial (July 24, 1911); “II. Querer y Poder

Artísticos,” “III. Simpatía y Abstracción” (July 31, 1911); “IV. El Hombre Primitivo,” “V. El Hombre Clásico,” “VI. El Hombre Oriental,” “VII. El Hombre Mediterráneo” (August 13, 1911); “VIII. El Hombre Gótico” (August 14, 1911). Reprinted in José Ortega y Gasset, Obras Completas. Vol. 1: 1902-1916 (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1946), pp. 186-205.

_________. La Deshumanizacio ́n del Arte y otros Ensayos de Este ́tica. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1925. Ortiz-Echagüe, Javier. Yuri Gagarin y el conde Orgaz: Mística y Estética de la Era Espacial (Jorge Oteiza, Yves

Klein, José Val del Omar). Alzuza: Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza Fundazio Museoa, 2014. Oteiza, Jorge. “Yuri Gagarin y Velázquez.” El Bidasoa (April 22, 1961), p.1. Reprinted in Oteiza en Irún

1957-1974. Edited by Jaime Rodri ́guez Sali ́s (Irún: Alberdania, 2003), pp. 120-124. Papapetros, Spyros. On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2012. San Juan de la Cruz. Obras Completas. Madrid: BAC, 1964.AVDO Saint Therese of Jesus. Las Moradas. Madrid: Susaeta, 1969.AVDO Schaefer, Claudia. Lens, Laboratory, Landscape: Observing Modern Spain. Albany: State University of New

York Press, 2014. Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993. __________. The Nervous System. Routledge: New York, 1992. Val del Omar, José. “Sentimiento de la Pedagogía Kinestésica.” Sin Fin, pp. 57-60. Annotated by Javier

Ortiz-Echagüe in Escritos, pp. 38-45. Wilke, Tobias. “Tacti(ca)lity Reclaimed: Benjamin's Medium, the Avant-Garde, and the Politics of the

Senses.” Grey Room 39 (Spring 2010), pp. 39-56. Worringer, Wilhelm. Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie. Inaugural dissertation,

Universität Bern, Neuwied, 1907. __________. Ägyptische Kunst: Probleme ihrer Wertung. Munich: R. Piper, 1927. Partially translated in

Spanish as “El Americanismo de la Cultura Egipcia.” Revista de Occidente, No. 52, Vol. XVIII (October 1927), pp. 29-55; full version published as El Arte Egipcio. Problemas de su Valoración. Translated by Emilio Rodríguez Sadía. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1928.

__________. Formprobleme der Gotik. Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1911. Excerpts first published in Spanish as “El Espíritu del Arte Gótico.” Revista de Occidente, No. 11, Vol. IV (May 1924), pp. 178-211; full version published as La Esencia del Estilo Gótico. Translated by Manuel G. Morente. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1925.

Chapter 3. “Animal Instinct (1955-1982)”

Bowker, Geoffrey C., “How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943–70.” Social Studies of Science, vol. 23, no.1, February 1993, pp. 107–27.

Canguilhem, Georges. “The Living and Its Milieu” (1952). Translated by John Savage. Grey Room 3 (Spring 2001), pp. 6-31. Originally published as “Le Vivant et son Milieu.” La Conaissance de la Vie (1952).

Carthy, J.D. Animal Navigation: How Animal Find Their Way About. London: Allen & Unwin, 1956. First

published in Spanish as La Conducta de los Animales. Madrid: Salvat, 1969.AVDO Cristóbal, Ricardo. La Metamorfosis del Ojo. Madrid: Edarcón, 1980.AVDO Frisch, Karl von. La Vida de las Abejas. Barcelona: Labor, 1957. __________. Las Abejas: Su Visión, Sentidos Químicos y Lenguaje. Translated by Eduardo L Ortiz; René Inés

Weyland. Argentina: Lautaro, 1958 Hubel, David H., and Torsten N. Wiesel. “Receptive Fields, Binocular Interaction and Functional

Architecture in the Cat’s Visual Cortex.” In Pattern Recognition. Edited by L. Uhr. New York: John Wiley, 1966.

Kepes, Gyorgy. Arts of the Environment. New York: G. Braziller, 1972 __________. Language of Vision. Chicago: P. Theobald, 1944. Masriera, Miguel. “La Cibernética, Ciencia Explosiva.” La Vanguardia Española (Februray 26, 1959), p. 5. Mindell, David A. Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control and Computing Before Cybernetics.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Lettvin, J. Y., H. R. Maturana, W. S. McCulloch, and W. H. Pitts. “What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's

Brain.” Proceedings of the IRE, No. 47 (November 1959), pp. 1940-1951. McCulloch, W. S. “Recollections of the Many Sources of Cybernetics.” ASC Forum, No. 2, Vol. VI (Summer

1974), pp. 5-16. Reprinted in The Collected Works of Warren S. McCulloch, Vol. I (Salinas CA: Intersystems, 1989), pp. 21-49.

McCulloch, Warren S., and W. H. Pitts. “How We Know Universals. The Perception of Auditory and Visual Forms.” Bull. Math. Biophysics, vol. 9 (June 1947), pp. 127-147.

Mira y Mira, José. “¿Que es la Cibernética? (I), Futuro Presente 1 (1971), pp. 31-45. __________. “¿Que es la Cibernética? (II), Futuro Presente 2 (1971), pp. 52-68. __________. “Cibernética y Biónica.” Revista de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid 24.96 (1975), pp. 107-

118. Santesmases, José G. Automática, Cibernética y Automatización. Discurso leído en el acto de la recepción por José

García Santesmases y contestación del Excmo. Sr. D. José Baltá Elías el día 13 de diciembre de 1961. Madrid: Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales, 1961.

__________. “La Biónica, nueva frontera del conocimiento.” Revista de Ciencia Aplicada (November-December, 1965), pp. 481-493.

__________. Discurso inaugural del año académico 1970-1971, leído en la sesión celebrada el día 25 de Noviembre de 1970: Cibernética y Proceso de la Información Visual en los Seres Vivos y en las Máquinas. Madrid: Real Academia de Ciencias, 1970.

__________. Computadoras, Sistemas de Inteligencia Artificial y Sociedad. Santander: Universidad de Santander, D.L. 1982.

Santesmases, José G., et al., International Automation Congress: Proceedings: Madrid, October 13-18, 1958. Madrid: Instituto de Electricidad y Automa ́tica, C.S.I.C., 1958.

Shannon, Claude. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949. Uexküll, Jakob von, Marina von Uexküll, Joseph D. O’Neil (trans.), A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and

Humans: With a Theory of Meaning. Introduction by Dorion Sagan; afterword by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Originally published as Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen: Ein Bilderbuch unsichtbarer Welten. Berlin: J. Springer, 1934.

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. New York: J. Wiley, 1948. First published in Spanish as Cibernética. Translated by Miguel Mora Hidalgo. Madrid: Guadiana de Publicaciones, 1960.

__________. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Boston: Mifflin, 1952. First published in Spanish as Cibernética y Sociedad. Translated by José Novo. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1958. First published in Catalan as Cibernètica i Societat. Translated by Jordi Monés. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1965.

__________. God and Golem. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1964. First published in Spanish as Dios y Golem, S.A. Comentario sobre Ciertos Puntos en que Chocan Cibernética y Religión. México: Siglo XXI, 1967.

Chapter 4. Television (1956-1982)

Baget Herms, Josep Maria. Historia de la Televisión en España (1956-1975). Barcelona: Feed-Back, 1993. Busbea, Larry. “McLuhan’s Environment: The End (and The Beginnings) of Architecture,” The Aggregate

website (Transparent Peer Reviewed), Volume 3, December, 2015. Accessed September 26, 2016, http://we-aggregate.org/piece/mcluhans-environment.

Carpenter, Edmund S., and Marshall McLuhan. Explorations in Communication: An Anthology. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1960. First published in Spanish in El Aula sin Muros. Investigaciones sobre Técnicas de Comunicación. Prologue by Román Gubern. Translated by Luis Carandell. Cover by Enric Satué. Barcelona: Cultura Popular, 1968.AVDO

Castillo, Gregg. Cold War on the Home Front: the Soft Power of Midcentury Design. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Colomina, Beatriz. Domesticy at War. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Debord, Guy. La Société du Spectacle. Paris: Buchet Chastel, 1967. First Published in Spanish as La Sociedad

del Espectáculo y Otros Textos Situacionistas. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1974. Giedion, Sigfried. The Eternal Present. A Contribution on Constancy and Change. Vol. I: The Beginnings of Art.

Vol. II: The Beginnings of Architecture. Pantheon Books, 1962. Joselit, David. Feedback: Television Against Democracy, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007. Kittler, Friedrich. “Theoretical Presuppositions” in Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999. Translated by

Anthony Enns. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity, 2010), pp. 29-46. Krauss, Rosalind E. “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” October, No.1 (Spring, 1976), pp. 50–64. Leighton, Tanya (ed.). Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader. London: Tate Publishing, 2008. McLuhan, Marshall.The Gutenberg Galaxy: the Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto

Press, 1962. Translated in French as La Galaxie Gutenberg. París: Mame, 1967.AVDO First published in Spanish as La Galaxia Gutenberg. Génesis del “Homo Typographicus.” Translated by Juan Novella. Madrid: Aguilar, 1969. McLuhan, Marshall.AVDO

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. First published in Spanish as La Comprensión de los Medios. Ciudad de México: Diana, 1969.

McLuhan, Marshall. “The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion.” Perspecta Magazine, No. 11 (1967), pp. 163-167.

McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage. Londres: The Penguin Press, 1967. AVDO First published in Spanish as McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. El Medio es el Masaje. Un Inventario de Efectos. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1969.AVDO

Palacio, Manuel. “Francisco Franco y la Televisión.” Archivos de la Filmoteca: Revista de Estudios Históricos sobre la Imagen, No. 42-43, Vol. 2 (2002), pp. 72-95

Papapetros, Spyros. “Modern Architecture and Prehistory: Retracing the Eternal Present (Sigfried Giedion and André Leroi-Gourhan),” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 63/64 (Spring/Autumn, 2013), pp..

Sprenger, Florian. “A Theory of Media as a History of Electricity–How McLuhans thoughts about mediation are thwarted by their negation.” In Ciastellardi, Matteo; de Almeida, Cristina Miranda; Scolari, Carlos A., McLuhan Galaxy Conference: Understanding Media, Today. Conference Proceedings. Sehen, Barcelona (Hrsg; 2011), pp. 71-77.

Wigley, Mark. “Network Fever.” Grey Room, No. 4 (Summer 2001), pp. 82–122. Chapter 5. Static Electricity (1962-1982)

Alexander, Cristopher. “The Question of Computers in Design" in Landscape (No. 14, Vol. 3), pp. 6-8. Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. New York: Praeger, 1960. __________.The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment. London: Architectural Press, 1969. Banham, Reyner and François Dallegret.“A Home is not a House.” Art in America, No. 53 (April 1965), pp.

109-118. Blakinger, John R. ‘The Aesthetics of Collaboration: Complicity and Conversion at MIT’s Center for

Advanced Visual Studies.’ Tate Papers, No. 25, Spring 2016, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/25/aesthetics-of-collaboration. Accessed October 26, 2016.

Diego García, Emilio de. Historia de la Industria en España: la Electrónica y la Informática. Madrid: Actas Escuela de Organización Industrial, 1995.

Fuller, R. Buckminster. Ideas and Integreties. New York: Macmillan, 1963. __________. 50 Years of The Design Science Revolution and The World Game. Carbondale: Southern Illinois

University, 1969. Fisac, Miguel. “Edificio de oficinas IBM, Madrid.” Hogar y Arquitectura, No. 83 (July August 1969), pp. 56-

62. __________. “Edificio de Oficinas ‘IBM,’ en el Paseo de la Castellana, 4, Madrid. Arquitecto: Miguel Fisac

Serna.” Cuadernos de Arquitectura, No. 78, Vol. 1 (Annuary 1970) p. 89. __________. “Edificio de Oficinas en Madrid, Edificio I.B.M. Paseo de la Castellana, 4, Madrid.”

Arquitectura, No. 127 (July 1969), pp. 9-10. Fisac, Miguel, and Carmen Castro. “Los Arquitectos Critican Sus Propias Obras: Miguel Fisac, Edificio

I.B.M. y Laboratorio Jorba en Madrid.” Arquitectura, No. 151 (July 1971), pp. Galison, Peter. “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision.” Critical Inquiry,

Vol. 21, No. 1 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 228-266. Halpern, Orit. Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945. Durham: Duke University Press,

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