Revisiting Huxley’s Dystopic Vision of Future Cinema, The Feelies: Immersive Experiences through Contemporary Multisensory Media

Manfred Milz

doi:10.25038/am.v0i20.325

Authors

Manfred Milz

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i20.325

Keywords:

flow (absorption in pleasure), multi-sensory interaction, multisequential prosthetic enhancement, participatory dramatic agency

Abstract

Aldous Huxley’s concern with media, and in particular with cinema, is one of the most conspicuous components of his work as a social critic and as a novelist. Evaluating its potential societal functions, as an artistic genre, a didactic cultural tool for documentaries or as a mass entertainment venue, determined his critical relationship towards the medium. Due to his impaired eyesight, Huxley’s attention to perception, intertwined with advancing cinema-technologies, was not restricted to the visual, but extended to all of the human senses, as he demonstrated in the Feelies of his novel Brave New World (1932). Primarily with regard to mechanomorphic reflexes of human conditioning, this cinematic concept is interpreted by drawing from articles and essays of evolutionary, psychological, political, and aesthetic perspectives that Huxley developed on a parallel writing track in popular print media during the 1920s/30s. In confronting modes of multisensory immersion around 1900 with some of the 20th/21st centuries, this contribution reevaluates Huxley’s vision of future cinema.

Article received: June 10, 2019; Article accepted: July 6, 2019; Published online: October 15, 2019; Original scholarly paper

Author Biography

Manfred Milz

Faculty of Languages, Literature and Culture, University of Regensburg
Germany

Manfred Milz, Ph.D., is Research Associate at the Institute of Media, Language and Culture at Regensburg University (Germany), following his appointment as a Guest Professor. While holding research and teaching positions in the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, he has primarily published books, book chapters and refereed journal articles on the origins of 20th-century visual culture in the Age of European Romanticism – particularly regarding questions of process ontology. After a long-term DFG research-grant within the post-graduate study group Psychische Energien bildender Kunst, he published his Ph.D., a comparative study on Alberto Giacometti and Samuel Beckett, as a book. He has been guest-editor of The European Legacy, edited and co-authored the volume Facing Mental Landscapes as well as the catalog of the Shahnameh Millenium exhibition at the Prince’s Gallery in London, Painting the Persian Book of Kings Today: Ancient Text and Modern Images.

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Revisiting Huxley’s Dystopic Vision of Future Cinema, The Feelies: Immersive Experiences through Contemporary Multisensory Media

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Author Biography

Manfred Milz

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