Can machines be beautiful? Of course they can – celebrating the beauty of industry and technology has been a key motif of the avant-gardes of the 20th century, from Futurism to Russian constructivism. But what happens when art itself becomes a useful part of the machine, an engine of industry even? The international conference “Films that Work” studied the use value of aesthetics and the uses of film in industrial organizations and industrial policy in particular.

Conference Locations, Frankfurt am Main:
– Museum Angewandte Kunst, Schaumainkai 17
– Kino im Deutschen Filmmuseum, Schaumainkai 41

Date: 15.12.2015 - 18.12.2015

Featuring the work of specialists from Europe, the United States and Asia, the conference worked from the assumption that economic development requires industrial organization, while industrial organization requires communication and communication requires media. As economist Robert Solow was among the first to point out (in a famous article from 1956, a few years before Marshall McLuhan published “Understanding Media”), without media such as the typewriter, the telephone, telex, telefax and information technology the economic development of the last one hundred and fifty years would have been unthinkable. Because of the emotional impact of moving images, film continues to occupy a privileged position in the “Medienverbund” of corporate communication.

Bringing together perspectives from cinema and media studies, economic history and science and technology studies, this conference aimed to develop an analytical framework for understanding the uses of art in industry and the media culture of industry.

The conference was open to the public and included screenings of rare films from archives in the United States, Great Britain, Italy and Central and Eastern Europe.

The whole program can be found in the attached PDF File.