Shock Factory: The Visual Culture of Industrial Music

An exploration of the multidisciplinary creative culture encapsulated by the term industrial art, which spans musical, visual, multimedia, and performance arts.

Industrial music appeared in the mid-1970s, and far from being a simple sound experimentation phenomenon, it quickly spawned a coherent visual culture operating at the intersection of a multitude of media (collage, mail art, installation, film, performance, sound, and video), and initiated a close inspection of the legacy of modernity and the growing pervasive influence of technology.

Deriving their sources from the modernist utopias of the first part of the twentieth century, the sound experiments conducted by industrial bands, including designing synthesizers and transforming recorded sounds from audio tapes either recycled or laid down by the artists, were backed up by a rich array of radical visual productions. Such saturated sounds were translated into abrasive images, manipulated through the détournement of reprographic techniques (Xerox art), that investigated polemical themes: mind control, criminality, occultism, pornography, psychiatry, and totalitarianism, among others.

This book aims to introduce the visual and aesthetic elements of industrial culture to a general history of contemporary art by analyzing the different approaches taken and topics addressed by the movement and the artists who perceptively anticipated the current discourse concerning the media and its collective coercive power.

Author: Nicolas Ballet
Publisher: Intellect (UK)
Published: 09/01/2025
Pages: 640
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 2.82lbs
Size: 9.61h x 6.54w x 1.50d
ISBN: 9781835950784

About the Author
Nicolas Ballet is an art historian and assistant curator at the Centre Pompidou in the New Media Department. He is the author of books and articles exploring the visual and sonic contributions of countercultures and experimental artistic practices.