Now in the electric age of decentralized power and information we begin to chafe under the uniformity of clock-time. In this age of space time we seek multiplicity, rather than repeatability, of rhythms. This is the difference between marching soldiers and ballet……In our electric century the mechanical time-kept city looks like an aggregation of somnambulists and zombies, made familiar in the early part of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
At present the mechanical begins to yield to organic unity under conditions of electric speeds. Man now can back at two or three thousand years of varying degrees of mechanization with full awareness of the mechanical as an interlude between two great organic periods of culture. In 1911 the Italian sculptor Boccioni said, “We are primitives of an unknown culture”.