Still Undead traces how, in the United States, Bauhaus experiments were given institutional backing and helped contribute towards the development of experimental photography as well as towards a new language of visual communication and digital design. Also, how in the slipstream of punk, the Bauhaus was seen as a transgressive forerunner whose iconoclastic approach to cultural norms and formal innovations could be appropriated by a new generation. In Britain this came through grass roots street style, graphic design and electronic music made by a generation, many of whom had trained in British art schools transformed by the introduction of “Basic Design”. As concerns electronic music, to give an example, the German band Kraftwerk went “back to the Bauhaus School” and and tried to break down “the barriers between craftsman and artist” in “the marriage of art and technology”.
The materials explored in Still Undead constitute a surplus from within the Bauhaus legacy, beyond the imperatives of commodity production and social value—seen in fantastical costumes and elaborate machines designed and oriented towards optical complexity without purpose. It is a queering of that legacy in the hedonistic and the affective, and its translation into social settings and technological formats, that was prefigured, but unimaginable, in the early years of the twentieth century.
