Dada - A Reader

Amidst the ruin of the First World War, down the streets of Zurich and nestled between the cafe walls of the Cabaret Voltaire, Dada was born. Founded by an eclectic mix of artists, writers, actors and poets fleeing slaughter on the Western Front, Dada asserted itself as a complete negation of bourgeois industrail society and its  governing logic of rationality, bureaucracy, and control. Alongside this negation came an affirmation of the  irrational, of the illogical, of nonsense itself; it was an is an affirmation of the discordant and chaotic entropy at the very heart of life. In other words, what Dada sought - insofar as it can be said to have "sought" anything - was an intervention into the crisis of modernity that had created the terror of the trenches in favor of the complete abolition of everything. In the century since the first Dada salon at the Cabaret Voltaire, the crisis that Dada attempted to intervene in has only deepened: our lives have become more regimented and mundane as the world is continuously supplanted by the virtual, the artificial, the manufactured, and the measured.  For this hyper-rationalized techno-industrial society, we can only offer total negation and through that, we in turn affirm life.