From Vorticism to New Futurism: A Trajectory of Abstract Energy

The relationship between Vorticism and New Futurism is one of evolution, redefinition, and radical energy. Vorticism emerged in early 20th-century Britain, propelled by the explosive momentum of modern life, while New Futurism carries the aesthetic and ideological torch into the 21st century. Both movements share an obsession with motion, industrial power, and the fractured dynamism of modernity, but they diverge in their approaches to abstraction and emotion.

Vorticism: The Machine Age Distilled

Vorticism, spearheaded by Wyndham Lewis and the journal BLAST in 1914, was a British response to Italian Futurism. Unlike its Italian counterpart, which glorified speed and violence in a fluid, almost lyrical manner, Vorticism was jagged, geometric, and rigorously structured. It reduced motion into sharp-edged abstraction, seeking to harness the chaotic energy of the industrial world within controlled compositions.

Artists like Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, and Helen Saunders painted urban landscapes and human forms fractured into angular planes, reflecting the tension between man and machine. The works often had a sense of frozen dynamism, as if capturing a split-second moment of technological upheaval. The machine was not just a subject—it was a force that dictated form itself.

The Evolution into New Futurism

Fast forward to the 21st century, and New Futurism emerges as a radical reinterpretation of these early modernist ideals. Rather than static explosions of energy, New Futurism embraces fluidity, organic chaos, and the limitless possibilities of digital and industrial techniques. Where Vorticism created mechanical order from chaos, New Futurism revels in disorder, allowing forms to dissolve, drip, and distort while still maintaining a core of movement and energy.

Helen Saunders and the Transformation in Blast 3.0 and Blast Remix

In my own work, Helen Saunders' Vorticist compositions became a foundation for Blast 3.0 and Blast Remix. I took direct inspiration from her angular, fragmented forms, first reinterpreting them into aluminum prints, then pushing the abstraction further through an AI remix process. This transformation was an intentional act of theft and reinvention—lifting the Vorticist language and pushing it into a new, digital-industrial context.

By doing this, Blast 3.0 acts as a bridge between the rigid energy of early 20th-century Vorticism and the liquid, unstable forms of New Futurism. Blast Remix takes this further, feeding the Vorticist aesthetic into AI-driven compositions that distort, mutate, and reimagine the machine age for a digital future. The machine, once the subject, has now become the creator itself.

Key Differences and Similarities

• Form & Abstraction: Vorticism is rigid and geometric, almost sculptural in its compositions. New Futurism, by contrast, leans into expressive fluidity, often allowing paint to run and bleed, symbolizing the disintegration of fixed forms in an era of digital and quantum realities.

• Emotion vs. Control: Vorticists sought to master the machine’s power by structuring it into sharp compositions. New Futurists embrace the machine’s unpredictability, allowing technology, artificial intelligence, and industrial techniques to introduce randomness into their process.

• Medium & Material: Early Vorticists worked primarily with oil, gouache, and printmaking. New Futurists experiment with mixed media—metallic paints, aluminum prints, digital manipulation, and dynamic layering techniques that reflect the interplay of digital and physical realms.

Aesthetic Continuity: The Future as Fragmentation

Both movements share a fundamental drive: to capture the pulse of their time. Vorticism mirrored the mechanical boom of the early 20th century, while New Futurism responds to an era dominated by digital acceleration, AI, and hyper-connectivity. In both, reality is fragmented—whether through rigid geometry or splintering layers of liquid abstraction.

The journey from Vorticism to New Futurism is not one of replacement but of mutation, adaptation, and expansion. The core energy remains: an obsession with motion, modernity, and the relentless march of time. What was once the hard-edged vortex has now liquefied into something wilder, more fluid, and infinitely more expansive.

New Futurism is not just an aesthetic movement—it’s a manifesto for the future of art. It refuses stagnation, embraces the unknown, and paints a vision of a world still in the throes of transformation.

The machine may have once dictated form, but now, the machine bleeds.