The advent of the Industrial Revolution that fired man's hope for universal benefit was followed by the use of the same automated and mechanical technology as a means of unbelievable carnage, inhumanity and mass destruction during the Great War. Intellectuals, mainly artists and writers, in the aftermath of World War I, especially the German artists living in the Weimar Republic, joined the group calling itself Dada, and began using images of machines and interchangeable machine parts in their work as a metaphor for the dehumanization of the common man, and for the social unrest, alienation, and the moral decay that they blamed on the military, the politicians, the war-profiteering bourgeois, and the spineless clergy. Exposing and ridiculing these groups became the driving motive of these artists who attempted to become the moral spokespersons and visual journalists of their time. (Carole Cameron)