Description
Book SynopsisThis book offers an innovative examination of the interactions of science and technology, art, and literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scholars in the history of art, literature, architecture, computer science, and media studies focus on five historical themes in the transition from energy to information: thermodynamics, electromagnetism, inscription, information theory, and virtuality.
Different disciplines are grouped around specific moments in the history of science and technology in order to sample the modes of representation invented or adapted by each field in response to newly developed scientific concepts and models. By placing literary fictions and the plastic arts in relation to the transition from the era of energy to the information age, this collection of essays discovers unexpected resonances among concepts and materials not previously brought into juxtaposition. In particular, it demonstrates the crucial centrality of the theme of energy in mo
Trade Review
"The essays in this remarkable collection are productively disruptive of disciplinary and historical boundaries, richly detailed, and elegantly argued. Written by some of the leading figures in the history of art, literary studies, and science studies (as well as a handful of emerging stars), these essays are virtuoso performances that will capture a wide audience in a number of disciplines and interdisciplinary fields."—David Horn, Ohio State University
"Beyond the intrinsic merit of the essays in From Energy to Information, the collection also demonstrates the payoff of such work for our understanding of major issues in modernism and postmodernism."—Modernism/Modernity
Table of Contents
ILLUSTRATIONS CONTRIBUTORS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Introduction BRUCE CLARKE AND LINDA DALRYMPLE HENDERSON From Thermodynamics to Virtuality BRUCE CLARKE Part One. The Cultures of Thermodynamics Introduction 1. Time Discovered and Time Gendered in Victorian Science and Culture M. NORTON WISE 2. Dark Star Crashes: Classical Thermodynamics and the Allegory of Cosmic Catastrophe BRUCE CLARKE 3. Energetic Abstraction: Ostwald, Bogdanov, and Russian Post-Revolutionary Art CHARLOTTE DOUGLAS Part Two. Ether and Electromagnetism: Capturing the Invisible Introduction 4. Lines of Force, Swirls of Ether BRUCE J. HUNT 5. The Real and the Ethereal: Modernist Energies in Eliot and Pound IAN F. A. BELL 6. Vibratory Modernism: Boccioni, Kupka, and the Ether of Space LINDA DALRYMPLE HENDERSON Part Three. Traces and Inscriptions: Diagramming Forces Introduction 7. Representation on the Line: Graphic Recording Instruments and Scientific Modernism ROBERT M. BRAIN 8. Concerning the Line: Music, Noise, and Phonography DOUGLAS KAHN 9. Bodies in Force Fields: Design Between the Wars CHRISTOPH ASENDORF Part Four. Representing Information Introduction 10. On the Imagination's Horizon Line: Uchronic Histories, Protocybernetic Contact, and Charles Babbage's Calculating Engines DAVID TOMAS 11. Escape and Constraint: Three Fictions Dream of Moving from Energy to Information N. KATHERINE HAYLES Part Five. Voxels and Sensels: Bodies in Virtual Space Introduction 13. Authorship and Surgery: The Shifting Ontology of the Virtual Surgeon TIMOTHY LENOIR AND SHA XIN WEI 14. Eversion: Brushing against Avatars, Aliens, and Angels MARCOS NOVAK Part Six. Representation from Pre- to Post-Modernity Introduction 5. Puppet and Test Pattern: Mechanicity and Materiality in Modern Pictorial Representation RICHARD SHIFF 16. Dinosaurs and Modernity W. J. T. MITCHELL NOTES INDEX
