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From Energy to Information : Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature / ed. by Bruce Clarke, Linda Dalrymple Henderson.
- Format:
- Book
- Series:
- Writing Science
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (464 p.) : 90 illustrations
- Place of Publication:
- Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2022]
- Language Note:
- In English.
- Summary:
- This 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 modernist discourse. Overall, the volume develops the scientific and technological side of the shift from modernism to postmodernism in terms of the conceptual crossover from energy to information. The contributors are Christoph Asendorf, Ian F. A. Bell, Robert Brain, Bruce Clarke, Charlotte Douglas, N. Katherine Hayes, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Bruce J. Hunt, Douglas Kahn, Timothy Lenoir, W. J. T. Mitchell, Marcos Novak, Edward Shanken, Richard Shiff, David Tomas, Sha Xin Wei, and Norton Wise.
- Contents:
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- ILLUSTRATIONS
- CONTRIBUTORS
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- Introduction
- From Thermodynamics to Virtuality
- Part One The Cultures of Thermodynamics
- INTRODUCTION
- 1. Time Discovered and Time Gendered in Victorian Science and Culture
- 2. Dark Star Crashes: Classical Thermodynamics and the Allegory of Cosmic Catastrophe
- 3. Energetic Abstraction: Ostwald, Bogdanov, and Russian Post-Revolutionary Art
- Part Two Ether and Electromagnetism: Capturing the Invisible
- 4. Lines of Force, Swirls of Ether
- 5. The Real and the Ethereal: Modernist Energies in Eliot and Pound
- 6. Vibratory Modernism: Boccioni, Kupka, and the Ether of Space
- Part Three Traces and Inscriptions: Diagramming Forces
- 7. Representation on the Line: Graphic Recording Instruments and Scientific Modernism
- 8. Concerning the Line: Music, Noise, and Phonography
- 9. Bodies in Force Fields: Design Between the Wars
- Part Four Representing Information
- 10. On the Imagination's Horizon Line: Uchronic Histories, Protocybernetic Contact, and Charles Babbage's Calculating Engines
- 11. Escape and Constraint: Three Fictions Dream of Moving from Energy to Information
- 12. Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s
- Part Five Voxels and Senseis: Bodies in Virtual Space
- 13. Authorship and Surgery: The Shifting Ontology of the Virtual Surgeon
- 14. Eversion: Brushing against Avatars, Aliens, and Angels
- Part Six Representation from Pre- to Post-Modernity
- 15. Puppet and Test Pattern: Mechanicity and Materiality in Modern Pictorial Representation
- 16. Dinosaurs and Modernity
- NOTES
- INDEX
- Notes:
- Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Mai 2022)
- ISBN:
- 1-5036-1947-8
- OCLC:
- 1322124913
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