From Energy to Information

by Clarke, Bruce; Henderson, Linda Dalrymple

• ISBN13: 9780804741767
• ISBN10: 080474176X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-09-01
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

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.

Author Biography

Bruce Clarke is Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Interaction of the Arts and Sciences at Texas Tech University. He is the author, most recently, of Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics. Linda Dalrymple Henderson is David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author, most recently, of Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Early Works.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	ix
Contributors	xiii
Acknowledgments	xvii
Introduction	1	(16)
Bruce Clarke
Linda Dalrymple Henderson
From Thermodynamics to Virtuality	17	(18)
Bruce Clarke
Part One The Cultures of Thermodynamics
Introduction	35	(4)
Time Discovered and Time Gendered in Victorian Science and Culture	39	(20)
M. Norton Wise
Dark Star Crashes: Classical Thermodynamics and the Allegory of Cosmic Catastrophe	59	(17)
Bruce Clarke
Energetic Abstraction: Ostwald, Bogdanov, and Russian Post-Revolutionary Art	76	(23)
Charlotte Douglas
Part Two Ether and Electromagnetism: Capturing the Invisible
Introduction	95	(4)
Lines of Force, Swirls of Ether	99	(15)
Bruce J. Hunt
The Real and the Ethereal: Modernist Energies in Eliot and Pound	114	(12)
Ian F. A. Bell
Vibratory Modernism: Boccioni, Kupka, and the Ether of Space	126	(29)
Linda Dalrymple Henderson
Part Three Traces and Inscriptions: Diagramming Forces
Introduction	151	(4)
Representation on the Line: Graphic Recording Instruments and Scientific Modernism	155	(23)
Robert M. Brain
Concerning the Line: Music, Noise, and Phonography	178	(17)
Douglas Kahn
Bodies in Force Fields: Design Between the Wars	195	(22)
Christoph Asendorf
Part Four Representing Information
Introduction	213	(4)
On the Imagination's Horizon Line: Uchronic Histories, Protocybernetic Contact, and Charles Babbage's Calculating Engines	217	(18)
David Tomas
Escape and Constraint: Three Fictions Dream of Moving from Energy to Information	235	(20)
N. Katherine Hayles
Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s	255	(28)
Edward A. Shanken
Past Five Voxels and Sensels: Bodies in Virtual Space
Introduction	279	(4)
Authorship and Surgery: The Shifting Ontology of the Virtual Surgeon	283	(26)
Timothy Lenoir
Sha Xin Wei
Eversion: Brushing against Avatars, Aliens, and Angels	309	(18)
Marcos Novak
Part Six Representation from Pre- to Post-Modernity
Introduction	325	(2)
Puppet and Test Pattern: Mechanicity and Materiality in Modern Pictorial Representation	327	(24)
Richard Shiff
Dinosaurs and Modernity	351	(14)
W. J. T. Mitchell
Notes	365	(64)
Index	429