Sean Cubitt, Paul Thomas (eds.): Re:live: Media Art Histories 2009 (2010)
Filed under proceedings | Tags: · art history, history of science, history of technology, media art
Proceedings from the Third International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology held in December 2009 in Melbourne, Australia. The event followed the success of the two previous Media Art History conferences, re:fresh (Banff 2005) and re:place (Berlin 2007).
Publisher, University of Melbourne & Victorian College of the Arts and Music, 2009
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Australia license
ISBN 9780980718638
James Essinger: Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom led to the Birth of the Information Age (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · computing, history of computing, history of technology, technology
* A fascinating look at the previously uninvestigated story of a how a loom invented 200 years ago led to the development of the computer age
* Provides a new perspective on the history of computing and information technology
* Full of interesting and colourful characters: the modest but dedicated Joseph-Marie Jacquard, the brilliant but temperamental polymath Charles Babbage, and the imaginative and perceptive Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter
* Contains much compelling new material that has never been published for a general readership until now
Jacquard’s Web is the story of some of the most ingenious inventors the world has ever known, a fascinating account of how a hand-loom invented in Napoleonic France led to the development of the modern information age. James Essinger, a master story-teller, shows through a series of remarkable and meticulously researched historical connections (spanning two centuries and never investigated before) that the Jacquard loom kick-started a process of scientific evolution which would lead directly to the development of the modern computer.
Publisher Oxford University Press, 2007
ISBN 0192805789, 9780192805782
302 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)
Comment (1)R. L. Rutsky: High Technē: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (1999)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, art, cyberpunk, history of technology, posthumanism, technology
In an age of high tech, our experience of technology has changed tremendously, yet the definition of technology has remained largely unquestioned. High Techne redresses this gap in thinking about technology, examining the shifting relations of technology, art, and culture from the beginnings of modernity to contemporary technocultures.
Drawing on the Greek root of technology (techne, generally translated as “art, skill, or craft”), R. L. Rutsky challenges both the modernist notion of technology as an instrument or tool and the conventional idea of a noninstrumental aesthetics. Today, technology and aesthetics have again begun to come together: even basketball shoes are said to exhibit a “high-tech style” and the most advanced technology is called “state of the art.” Rutsky charts the history and vicissitudes of this new high-tech techne up to our day — from Fritz Lang to Octavia Butler, Thomas Edison to Japanese Anime, constructivism to cyberspace.
Progressing from the major art movements ofmodernism to contemporary science fiction and cultural theory, Rutsky provides clear and compelling evidence of a shift in the cultural conceptions of technology and art and demonstrates the centrality of technology to modernism and postmodernism.
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1999
ISBN 0816633568, 9780816633562
196 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-11-4)
Comment (0)