Desiring Machines: A Review of Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life by Mark Goble

Mark Goble’s Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life is an important examination of how new information technologies shaped modernist forms of intimacy. This wide-ranging book engages with recent work on new media, sexuality studies, and racial politics, while also revisiting the earliest accounts of modernism’s formalist aesthetics. The result is a rich account of how American modernism’s concerns over information, race, and sexuality were absorbed by the machines that mediated them.