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Technology and Culture 45.1 (2004) 227-229



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From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature. Edited by Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002. Pp. xviii+440. $70/$35.95.

This volume contains a collection of papers from a conference held at the University of Texas at Austin in 1997. The theme was an interdisciplinary exploration of the central metaphor from science—central in its widespread recognition among nonscientists and incorporation into work outside of typically scientific spaces—as it shifted from energy to information between the latter part of the nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth. The conference brought together academics from varied disciplines—visual arts, music, mathematics, cultural studies, and history among them—to consider the representation of science and technology in art and literature. Based on the contributions collected here, it must have been a lively and stimulating event. [End Page 227]

From Energy to Information comprises sixteen essays, arranged in six sections. Their titles give a good idea of the contents: "Cultures of Thermodynamics"; "Ether and Electromagnetism: Capturing the Invisible"; "Traces and Inscriptions: Diagramming Forces"; "Representing Information"; "Voxels and Sensels: Bodies in Virtual Space"; "Representation from Pre- to Post-Modernity." The range is even more diverse than those headings imply, moving from discussions of linear versus curvilinear visualizations of time (M. Norton Wise, "Time Discovered and Time Gendered in Victorian Science and Culture"), to approaches and attitudes toward three-dimensional computer images and animations in surgery (Timothy Lenoir and Sha Xin Wei, "Authorship and Surgery: The Shifting Ontology of the Virtual Surgeon"), to concepts of the acoustic line in musical modernism (Douglas Kahn, "Concerning the Line: Music, Noise and Phonograpy"). Still, some names and themes recur, among them Alfred Jarry; James Clerk Maxwell and his demon; Georges Seurat; instrumentation and imaging; ether and the various spaces it does (or does not) fill; and time.

Bruce Clarke's capable initial essay explains the energy-information transition, using a format reminiscent of a classical mathematical proof or perhaps Transforms, the word game that asks players to turn one word (for example, "Watt") into another (say, "Know") through the minimal number of single-letter conversions. Explaining the transition is helpful to readers but only indirectly important to understanding the individual essays. With the exception of N. Katherine Hayles's "Escape and Constraint: Three Fictions Dream of Moving From Energy to Information," contributors tend to take their own topics in depth rather than breadth.

As a collection, the essays here raise the same questions often asked about the application of postmodern sensibilities to the use of art in science. If energy, acoustics, cybernetics, and the rest form a metaphor or allegory, then how strong is a modern author's obligation to understand how their subjects construed or adapted the scientific notions in which they claimed to base their work? For example, several authors discuss ether as a conceptual model in physics, the "imponderable medium thought to fill all space and to serve as the vehicle for the transmission of vibrating electromagnetic waves" (p. 126). Yes, ether was a kind of neo-Aristotelian or neo-Cartesian physical substance revived in the mid-nineteenth century, but it had a chemical form as well. That manifestation of ether had been known for several centuries and its chemistry analyzed in the 1850s. It was an artists' material and a surgical anesthetic, a substance appreciated by many chemistry students (despite its dangers) for the dizzying effects when inhaled. To ignore this material form, under examination at the same time as its physical-astronomical mode, may detract not from the conclusion but from the argument itself. In general, historians or others used to thinking about objects, including art, within frameworks of material culture may [End Page 228] find that many of the discussions have a disturbingly flat affect, relying as they do a painting-driven, literally superficial analysis.

The editors describe their goals for the conference as "both broader and more tightly focused than past experiments in exploring the relationships...

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