Inside the Machine – Art and Invention in the Electronic Age - Hardcover

Prelinger, Megan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393083594 ISBN 13: 9780393083590

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015

Synopsis

A hidden history of the twentieth century’s brilliant innovations—as seen through art and images of electronics that fed the dreams of millions.Inside the MachineBut, as cultural historian Megan Prelinger explores here, the history of electronics in the twentieth century is not only a history of scientific discoveries carried out in laboratories across America. It is also a story shaped by a generation of artists, designers, and creative thinkers who gave imaginative form to the most elusive matter of all: electrons and their revolutionary powers.As inventors learned to channel the flow of electrons, starting revolutions in automation, bionics, and cybernetics, generations of commercial artists moved through the traditions of Futurism, Bauhaus, modernism, and conceptual art, finding ways to link art and technology as never before.Inside the MachineInside the Machine

About this title

Review

[An] unusual and compelling study.

Because electrons are mostly invisible, our visualizations of them tell us more about our dreams than about electrons. This cool and unusual book gathers our earliest collective dreams about circuits and electronics and makes them visible. It got me thinking about our assumptions for tomorrow. I love it when a book like this makes me see the world differently.--Kevin Kelly, senior maverick for Wired magazine and author of What Technology Wants

Fascinating.... [A] fantastically geeky visual tour of tech industry history as seen through the lens of the commercial art that helped popularize it.--Meg Miller

Attentive readers of Prelinger's lively chronology will come away with an appreciation of how the visual representations of technology are integral to our understanding of it.--Chris Rasmussen

Unusual and insightful.... Filled with retro tech-industry ads, magazine covers and other commercial artworks, this erudite book takes readers on a cultural history tour that sharply reveals 'art's ability to touch the intangible and render it visible.'--John Wilwol

An essential and eye-popping visual history of electronics, a glimpse of the electronic infrastructure captured in the brief moment before it miniaturized down to a scale too small for the eye to see, disappearing from our ordinary view forever, even as it burrowed into our buildings, streets, vehicles and even our bodies.--Cory Doctorow coeditor of Boing Boing and author of In Real Life and Information Doesn't Want to Be Free

A highly original cultural history of 20th-century technology examined through the lens of commercial art.... Sophisticated in its grasp of science and technological history but also accessible to general readers.

About the Author

Megan Prelinger is a cultural historian and archivist, and the author of Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-1962. She is cofounder and information designer of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, where she lives.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393083594
• ISBN 13: 9780393083590
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272