{"product_id":"time-machines-isbn-9780262049184","title":"Time Machines","description":"\u003cb\u003eA riveting exploration of the relationship between art and telegraphy, and its implications for understanding time and history in nineteenth-century France.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eTime Machines \u003c\/i\u003eRichard Taws examines the relationship between art and telegraphy in the decades following the French Revolution. The optical telegraph was a novel form of visual communication developed in the 1790s that remained in use until the mid-1850s. This pre-electric telegraph, based on a semaphore code, irrevocably changed the media landscape of nineteenth-century France. Although now largely forgotten, in its day it covered vast distances and changed the way people thought about time. It also shaped, and was shaped by, a proliferating world of images. What happens, Taws asks, if we think about art telegraphically?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePlaced on prominent buildings across France—for several years there was one on top of the Louvre—the telegraph’s waving limbs were a ubiquitous sight, shifting how public space was experienced and represented. The system was depicted by a wide range of artists, who were variously amused, appalled, irritated, or seduced by the telegraph’s intractable coded messages and the uncanny environmental and perceptual disruption it caused. Clouds, architecture, landscapes, and gestures: all signified differently in the era of telegraphy, and the telegraph became a powerful means to comprehend France’s technological and political past. While Paris’s famous arcades began to crisscross the city at ground level, a more enigmatic network was operating above. Shifting attention from the streets to the skies, this book shows how modern France took shape quite literally under the telegraph’s sign.1 The Compass of Time\u003cbr\u003e2 Revolutionary Horizons\u003cbr\u003e3 Lines in Sand\u003cbr\u003e4 Paris in Code\u003cbr\u003e5 When I was a Telegrapher\u003cbr\u003e6 The Machine Stops\u003cbr\u003eAcknowledgments\u003cbr\u003eIllustration Credits\u003cbr\u003eNotes\u003cbr\u003eIndex“\u003ci\u003eTime Machines\u003c\/i\u003e is a nuanced, compelling, exceptionally rewarding investigation of a nearly-forgotten technology that once set the pace of modernity. Rediscovering the omnipresent optical telegraph and its signaling arms, Richard Taws redraws the visual, temporal, and political landscape of an early industrialization both alien and familiar.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—John Tresch, Professor, Warburg Institute; author of \u003ci\u003eThe Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eRichard Taws is Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at University College London. He is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Politics of the Provisional\u003c\/i\u003e as well as coeditor, with Iris Moon, of \u003ci\u003eTime, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France \u003c\/i\u003eand, with Genevieve Warwick, \u003ci\u003eArt and Technology in Early Modern Europe.\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"The MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304299352293,"sku":"NP9780262049184","price":50.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780262049184.jpg?v=1767742648","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/time-machines-isbn-9780262049184","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}