From Energy to Information

Bruce Clarke is Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Interaction of the Arts and Sciences at Texas Tech University. He is the author, most recently, of Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics. Linda Dalrymple Henderson is David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author, most recently, of Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Early Works.

"The essays in this remarkable collection are productively disruptive of disciplinary and historical boundaries, richly detailed, and elegantly argued. Written by some of the leading figures in the history of art, literary studies, and science studies (as well as a handful of emerging stars), these essays are virtuoso performances that will capture a wide audience in a number of disciplines and interdisciplinary fields."—David Horn, Ohio State University "Beyond the intrinsic merit of the essays in From Energy to Information, the collection also demonstrates the payoff of such work for our understanding of major issues in modernism and postmodernism."—Modernism/Modernity

• ILLUSTRATIONS CONTRIBUTORS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Introduction BRUCE CLARKE AND LINDA DALRYMPLE HENDERSON From Thermodynamics to Virtuality BRUCE CLARKE Part One. The Cultures of Thermodynamics Introduction 1. Time Discovered and Time Gendered in Victorian Science and Culture M. NORTON WISE 2. Dark Star Crashes: Classical Thermodynamics and the Allegory of Cosmic Catastrophe BRUCE CLARKE 3. Energetic Abstraction: Ostwald, Bogdanov, and Russian Post-Revolutionary Art CHARLOTTE DOUGLAS Part Two. Ether and Electromagnetism: Capturing the Invisible Introduction 4. Lines of Force, Swirls of Ether BRUCE J. HUNT 5. The Real and the Ethereal: Modernist Energies in Eliot and Pound IAN F. A. BELL 6. Vibratory Modernism: Boccioni, Kupka, and the Ether of Space LINDA DALRYMPLE HENDERSON Part Three. Traces and Inscriptions: Diagramming Forces Introduction 7. Representation on the Line: Graphic Recording Instruments and Scientific Modernism ROBERT M. BRAIN 8. Concerning the Line: Music, Noise, and Phonography DOUGLAS KAHN 9. Bodies in Force Fields: Design Between the Wars CHRISTOPH ASENDORF Part Four. Representing Information Introduction 10. On the Imagination's Horizon Line: Uchronic Histories, Protocybernetic Contact, and Charles Babbage's Calculating Engines DAVID TOMAS 11. Escape and Constraint: Three Fictions Dream of Moving from Energy to Information N. KATHERINE HAYLES Part Five. Voxels and Sensels: Bodies in Virtual Space Introduction 13. Authorship and Surgery: The Shifting Ontology of the Virtual Surgeon TIMOTHY LENOIR AND SHA XIN WEI 14. Eversion: Brushing against Avatars, Aliens, and Angels MARCOS NOVAK Part Six. Representation from Pre- to Post-Modernity Introduction 5. Puppet and Test Pattern: Mechanicity and Materiality in Modern Pictorial Representation RICHARD SHIFF 16. Dinosaurs and Modernity W. J. T. MITCHELL NOTES INDEX