Book Description

"Our endeavour is not to explain the history of the media as a consecutive retrospective, but to move from reflections about the deep time history of arts and sciences to speculations that reach into the present. The contributors to the third volume in the Variantology Series expand our ideas of the interplay between arts, technology, and science in at least three important ways: 1. Themes. Fireworks as a time-based praxis of performance, magnetised chess automata, paper-cuts, thermometers, radical interventions in the natural landscape by humans, and the com pass are revealed as areas where discoveries can be made that lead to much broader and richer concepts of what art and media are. 2. Regions. As we move with the authors from Europe to the Far East and back again it becomes absolutely clear that the history of the media cannot be written with only the former industrial metropolises of the world in our sights, beginning and ending there. 3. Time. The evolution of the Chinese culture of science and technology takes us into dimensions that add unsuspected energies and historical possibilities to the concept of deep time. Brecht's verdict from the 1920s that Chinese civilisation has already forgotten about innovations that the West proudly celebrates as innovations of the Modern Age, is given new meaning."--Publisher's description.