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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Time Machines: Telegraphic Images in Nineteenth-Century France

Time Machines: Telegraphic Images in Nineteenth-Century France

Taws, Richard

Hardcover

Art HistoryTechnology & EngineeringFrench History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 026204918X
ISBN13: 9780262049184
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: Jan 21 2025
Pages: 400
Weight: 2.30
Height: 1.11 Width: 6.62 Depth: 9.77
Language: English
A riveting exploration of the relationship between art and telegraphy, and its implications for understanding time and history in nineteenth-century France.

In Time Machines Richard 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?

Placed 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.

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