Author Julie Wosk welcomes you to her book BREAKING FRAME: TECHNOLOGY, ART, AND DESIGN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (a new Authors Guild Backinprint.com edition of her book Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century).
Julie Wosk's BREAKING FRAME, originally published by Rutgers University Press, is now available as a special Authors Guild Backinprint.com edition with a new introduction linking the book to today’s world and today's technology and art. BREAKING FRAME is a groundbreaking view of how artists and designers dealt with the tremors of technology as new industries and mechanical inventions dramatically transformed human life. Artists captured the explosive impact of the Industrial Revolution in their images of factories spewing smoke, trains crashing, and comic views of people-turned-automatons as they happily walk along in their steam-powered legs and ride precariously in their fanciful flying machines.
Artists celebrated the century's impressive new feats of engineering ranging from London's Crystal Palce to the Brooklyn Bridge. These images often mirrored widespread feelings of admiration and anxiety at the dramatic changes underway.
To ease the public's uncertainty about new machines and celebrate them too, designers shaped steam engine frames to look like Greek temples and developed a design aesthetic for the new sewing machines, factory machines, and mass-produced decorative arts.
Reviewers like Yale professor Alan Trachtenberg have called BREAKING FRAME "perceptive, lucid, engaging"---"a book that becomes more pertinent every day." Filled with illustrations, the book is an engaging study that will appeal to readers with a wide range of interests including history, art, computers, sociology, engineering, robotics, visual culture, and more.