The deterioration of the information environment in our age of inflationary media has precipitated a crisis of reality: any sort of baseline for what we take to be “facts” no longer exists. Evidence-based information is routinely drowned in a media market that rewards the loudest and most strident voices at the expense of truth and the common good. The powerful AIs employed by social media giants like Facebook (now Meta), Twitter (now X), YouTube, and TikTok have been trained to generate the...

In 1926, Gertrude Stein delivered the lecture “ Composition as Explanation” to the Cambridge Literary Club at Oxford University (fig. 1). The talk couches a description of her own evolution as an experimental author within a broader discussion of history, culture, and art as a series of distinct “composition[s].”As Kristin Bergen helpfully explains, the “multivocal term” composition at once designates “the dominant mode of daily life for a given period and also the production of those who...

In a 1913 pamphlet, F. T. Marinetti, best known for his “Manifesto of Futurism,” attributed the twentieth century’s “complete renewal of human sensibility” to a series of technological innovations, including “the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the train, the bicycle, the motorcycle, the automobile, the ocean liner, the dirigible, the aeroplane, the cinema, [and] the great newspaper.”

The crown jewel in the 1937 Hollywood musical Ready, Willing, & Able is an elaborate song-and-dance number called “Too Marvelous for Words.” A lovestruck male theater producer, attempting to write a love letter by dictation, is surrounded by an army of female secretaries: hanging on his words, clinging to ladders, sitting at typewriters. As the music picks up tempo, the secretaries tap their keys in time.

Birds and certain varieties of birds have long been potent symbols related to war and conflict. But as airplane technologies developed in rapid tandem with the coming and arrival of the Second World War, the connection between avian and aviation reached new heights in the cultural imagination. The symbolism of doves, for instance, takes on unsettling connotations in T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” (1942), where a descending dove breaks through the air with flames of incandescent terror, controversially representing the Holy Spirit in the form of a German dive-bomber. The painter Paul Nash, much of whose oeuvre relates to his fascination with flying or downed aircraft, compared different “species” of planes to birds, calling the Whitley bomber “a queer bird-like creature . . . A dove of death.” Swallows, meanwhile, feature in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941), their historical flight trajectory connecting continents as well as epochs. The subsequent intrusion by modern aircraft, by “[t]welve aeroplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck,” in turn anticipates Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944) (fig. 1), a film whose famous jump-cuts splice the image of a soaring falcon in medieval England with that of a Spitfire during the Second World War present. With birds like planes and planes like ducks, much cultural production surrounding the Second World War chimes the military with the ornithological. Their visual resemblance, of course, was much remarked upon beyond the realm of art, causing no shortage of anxiety even during the interwar years (fig. 2). Notorious cases in which one was confused for the other are recounted in aerial warfare “prophet” Giulio Douhet’s influential book The Command of the Air (1921), including a panicked moment at Brescia when mourners at the funeral services for victims of an earlier bombing mistook a bird for an enemy plane. Later, the first British fighter pilot casualty of the Second World War occurred when a flock of geese was misidentified by ground observers as a formation of high-altitude enemy aircraft; two squadrons of fighters were scrambled as a result and attacked each other in a case of friendly fire.

Originally constructed in 1817, Auburn Correctional Facility in Upstate New York stands as the oldest continually functional maximum-security penitentiary in the United States. [1] I doubt that its designers would have predicted that 200 years later the US would come to incarcerate more people than any other country in history. We currently make up only 5% of the world’s population, but confine about 21% of its prisoners.

In 1896, bodybuilder Eugen Sandow sat at a desk to devote himself to a mental task, rather than a physical one. He had recently returned to England from a trip to the United States, where he had collaborated with inventor W. K. L. Dickson on a mutoscope reel, an early moving-picture technology, and had posed for X-ray photographs after indicating his interest in the subject to Thomas Edison, who was proudly advertising his patented process for X-rays and fluoroscopes. Now, though, Sandow was working on his own invention. Self-consciously identifying himself as a “Professional Athlete,” he drafted a patent application for what he called a “novel and effective portable method of advertising” (figs. 1, 2). This mobile moving-picture device was to be mounted on a human body that would walk the streets while projecting lantern slides or films, bringing novel meaning to the newly-developing media and bandied-about phrases of “moving pictures” and “living pictures.” Sandow’s device for portable projection engaged with and re-conceptualized contemporary issues of mobility, technology, consumption, and urban spectacle. Although the proposed machine was never brought into mass production, this patent transforms our understanding of the history of “screen practice,” as articulated by Charles Musser, by proposing a mobile screen borne on the body of a pedestrian, meant to circulate through the city at night; it also expands our view of broader practices of urban advertising, media experimentation, and perception. The patent specification, emerging only a few months after the first successful projection of enlarged motion pictures (rather than the prior reliance on the kinetoscope and peep-box viewing), reveals the way the practice of viewing film might have developed. This article examines the circulating image of embodied advertising and corporeal technologies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, positing a proto-cyborg whose interaction with machines and commodities superseded his interaction with other humans.