Art, Machine, and Learning in Eighteenth-Century China

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the visual and material repercussions of China’s encounters with European scientific devices. No less than today, a romance with technology at that time stoked dreams and changed lives. Celestial globes, precision timepieces, ivory spheres, and mechanical automata captivated interest; could machines, some wondered, be conscious? Discourses on consciousness, design, and precision reimagined art and technology, time and space, and man and machine. A drive to imbue both machines and art with life motivated the collection and creation of new devices and new genres. Combining art history with the history of science, I examine these objects not merely as luxury items of connoisseurship but as manifestations of a new kind of thinking about visuality and intelligence. New Media thus has an old (and Chinese) history.