Speed, Technology, and the Invention of Change, 1800-1919

22 March 2004
9am-5pm
314 Royce Hall
UCLA

Hosted by

The Center for Modern and Contemporary Studies

All welcome!
Reservations are not required. Parking is available on the UCLA Campus for $7.00. Please see an attendant at any parking information kiosk to be directed to the available lot closest to the above venues.

For further information or questions, you may contact the Center for Modern and Contemporary Studies office at (310) 825-9581.

Conference Speakers

9:00-11:30 Enda Duffy UC--Santa Barbara Thriller: Experience contra Consumption in the Era of Velocity N. Katherine Hayles UCLA Telegraph Code Books: Speed, Language, and Cryptography 1:00-3:00 Natalka Freeland UC--Irvine Trashing the Novel: Accelerated Reading and Disposable Culture Stephen Kern Ohio State The Culture of Speed, 1870-1920 3:15-5:30 Irene Tucker Johns Hopkins The Speed of an Instant: Photography’s Public Jeffrey Schnapp Stanford A Portrait of Homo Velox Followed by a Reception

This conference seeks to explore the history through which modern, industrial culture came to know and think of itself as part of a global technological process of infinite acceleration.

Can we, for instance, theorize the “annihilation of time and space” that begins in this era? How do we tell histories of speed in ways that carry us beyond, or at least re-illuminate, the invention of railroad and airplane?

And what kind of criticism emerges when we set out from such a fundamentally relational viewpoint, from understanding all life, in Deleuze’s words, “as a complex relation between differential velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles”?

conference organizer:
Jonathan Grossman
grossman@humnet.ucla.edu

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