"Conversion machines are apparatuses, artfully-fashioned preparations, arrangements, and things that demonstrate processes of change. They are paradoxical things - at once intent on verifying what was invisible, uncertain, and even unknowable, while also acting as sowers of dissimulation. The b...

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Bibliographic Details

Other Authors:	Wilson, Bronwen 1960- (Editor), Yachnin, Paul 1953- (Editor)
Format:	Book
Language:	English
Published:	Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press [2023]
Series:	Conversions
Subjects:	Konversation Automat Mechanisches Kunstwerk Art objects / Religious aspects Machinery / Philosophy Conversion Art and society Mind and body
Summary:	"Conversion machines are apparatuses, artfully-fashioned preparations, arrangements, and things that demonstrate processes of change. They are paradoxical things - at once intent on verifying what was invisible, uncertain, and even unknowable, while also acting as sowers of dissimulation. The book does not seek to mechanize conversion. In many ways, conversion and the transformation of the convert will remain ineffable. But we maintain that conversion of all kinds must unfold in ecologies that include politics, law, religious practice, the arts, and the material and corporeal realms. Shifting the focus from subjectivity toward the operations of governments, institutions, artifices, and the body, the contributors to the volume consider how early moderns suffered under the mechanisms of conversion, sometimes were able to realize themselves by dint of being caught up in the machinery of sovereignty, invented scores of new, purpose-built conversional instruments, and experienced forms of radical transformation in their own bodies."--
Physical Description:	xxvi, 358 Seiten Illustrationen 24 cm
ISBN:	1399516000 9781399516006