Digital Aesthetics Workshop with Aileen Robinson

Abstract

The orrery, a clockwork astronomical model that shows the movements of planetary bodies, provides the case study in this talk around historical technologies and their digital afterlives. The ornate eighteenth-century device, named after the Earl of Orrery, merged art, science, and theatre in its planetary movements, becoming as a beautiful display object and a vision into the arrangement and movements of the stars. As a vision of the heavens, the tabletop orrery miniaturized the cosmos for spectators—and the transparent orrery magnified it for audiences. The orrery became the central performer in a longer history of technological performance from the tabletop device to early iterations of the planetarium projector. Just as the technology for the planetarium has also shifted into a complex interweaving of projection and computing, the orrery, as a specific solar system display, has also moved into digital and cinematic forms. In this talk, I chart how the orrery, and its performances, moves between media object and digital prop from its inception to the present day.  
—Aileen Robinson

About the Speaker

Image

Aileen Robinson is a historian of performance and technology with specializations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century technological performance and Black cultural performances. Working across the history of science, technology, and theater, Robinson explores how systems of knowledge, connected to the body and the object, overlapped to produce practices of research, dissemination, and valuation. Robinson's current book manuscript, Instruments of Illusion, explores intersections between technological, scientific, and theatrical knowledge in early nineteenth-century interactive science museums. She teaches across the history of science and performance, magic and technology, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stagecraft, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Black artistic production.