December 7, 2023 By: Yandong Li

At the top of the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, an exhibition designated “New Frontiers” showcases digital art and design works that are “technology-forward” and “innovative.” [1] The exhibition borrows its title from the Rockefeller Center’s inaugural arts program of the same name, led by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, the co-founder of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (Schneider, “New Frontiers”). More than half a century ago, at the same building, Socony-Vacuum, one of the legacies of John D...

December 9, 2022 By: Tobias Wilson-Bates

On February 15, 1894, a bomb went off in Greenwich Park near the Royal Observatory. The event set off a media frenzy that, thirteen years later, resulted in Joseph Conrad writing The Secret Agent (1907). Recent readings of the novel have begun to explore how in constructing his ironic re-mediation of the event, Conrad also began to lay bare some of the complex energy infrastructures of his historical moment. In Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination, Allen Macduffie argues...