Revue Faire: To Look at Things 47–48, Mechanical Translations traces the long history of automated writing and translation — from a 19th-century voice-inscription machine to the binary logic underpinning digital computing — across two tightly argued issues.
About This Book
This double issue of Revue Faire pursues a single, searching question: what happens to language when machines take over its production? Issue 47, Machines, Accents, and Affects, opens with Dr René Marage's late-19th-century apparatus for graphically inscribing the voice, using that device to unfold a broader history of humanity's ambivalence toward technical objects. Issue 48, Electric Letters, follows the thread into digital territory, locating the roots of binary code in the telegraph and the electrification of communication. Together, the issues position mechanical translation not as a modern disruption but as a tension embedded in writing itself — one in which human intent and machine manipulation have long been entangled. Essential reading for those working at the intersection of typography, media theory, and the history of graphic inscription.
Key Features
- 68 pages of critical essays and historical analysis across two thematic issues
- Authored by Camille Pageard and Simon Renaud
- Published by Editions Empire, [Details available upon request]
What You'll Discover
- How Dr René Marage's voice-inscription machine shaped the graphic history of sound and language in the late 19th century
- The cultural psychology of attraction and repulsion that has always shadowed technical objects involved in writing
- How the telegraph and the advent of electricity established the binary logic that now underpins digital text
- The distinction — and the collapse — between writing addressed to humans and code manipulated by machines
About the Author
[Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 68
- Dimensions: 210 x 290 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9791095991441
- Publisher: Editions Empire
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Graphic designers, typographers, media theorists, and historians of communication with an interest in the mechanisation of language and the deep origins of digital writing.