Technologies of the Picturesque This book examines how art and technology mutually align their representations of nature in order to transform land into intelligible landscapes. The author has selected three technological fields burgeoning in 18th century Britain whose influence on the picturesque aesthetic has been overlooked: cartography, meteorology, and animal breeding. Technologies of the Picturesque traces how these scientific fields influence the works of Wordsworth, Gilpin, Constable, Gainsborough and other key figures of the period. Technology and interior experience of the poetic subject overlap in their means and methods of removing the viewer from nature while presenting the land as a comprehensible object. With each chapter archival research is paired with a phenomenological critique of how representation abstracts from the lived engagement with the land and how artists are both complicit with such objectification of nature and at other moments work toward a more vivid connection to the environment.
	Reviews Politics and Culture. by David Baulch, November 2007.