Variantology 2

Book excerpt: What does a thirteenth-century Majorcan missionary have to do with logical machines? Were the astrolabes of the late Middle Ages really only used to calculate the orbits of stars and planets, or were they philosophical instruments? Was the first avant garde in Russia more interested in Jesuit affect theory or H.G. Wells's time machine? Where do radar angels live? These excursions into the relationships between the arts, the sciences and technology lead neither to a revised history of art nor to a revised history of the media; they question our understanding of what we have defined as art and what we have seen as the media.