Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form

Description

Liquid crystal is a curious phase of matter. It has the ability at once to flow, like water, and to refract, like ice. It was closely observed, if not yet named, by experts in 1888 but they found no practical use for it. Probed and imaged for decades, its unique properties were eventually harnessed for an age of screen-based media. Now liquid crystal is ubiquitous, communicating, selling and delighting, in flat-screen LCDs, computers and mobile devices. We also now know that it exists inside our bodies. For the very first time, Liquid Crystals tells the history of this anomalous and little understood phase of matter in relation to a 'liquid crystal' epoch, spanning from 1820 to today, detailing the key interminglings of the liquid and crystalline located in politics, philosophy and art during this time.

Esther Leslie is professor of political aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of many books and is, most recently, the editor and translator of Walter Benjamin's On Photography, also published by Reaktion Books.

"Lucid and hallucinatory, this work is like a journey into the undead, affect-ridden material unconscious of modernity."--Anselm Franke "Leslie drags us back to the screen, to the discovery of this uncomfortably contradictory state of matter, and to the vast range of implications it has for the way we imagine the materiality and abstraction of our world, from financial liquidity to Superman's icy Fortress of Solitude. She raises the tantalizing prospect that liquid crystals are key not only to images but to perception and to our worldview: the governing metaphor through which we comprehend the rival claims of dialectics and flow. Erudite, lucid, enthralling, Leslie's eclectically logical investigations transform our understanding of the historical generation of ideas and ways of thinking." --Sean Cubitt, Goldsmiths, University of London "The particular history being expounded here provides another perspective on Leslie(1)s other histories such as those explored in Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry. . . . A particular clandestine story is being told, with fairy-tale intrigue and political urgency, because this story has hitherto been glossed over or forgotten: a story about German fascism and its postwar industrial legacy; about nature and the culture industry; a critique of the division of labor between artists and scientists. . . . Leslie's book itself appears as a liquid crystalline incarnation with abstract sketches . . . preceding the flowing, rangy, roaming prose of her individual chapters. Just as liquid crystals pervade aspects of life, they inhere too in the prose form of Leslie's liquid crystalline text."-- "Radical Philosophy"