The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America

[Werner Presber]

The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
„In late 2009, Warren Buffett made headlines for investing in the  
railroad industry, thus marking it with the imprimatur of market  
confidence. It was a provocative move considering the general  
disappearance of trains from the national consciousness and the  
American landscape in general. Earlier that same year, Jeff Brouws  
began a body of work in which he investigates the forgotten legacy of  
the numerous competing railroads servicing Dutchess County in Upstate  
New York during the late 19th Century and into the first-third of the  
20th. With The Machine in the Garden, Brouws masterfully shines a  
light on the vicissitudes of capital that govern the successive layers  
— material and psychological — of economic and cultural  
infrastructure. And indeed the railroad is a cultural phenomenon as  
much as anything else: as the dominant mechanism of growth and  
development in the 19th Century, it fundamentally determined the way  
that people and communities related to one another. Like nothing that  
came before, the railroad restructured the modern organization of time  
and space. And yet that time would seem to have passed. (…)“

http://www.robertmann.com/exhibitions/current.html

"Up and down the steeply-pitched sides of a ravine lay the picked-over  
hulks of failed time machines - Chronoclipses, Asimov Transeculars,  
Tempomorph Q-98s - broken, defective, scorched by catastrophic flares  
of misrouted energy, corroded often beyond recognition by unintended  
immersion in the terrible Flow over which they had been designed and  
built, so hopefully, to prevail... A strewn field of conjecture,  
superstition, blind faith, and bad engineering, expressed in sheet- 
aluminum, vulcanite, Heusler's alloy, bonzoline, electrum, lignum  
vitae, platinoid, magnalinum, and packfong silver, much of it stripped  
away by scavengers over the years. Where was the safe harbor in Time  
their pilots might have found, so allowing their craft to avoid such  
ignominious fates?" p. 409