The computer resists representation where the machine was eminently representable

Evidence

It is immediately obvious that the technology of our own moment no longer possesses this same capacity for representation: not the turbine, nor even Sheeler’s grain elevators or smokestacks, not the baroque elaboration of pipes and conveyor belts, nor even the streamlined profile of the railroad train — all vehicles of speed still concentrated at rest — but rather the computer, whose outer shell has no emblematic or visual power, or even the casings of the various media themselves, as with that home appliance called television which articulates nothing but rather implodes, carrying its flattened image surface within itself. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 131

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives the concrete aesthetic contrast between modernist machinery’s representability and postmodern technology’s null shell.
• SEED: The line ‘television which articulates nothing but rather implodes, carrying its flattened image surface within itself’ is a quotable core for an essay on why data-centers, servers, and AI are representationally blank in contemporary art.