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This course is an interrogation of the relationship between art and the major technological inventions, infrastructures, and milestones that emerged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It dovetails significantly with the history of science, examining works of art, architecture, and visual culture alongside crucial concurrent discoveries in the scientific world, including the invention of electricity and the industrialization of light, Einstein’s work on the nature of time, and the moon landing. A key theme is the role of technology in the imagination (and attempted construction) of a utopian world. Topics include the use of photography as a tool for detective work, the technology of wax as a visual medium, the visual productions of major civil engineering projects, the use of anatomical models in the study of medicine, machines of war and speed, and the rise of surveillance systems. A core premise of the course is that technology is not neutral but necessarily ideological and subjective; we will attend to the social, cultural, and political attitudes that undergirded the production, distribution, and (visual) representation of technology. The course aims to understand the discursive significance of technological objects in the construction of vision, and of the histories of vision, and in doing so it grapples with the methodological risks of technological determinism, which presupposes that technology influenced all developments in art and culture. In this course, we will pose the converse question: how have advances in art and visual culture led to breakthroughs in technology?