"In a well-known work of art there are some significant and early anticipations of the 24/7 temporalities discussed so far. The British artist Joseph Wright of Derby produced... It has been reproduced in many books on the history of industrialization, to illustrate - often misleadingly - the impact of factory production on rural England (an impact that was not widely felt for many decades). The painting's strangeness comes in part from the understated but distinctly anti-picturesque implantation of six and seven story brick buildings within an otherwise untamed and wooden countryside. As historians have noted, they are structures without precedent in English architecture. Most unsettling, however is the elaboration of a nocturnal scene in which the light of a full moon illuminating a cloud-filled sky coexists with the pin-points of windows lit by gas lamp in the cotton mills.The artificial lighting of the factories announces the rationlized deployment of an abstract relation between time and work, severed from the cyclical temporalities of lunar and solar movements."
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