Elusive matter, material bodies: American art in the age of electronic mediation, 1865-1918
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation examines how American art engaged new electronic media during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when techno-utopian desires for global harmony and interconnection surged throughout American culture, encouraged by the advent of the electromagnetic telegraph. While the fluid transmission of information over vast distances offered the democratic ideal of interconnectedness, its dematerialized process eluded public understanding. Responding to this tension, artists and craftsmen of the period adapted new communicative strategies and formal languages to traditional materials and modes of creative expression—from landscape and genre paintings to quilts and decorative desk sets—to help translate this elusive process into material form. By approaching these practices as both artistic mediums and communication media (through the lens of media theory and material culture studies), my project addresses the broader cultural implications of social technologies during the period, still relevant in our current digital age—the porousness of domestic and national boundaries; questions of access and privacy; and the development of global markets and power structures within these seemingly egalitarian spaces. My research contributes to a growing investment across the humanities in the aesthetics—and material manifestation—of electronic media. Within the field of art history, this investment has predominately been devoted to the emergence of the information age and the implementation of New Media in contemporary art practices. My project, however, investigates the understudied formative stage in electronic media. While the prevailing narratives on social technologies in this period address the way in which devices like the telegraph contributed to a new anti-pastoral content in visual culture through the portrayal of telegraph poles and wires, I examine how a diverse range of creative expressions by Frederic Church, Enoch Wood Perry, and Louis C. Tiffany t…
abstract: This dissertation examines how American art engaged new electronic media during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when techno-utopian desires for global harmony and interconnection surged throughout American culture, encouraged by the advent of the electromagnetic telegraph. While the fluid transmission of information over vast distances offered the democratic ideal of interconnectedness, its dematerialized process eluded public understanding. Responding to this tension, artists and craftsmen of the period adapted new communicative strategies and formal languages to traditional materials and modes of creative expression—from landscape and genre paintings to quilts and decorative desk sets—to help translate this elusive process into material form. By approaching these practices as both artistic mediums and communication media (through the lens of media theory and material culture studies), my project addresses the broader cultural implications of social technologies during the period, still relevant in our current digital age—the porousness of domestic and national boundaries; questions of access and privacy; and the development of global markets and power structures within these seemingly egalitarian spaces. My research contributes to a growing investment across the humanities in the aesthetics—and material manifestation—of electronic media. Within the field of art history, this investment has predominately been devoted to the emergence of the information age and the implementation of New Media in contemporary art practices. My project, however, investigates the understudied formative stage in electronic media. While the prevailing narratives on social technologies in this period address the way in which devices like the telegraph contributed to a new anti-pastoral content in visual culture through the portrayal of telegraph poles and wires, I examine how a diverse range of creative expressions by Frederic Church, Enoch Wood Perry, and Louis C. Tiffany t…
author: Applebaum, Lauren
language: en
keywords: Telecommunication, telegraph, telephone, transatlantic cable, Frederic Church, Enoch Wood Perry, Louis Comfort Tiffany, landscape painting, genre painting, quilting, epistolary practice, postal system, communication technology, new media, electronic mediation
date published: 2019-08-23T20:47:33Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:44Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/105217