Lauren Applebaum

My dissertation examines how American art, from paintings to quilts and decorative desk sets, engaged early electronic telecommunication practices between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on information theory, I conceive of such objects as active agents of communication that negotiated the shifting nature of social connection bridged by new technologies like the telegraph and telephone. As society attempted to locate and understand the modern communal spaces engendered by these technologies, I argue that artistic production became a crucial outlet for coming to terms with their functional logic and social implications in a perceivable form. While the fluid transmission of information over vast distances purported to provide democratic access, the artists of my study show just how uncertain these aspirations of equality and interconnectivity actually were. Due to its precarious form, the elusive matter of electronic mediation became the very figure for this uncertainty. Though invisible as a raw material, its presence in the spaces between social and national bodies is deeply inscribed in material and visual culture. Frederic Church explores the geographic and geologic resonance of the transatlantic telegraph, marking a moment at the end of the Civil War when the nation was constructing a new identity for a global audience. Enoch Wood Perry calls upon traditional women’s craft practices to articulate the awkward intrusion of the telephone, which threatened to dismantle the barrier between public and private spheres. John Frederick Peto contemplates the shortened life of information in an ever-expanding media landscape, foregrounding the overlaps between haptic and virtual modes of exchange. And Louis Comfort Tiffany attempts to naturalize electronic systems of discourse during a time of major expansion for telecommunication networks such as AT&T.