Mermaids amongst the Cables: The Abstracted Body and the Telegraphic Touch – Clare Pettitt (Seminar, King’s College, 9 October 2013)

Research Summary: Mermaids amongst the Cables

Topic: Art history seminar examining late 19th-century aesthetics and emerging telecommunications

Primary Focus: Two mermaid paintings (Evelyn De Morgan's “The Sea Maidens,” 1885-6; Edward Burne-Jones's “The Depths of the Sea,” 1887) as cultural responses to technological change

Key Contexts: Underwater cable networks, Challenger Expedition dredging/sounding data, emergence of “tele-contact” (Paul Virilio)

Central Argument: New communications technologies and scientific information drove aesthetic innovations in surface/depth representation and coding systems

Presenter: Professor Clare Pettitt, King's College London

Event Details: Research Seminar in History of Science, Technology and Medicine; 9 October 2013, 5-6:30pm, Strand Building S8.08

Disciplinary Approach: Integrates art history, technology studies, and literary theory to examine abstracted embodiment within material infrastructure

King’s College Research Seminar series in the history of science, technology and medicine:
Professor Clare Pettitt
Mermaids amongst the Cables: The Abstracted Body and the Telegraphic Touch
Wednesday 9 October at 5-6.30pm in S8.08, Strand Building.

This paper uses two paintings of mermaids form the 1880s to think about the emergence in the late nineteenth century of what Paul Virilio has termed ‘tele-contact’: Evelyn De Morgan’s ‘The Sea Maidens’ (sometimes called ‘The Sea Sisters’) of 1885-6, and Edward Burne Jones’s ‘The Depths of the Sea’, which was exhibited in 1887.

Reading these paintings in the context of the rapidly ramifying underwater cable network, the compromised material form of the cables themselves, and the much-reported dredging and sounding experiments of the Challenger Expedition of the 1870s, the paper suggests that new communications technologies, new scientific information, and an ever-widening contact network were driving aesthetic form into new patternings and stretchinesses, new concepts of surface and depth, and new kinds of coding.

All are welcome.