Electric Leisure: Late Nineteenth-Century Dreams of Remote Viewing by “Telectroscope”‘

摘要

Hidden inside this art installation by Paul St George, which drew on the aesthetics of mid-nineteenth-century scientific instruments, a visual high speed broadband link between the two cities was making 'real' a late Victorian dream of the technological future. 1 As we will see, the shape of the Victorians' imagined two-way electrical communications window was ironically far closer to existing twenty-first-century electronic screens than the nostalgic 'brass, leather and rivets' aesthetic favoured by Steampunk artists like St George (see also: Dawdy; Bowser and Croxall). St George's playful blurring of technological fact and fiction figures a particularly apt twist in the story of the imagined device, which in its own time was often incorrectly reported as real. Inspired by the development of the telegraph and telephone, and by the latest electrical inventions, which were showcased at the World's Fairs, the technology became a pervasive presence in the narratives of late nineteenth-century popular journalism and speculative literature. The telectroscope came to embody the fascination with televisual long distance seeing in late-nineteenth-century culture, and the new, emerging dynamics of Modern communication