My research investigates the relationship between art, science and technology in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It joins a growing body of scholarship interested in the material forms of knowledge shared by these three disciplines. I am interested in unearthing the hidden forms of labor embedded in objects that occupy this boundary, often giving voice to artists and craftsmen who might otherwise remain mute. My work engages the history of artistic labor with broader issues of class, race and gender in early America. Combining the tools of material culture studies and social history, I use questions of technology and technique to link seemingly unrelated objects in ways that complicate and deepen our understanding of history’s material reality.
DISSERTATION
My dissertation offers a history of mechanical drawing in the early American Republic, investigating the complex and evolving relationship between bodily and industrial mechanics at work in the new tools and drawing techniques that arose in the early years of industrialization. For much of the early modern period, the idea of the “mechanical” was deeply entwined with both physiological and philosophical conceptions of the body. However, around the turn of the nineteenth century, the anatomically impossible operations of mechanical automation began to render body and machine newly estranged. My research examines mechanical drawing’s entry into this breach, studying the reinvention of traditional forms of embodied artisanal knowledge through new technologies and techniques of representation.
The first chapter addresses the ways in which graphic instruction in this period was itself reimagined in the terms of mass production. The second chapter focuses on drawing as an integral aspect of early American technical education and the means by which such instruction negotiated a widening gulf between the administrative knowledge of the designer and the tacit knowledge of the artisan. In the third chapter, I consider physical interactions between hand and machine in the process of drawing, with particular attention to the strange biomechanical hybridities engendered in the era’s newly popular physiognotrace portraiture. My fourth and final chapter considers technical drawings as agents and instruments within the nineteenth-century’s expansive, and increasingly disembodied world of transatlantic exchange.
Tracing the rise of new networks of graphic communication, new systems of graphic instruction, and new drawing devices designed to secure mechanical objectivity, this project positions mechanical drawing as an essential tool in both understanding and complicating the gradual estrangement of body and machine that has come to define the modern industrial paradigm.
MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE THESIS
“Re|moving Architecture: A Collection of Short Fiction and Hard Evidence”
Elizabeth Bacon Eager 