Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy - Curator's Tour

Guildhall Art Gallery, Guildhall Yard, London
Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy - Curator's Tour image
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Event has ended
This event ended on Thursday 27th of October 2016
Admission
Free
Location

Guildhall Art Gallery, Guildhall Yard, London

Nearest Tube/Rail Stations
Bank 0.18 miles

On Thursday 27th October, the City of London Corporation’s Guildhall Art Gallery will hold a free Curator’s talk and guided tour of its exciting new exhibition, ‘Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy’, which marks the 150th anniversary of the first communications cable that was laid across the Atlantic, connecting Europe with America.

Professor Caroline Arscott of the Courtauld Institute of Art will regale visitors with intriguing tales of how the cable changed the world and transformed peoples’ understanding of time, space and speed of communication by allowing near-instantaneous communications across continents for the first time. The show is a collaboration between Guildhall Art Gallery, King’s College London, The Courtauld Institute of Art and the Institute of Making at University College London.

Highlights:
• Explore four themed rooms, Distance, Resistance, Transmission and Coding, telling the story of laying the cables, which weighed more than one imperial ton per kilometre across the Atlantic Ocean floor from Valentia Island in Ireland to Newfoundland in Canada.
• See never-seen-before paintings by prominent Victorian artists such as Edward John Poynter, James Clarke Hook and James Tissot, as well as rare artefacts including telegraph cable samples, Victorian newspapers, maps, codebooks and telegraphic devices.
• Marvel at Landseer’s renowned ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’ (1848) painting of the last, thwarted journey of HMS Terror, a British vessel which was found in the Arctic earlier this month, 168 years after it sunk.
• Interact with ‘The Great Grammatizor’, a specially-designed messaging machine which enables visitors to create a coded message of their own. Three rotating buttons represent 'genre', 'feelings' and 'driving force' and when each is turned to one of seven options and a lever 'cranked' it will produce a one-of-a-kind text for visitors to decipher. Imagined by UCL PhD student Alexandra Bridarolli, the idea was inspired by 'The Great Automatic Grammatizator' a story by Roald Dahl from his collection Someone Like You (1953).

‘Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy’ is now open to the public until 22nd January 2017.

The City of London Corporation, which owns and manages Guildhall Art Gallery, invests £80m every year in heritage and cultural activities of all kinds. It is the UK’s largest funder of culture after the government, the BBC, and the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Tags: Exhibition

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