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In the light of climate crisis, many artists and scholars are seeking new methodologies for engaging with the environment, including theorizing new definitions of landscape and focusing on the entanglement of material and political infrastructures. An elemental turn has recently expanded the scope of media studies (John Durham Peters, Melody Jue) to tackle new objects like air conditioning and seawater, and is influencing art historians of the contemporary (Giuliana Bruno, Brian Jacobson) to look more closely at the atmospheric relationships of buildings, spectators, infrastructures, and nature.

Our panel proposes that the invaluable lessons of “elemental media” can be applied to the study of 19th-century visual culture. In this age of expanding industrialization and empire, engineers modernized urban infrastructures and scientists were solidifying the diverse fields of meteorology, botany, and geology—developments that produced their own visual culture, alongside artists who interrogated their relationship to the natural world. Tackling this interdisciplinary corpus helps us make transhistorical connections between then and now—historicizing contemporary art’s increasing attention to ambient ecological effects within our growing awareness of 19th-century ecological damage that kickstarted our Anthropocene.

Papers might examine ways that elemental media have been wrangled and managed including by lenses, pipes, or paper certificates. Some of these media might physically interact with the water/air/light/earth in question, while others might function as secondary-order representations that facilitate their movement and circulation. How does “elemental media” open up new objects of analysis for 19th-century art history? What role can the visual play in wider conversations of ecological management?