AbstractsHistory

This thesis critically analyzes installations of telepresence art since 1986 and argues that the phenomological experience of engagement in telepresence suggests a new state of subjectivity at the end of the twentieth century: the hyper-subject, an overlapping of self and multiple others. I place telepresence art firmly in the genealogy of Surrealism by comparing artworks to Hans Bellmer's infinitely recombinant doll, La Poupee. While Bellmer represented the physical anagram of the body through the doll, telepresence art produces psychic anagrams of participants in the virtual sphere. Installations of telepresence art by multiple artists are probed to critically engage the artistic design of each, including humanoid telerobots, screen-based telepresence, and human avatars, and to assess their efficacy in upholding telepresence as what Lombard and Ditton define as "the perceptual illusion of non-mediation." By integrating psychoanalysis, post-anthropocentric posthumanism, and feminist disability theory, I examine telepresence art as a platform for social change. This research contributes the first art historical application of the uncanny valley to telepresence artworks, the first comparison of telepresence art to Bellmer's La Poupee, and advocates for more art historical research on the hyper-subject as a new state of viewing and experiencing art in the twenty-first century.