Speakers include: Andrew Benjamin, Adriana Cavarero, Ian James, Griselda Pollock and Samuel Weber

Venue: Yorkshire Bank Lecture Theatre, Business School, University of Leeds, Clarendon Road.

For further information, conference schedule, etc., please see the conference website.

A two day conference held by the American Studies department at the University of East Anglia

18th-19th June 2011

When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that ‘America is a poem in our eyes’, he was partly expressing the transcendental belief that words and images share a unique and ‘radical correspondence’ that might enable the poet ‘to fasten words again to visible things.’ Walt Whitman answered Emerson’s call for such a poet, cementing the special relationship that still exists in America between the written word and visual image.

The burgeoning discipline of visual studies is perfectly placed to take the exploration of this relationship in new directions. However, there is at present a tendency in such studies to neglect the roots of language in pictures, and to overlook the importance of visual/textual relations to the expression of American character, culture and identity. Whilst the growth of visual studies is an exciting development, ‘visual literacy’ remains a nebulous and confusing term, and as a field of academic study, tends not to generate readings outside a tried and trusted sociological and ideological framework. There is a pressing need for scholarship in image – text relations to be made more various, more theoretically adventurous and more culturally and historically penetrating, and for scholarship to place the study of contiguous images and texts in a much deeper cultural history of visual/verbal responses to film and theatre, to landscape and the built environment, to the visual and plastic arts, to contemporary considerations of mixed media texts, illustrated texts, illuminated manuscripts, and more.

This conference invites speakers to consider the product and practice of the interrelations of image and word across disciplines, and in a specifically American context. We encourage a theoretical approach that considers, for example, any aspect of science, historiography, theology, iconology, art history, multicultural and transnational study, film and media studies, poetry scholarship, cognitive psychology.

We are very pleased to confirm that our eminent keynote speakers are:

• Professor W.J.T. Mitchell (University of Chicago) and
• Professor Miles Orvell (Temple University)

Please send a one-page abstract for a 20-minute paper that may address, but not be restricted to, any of the following:

• Naming and captioning
• Reading the visual and verbal
• The photographic essay or book
• Graphic design; the graphic novel
• Lettrism, Hypertexts – fiction and poetry, concrete poetry
• Environments and spaces of reception and display- eg the gallery, the museum, the classroom, the church, the home
• Ekphrasis
• Philosophy
• Anthropology and archaeology
• Literary use of the physical or imagined image
• The use of verbal signs in the visual arts
• Verbal and visual ontology
• Illustrated texts – fiction or non-fiction
• Illuminated manuscripts
• Artists’ notebooks / scrapbooks
• Performance and installation art
• Iconography and iconology involving word and image
• Image and text in digital media
• Image and text in the visual arts, including theatre, film, photography and television
• The manifesto as imagetext
• Newspapers and broadsides
• Street art and graffiti

Please send abstracts to Dr Catherine Gander and Dr Sarah Garland at americanimagetext@gmail.com by February 28th 2011.

Panel suggestions are also welcome. Conference participants may be encouraged to expand and revise their papers for submission to an edited collection of essays. Updates and details will soon be available at American-image-text.blogspot.com.

A two-day conference sponsored by the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford, with support from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the Oxford e-Social Science project.

Speakers:
Peter Galison, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University
Michael Lynch, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University
Barbara Maria Stafford, Distinguished University Professor, Georgia Tech and University of Chicago
Steve Woolgar, Science and Technology Studies, University of Oxford

Summarising Discussants:
Anne Beaulieu, Virtual Knowledge Studio (VKS)
Paolo Quattrone, IE Business School and Fulbright New Century Scholar

Visualisations abound in all forms and phases of research and knowledge production and communication. From the graphical user interface of our computers, to equipment and instrument displays, to the screen of our smart phones, knowledge communication of all kinds is increasingly visual. In design, engineering, science, education, medicine, humanities and social science, the increasing pervasiveness of visual images is due largely to computational techniques. To be sure, computers have been in common use in science and related domains since the advent of the desktop computer. Over the past decade, however, plain text commands, programming languages and numerical engagement have given way to the visual form, from the reproduction, modification and synthesis of images to the visual representation of that which formerly could not be seen.

There has been an unprecedented rate of innovation in computational imaging and visualising techniques to render physical and non-physical data in visual form, including techniques for multidimensionality, the development of algorithmic techniques for image processing,  the production of hybrid visual objects and an apparent photorealism for non-existent entities and objects. The emergence of the internet-as-database, with complex and massive quantities of data mined from online social and spatial processes given visual form, has gone hand-in-hand with these advances in making new phenomena and data visible.

Call for Papers:
We welcome abstracts of 500-1,000 words for papers on these topics. We also invite proposals for less conventional forums, such as conversations, performance pieces or installation works.

Please visit the website for the full CfP:
http://www.sbs.oxford.edu/visualisation

Registration: There is no fee to attend, but travel and accommodation are not provided.

Accommodation: More information to follow. Please visit the website for updates.

Twitter hashtag: #oxvisual

Contact the organisers through visualisation@sbs.ox.ac.uk.

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Martin Jay (UC Berkeley)
Wendy Steiner (University of Pennsylvania)
Libby Saxton (University of London)

Images seduce. Images deceive. Images conceal. Images reveal. Images make icons. Images break icons. Images are agents of political struggle. Images are sacred. Images are secular. Images are powerful. Images are powerless. Images are banal objects. Images are aesthetic artefacts. Images embody cultural concepts materially. Images create concepts. Images are bodies without organs. Images are photographic. Images are cinematic. Images are digital. Images are real. Images are reality. Images are mimetic. Images are amimetic. Images are currency. Images are worthless. Images want something from us. Images witness. Images haunt us. Images are fundamentally unknowable. Images are entelechial. Images travel. Images are boundless. Images are transmutable. Images are ephemeral. Images are excessive. Images are inadequate. Images are mute. Images are language. Images are beyond language. Images disturb us. Images hurt us. Images are destructive. Images are redemptive. Images are transcendental. Images are transparent. Images are opaque. Images are worth more than a thousand words. Images are primitive. Images are historical. Images are poetic. Images are synechdochic. Images are rhetorical. Images shape the imaginary. Images are neural. Images are neutral. Images are ubiquitous. Images are haptic. Images are spiritual. Images are matter. Images matter. IMAGE=GESTURE.

Nomadikon now invites paper proposals that relate to the overall conference topic and to one or more of the streams below. Please note:

• Abstracts should not exceed 400 words.
• Please include a short bio.
• Deadline for submitting abstracts: 10 November 2010.

Nomadikon also intends to publish one or more anthologies of articles based on material from the conference.

As a critical and heuristic trope, the gestural galvanizes many of the most pertinent areas of inquiry in contemporary debates and scholarship in visual culture and related disciplines:

a) Ethics: Images and their values and affects.
b) Ecology: Iconoclastic gestures and spaces of conflict.
c) Experience: The human as acts of mediation/product of the gaze.
d) Epistemology: Archive, document, memory.
e) Esthetics: From visual essentialism to transesthetics and synesthesia.

As both a cultural phenomenon and a philosophical concept, the notion of gesture straddles several disciplines, such as anthropology, linguistics, performance, theater, film and visual studies. At once a codified and natural expression, the gestural is peculiarly and somewhat ambiguously situated between the realm of the discursive and the realm of the instinctual, between the culture-specific and the universal, and between the corporeal and the visual. As a mode of mediation the gestural also traverses the distinct, albeit interrelated spheres of the political, the aesthetic and the everyday. A space of visual articulation in which rhetoric and semiotics intersect, the gestural produces movements and energies of eloquence capable of generating ideas, perceptions and affect.

Within the context of the present event, we would like to suggest that gesture could also rewardingly be re-deployed as a metaphorical and figurative concept. As among others Hans Belting has shown, there is a rather intimate connection between bodies and images, and if bodies can convey gestures, maybe images can too. Thus, we would like to ask:

• How may one speak not only of the gestures of the body but also of the gestures of the image?
• What constitutes gesturality in the image and, more broadly, what are the gestures of the aesthetic itself?

In W.J.T. Mitchell’s already canonical postulation, pictures must be considered animated beings with drives, demands and desires of their own. They are, however, also in a sense mute beings incapable of speaking the hegemonic vernacular of logocentric discourses. But while pictures cannot speak in the literal sense, perhaps they have a gestural language of their own?

The artwork and its complex gestures remains an under-explored theoretical topos in contemporary visual culture studies. In our turbulent mediasphere where images – as lenses bearing on their own circumstances – are constantly mobilized to enact symbolic forms of warfare and where they get entangled in all kinds of cultural conflicts and controversies, a turn to the gestural life of images seems to promise a particularly pertinent avenue of intellectual inquiry. In visual art, the gestural appears to be that which intervenes between form and content, materiality and meaning. But as a conceptual force it also impinges upon the very process of seeing itself, as Marie-José Mondzain has pointed out: ”The image is only sustained through a dissimilarity, in the space between the visible and the seeing subject. But is this space visible? If it were, it would no longer be a space. Thus, in the act of seeing, there is an invisible gesture that constitutes the space of seeing.”

Jean-François Chevrier in ‘The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History of Photography’ from The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960-1982 edited by Dougals Fogle (Walker Art Centre, 2003).

In preparation for a two day international conference, ‘Tableau/dispositif/apparatus’, at Tate Modern in October 2011 a symposium will be held on Saturday 27 November 2011 at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in collaboration with the London Consortium to hear papers which address the nature of pictorial forms in contemporary practice; “fragmented, open and contradictory” which Jean-Francois Chevrier opposes to the “utopia of a comprehensive systematic order”. This symposium is in preparation for the second day of the Tate conference which will be dedicated to the presentation of research papers.

Submissions: 500 word abstracts should be submitted by 1 October 2010 to Mick Finch through m [dot] finch [at] csm [dot] arts [dot]ac [dot] uk.

International Conference Hosted by the Visual Culture Programme
Vienna University of Technology, 21-23 October 2010

What has emerged over the last decade as one of the most significant aspects of work in Visual Culture is a persistent desire for both a critical sensitivity toward its theoretical underpinnings and an experimental elasticity in its methodological approaches. This drive is giving rise to a plethora of new investigative practices and multi-directional engagements, particularly vis-à-vis matters of geopolitical urgency and their cultural and spatial implications.

Marking ten years of Visual Culture studies at Vienna University of Technology, this conference aims to bring together a diverse group of researchers and practitioners interested in the dynamics between emergent spatial phenomena and new modes of theoretical inquiry. Examining the blurring roles of intervention and research, the conference seeks to debate how critical and creative work in Visual Culture negotiates unexpected transitions and oscillations between individual and collective, real and virtual, center and periphery, and activism and academy.

We invite submission of papers that address the current liminalities of theory and practice in Visual Culture. Participation from graduate students and early career academics is especially welcome. Topics may range from investigating the intimate, indiscreet or collaborative architectures of globalisation to discussing the genealogy of ideas, implemented utopias or unperformed failures.Current shifts in global politics and economy – financial crises, protest movements, natural disasters, worldwide migrations of people and concepts, new shadow economies – contain a myriad of micro and macro processes whose contingent interactions may offer new perspectives for an emerging culture of research as intervention. How can we conceptualise the transformations in the way we share space and the political regimes operative in these spaces? What kinds of strategies does this ambition require? Where will the novel confluences of spatial realities and practice based research lead Visual Culture as a field of critical investigation?

Confirmed keynote speakers include Jorella Andrews (Goldsmiths, University of London), Suzana Milevska (Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje) and Erica Robles (Steinhardt, NYU).

The conference will partly take place within the exhibition setting of 2 or 3 Things we’ve learned – Intersections of art, pedagogy and protest (IG Bildende Kunst, 14th Sep to 29th Oct 2010), which aims to produce a discursive space to address processes, displacements and intervention through art in education. In order to be considered for the conference, please send a paper proposal of 200-300 words (and an optional image) to the conference organisers at
conference@visuelle-kultur.net by 1 August 2010. Please also include a brief biographical sketch of the author(s) of 100-150 words. All abstracts will be reviewed by members of the conference board. Participants will be notified of the acceptance of papers by 1 September 2010.

Conference registration is free of charge. Participants are encouraged to draw on their own resources for travel and accommodation, although there might be some funding available to support paper givers from CEE countries or from outside the EU. Papers from the conference may form the basis for an edited volume. Please address all correspondence (including paper submissions, registration and additional inquiries) to the conference email address: conference [at] visuelle-kultur [dot] net
Updated information will shortly be available on the conference website: http://www.kunst.tuwien.ac.at/conference.htm

Review Board:
Gulsen Bal, Open Space – Zentrum für Kunstprojekte, Vienna
Brigitta Busch, University of Vienna
Eva Egermann, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, IG Bildende Kunst
Susan Kelly, Goldsmiths, University of London
Elke Krasny, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Architekturzentum Wien
Helge Mooshammer, Vienna University of Technology
Peter Mörtenböck, Vienna University of Technology
Irene Nierhaus, University of Bremen
Johanna Schaffer, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Conference Organising Committee:
Karin Reisinger
Amila Sirbegovic
Stefanie Wuschitz
Nada Zerzer
Institute of Art and Design, Vienna University of Technology
Karlsplatz 13, A-1040 Vienna, Austria

FULL PROGRAMME

Thursday 27th May 2010

12:00 Registration

1:00-2:15 Session 1
W.J.T. Mitchell (English and Art History, University of Chicago)

2:15-4:15 Session 2 Roundtable: Education
Mark Dunhill (School of Art, Central Saint Martins College)
Will Cobbing (Wimbledon College of Art)
Joanne Morra (School of Art, Central Saint Martins College)
Adrian Rifkin (Art Writing, Goldsmiths, University of London)
Joy Sleeman (History and Theory of Art, Slade School of Fine Art)
Victoria Walsh (Education and Interpretation, Tate Britain)

4:45-6:30 Session 3
Gary Hall (Media and Performing Arts, Coventry University)
Joanna Zylinska (Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London)

6:30-8:30: Reception

Friday 28th May 2010

10:00-11:15 Session 4
Keith Moxey (Art History and Archaeology, Columbia)

11:15-1:00 Session 5
Divya P. Tolia-Kelly (Geography, Durham University)
David Cunningham (Cultural & Critical Studies, University of Westminster);

1:00-2:00 Lunch (Not provided)

2:00-4:00 Session 6 Roundtable: Design Studies – Visual Studies – Cultural Studies
Glen Adamson (Design/Craft, RCA/V&A)
Sarah Chaplin (Architectural Humanities, Greenwich University)
Elizabeth Guffey (Design, SUNY, Purchase)
Raiford Guins (Digital Cultural Studies, SUNY, Stony Brook)
Guy Julier (Design, Leeds Metropolitan University)
Penny Sparke (Design History, Kingston University)

4:30-5:45 Session 7
Lisa Cartwright (Communication, UC, San Diego)

Saturday 29th May 2010

10:30-11:45 Session 8
Nicholas Mirzoeff (Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University)

11:45-1:30 Session 9

Esther Leslie (Political Aesthetics, Birkbeck, University of London)
Esther Gabara (Romance Studies, and Art, Art History, & Visual Studies, Duke University)

1:30-2:30 Lunch (Not provided)

2:30-4:30 Session 10 Roundtable: The Future Institution: An International Association for Visual Culture Studies?
Michael Ann Holly (The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown)
Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London)
Stephen Melville (Art/Aesthetics/Philosophy, Ohio State University)
Griselda Pollock (Art Histories/Cultural Studies, University of Leeds)
Marquard Smith (Visual Culture Studies, University of Westminster)

4:30 Conference Ends

Organizers: Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York University), Joanne Morra (University of the Arts London), Marquard Smith (University of Westminster, London)

The Whitechapel Salon is back! Spanning art, architecture, performance and sustainability, the forthcoming year-long series of four Salon discussions focus on the matter of ‘matter’ – its nature, substance and the productive forces that govern it. Chris Horrocks (Principal Lecturer, Kingston University) and Julian Stallabrass (Reader, Courtauld Institute of Art) consider Popular Matters including mass culture, vernacular photography, Web 2.0 and user-generated content.

Book now to avoid disappointment! Tickets: £8/£6 (includes free glass of wine)

Programmed by Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, and Journal of Visual Culture