When:
Friday 1st July 2011, from 14:30 to 19:00
Where:
Multi-purpose Hall, Korean Cultural Centre, Grand Buildings, 1-3 Strand, London, WC2N 5BW (Main Entrance on Northumberland Avenue)

Programme

14:30 – 15:00 – Prelude
○ Digital Film Screening: Interview with Eemyun Kang
4482 Korean Contemporary Artists Group Exhibition

15:00 – 16:15 – Session 1. Academic Session – Theoretical approaches
○ Chair: Marquard Smith (Director, Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster)
○ Speaker: Young-Paik Chun (Reader, Department of Art History and Theory, Hong-Ik University, Seoul)
○ Commentator: Edward Allington (Professor, Head of Graduate Sculpture, Slade School of Fine Art)

16:15 – 16:30 Coffee Break

16:30 – 17:40 – Session 2. Panel Discussion in Art Practice I – Curatorial Practice
○ David A Bailey (Director of ICF The International Curators Forum)
○ Ji-Yoon Lee (Director, Suum Contemporary Art Project & Academy)
○ Sook-Kyung Lee (Curator, Tate Liverpool)
○ Moderator : Jade Keun-Hye Lim (Independent Curator / APG in Museum Studies, Leicester University)

17:50 – 19:00 – Session 3. Panel Discussion in Art Practice II – Making Art Works
○ Mee-Kyung Shin (Artist)
○ Chan-hyo Bae (Artist)
○ Jin-Kyun Ahn (Artist)
○ Moderator : Stephanie Seung-Min Kim (Director, Iskai Contemporary Art)

Keep a close eye out for forthcoming information on the International Association for Visual Culture.

A little background:

On 29th May 2010, as the final session of the three-day conference entitled ‘The 2010 Visual Culture Studies Conference’ held at University of Westminster, London, the subject under discussion was the proposal to establish an International Association for Visual Culture Studies. During the session, with presentations from Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London), Michael Ann Holly, and Stephen Melville (Ohio State), and convened by Marquard Smith, a motion was proposed formally by W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago) that the Association be established. This motion was seconded by Lisa Cartwright (UC, San Diego), and the motion was passed.

At the start of April 2011, Michael Ann Holly, Starr Director of Research and Academic Programming at The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and Marquard Smith, Founding Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture, convened a colloquium of international scholars, museum educators, and practitioners of visual culture at The Clark to discuss further the founding of such an Association – what would be its aims and mission, and how it would function in its service to its members. Following on from this colloquium, the Clark group is moving forward with the formal founding of an International Association for Visual Culture.

The Association for Visual Culture will be launched officially at a conference in New York in May 2012, convened by a group of New York State-based scholars, led by Nicholas Mirzoeff (NYU).

Information will be available soon regarding the Association’s official launch, the chance to register interest in the Association, to receive updates, membership offers, etc.

Watch this space…

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.

The last few decades have witnessed rapid developments and innovations in visualization techniques. This is the case for a wide variety of visualization genres, whether in scientific fields, in the fashion industry or in the arts. There are, however, overlaps of style as well as techniques between different genres. As Lisa Cartwright notes, there is a symbiotic relationship between scientific and popular imaging technologies. In a similar vein, we find an interaction between art and science in the genre known as bio-art.

In this PhD course/Research workshop we will explore images of relevance to the study of gendered bodies. This is an interdisciplinary course, and the concept of “body images” is to be understood in a broad sense, as transcending the categories of art and science, including art history. The course lecturers cover a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including media studies, science and technology studies and gender research. All lectures and discussions will be held in English.

The course aims at promoting intercultural exchange. There is no course fee. Norwegian students must cover their own travel and accommodation costs. Students from France and other countries may apply for reimbursement of costs. The conference organizers will make the hotel bookings for all participants.

Application Process
Applicants are asked to send a brief outline of their PhD project in English (1-3 pages).

Credit points
The course gives 7.5 ECTS (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System) credits. In order to obtain the credits, students must cover the reading list (around 1000 pages) and produce an essay, which is to be submitted after the course. It is the students’ responsibility to apply to their universities or related educational bodies to get the credits recognized as part of their PhD studies. The course organizers will provide certification that the course has been completed and that the essay requirement has been fulfilled.

Essay
For the essay, the student is required to apply the themes and literature covered in the course to his or her PhD topic. The essay should be submitted by 15 June 2011, and be 15 pages in length.

Course organizers are Professor Merete Lie, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture (merete.lie@ntnu.no) and Associate Professor Aud Sissel Hoel, Department of Art and Media Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) (aud.sissel.hoel@ntnu.no)

Please send your application before February 20, 2011 to
anja.johansen@ntnu.no

Programme

Monday 11 April
1000 – 1030 Opening and welcome: Bjarne Rogan, Directeur
Centre franco-norvégien en sciences sociales et humaines, FMSH, Paris
1030 – 1115 Merete Lie, NTNU:
An introduction to the course. Body images – gender inside/outside.
1115 – 1145 Coffee
1145 – 1230 Dr. André Gunthert, l’Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris: Smiling at war: How to make information enjoyable. The role of the smile in the magazine press in the 1930-1950s
1230 -1400 Lunch
1400 – 1445 Aud Sissel Hoel, NTNU:
Picturing the Brain: Perspectives on Neuroimaging
1500 – 1700 Group work. Student presentations.

Tuesday 12 April
0930 -1200 Lisa Cartwright, UCSD, workshop:
Imaging Technologies and the Body: Feminist Approaches
1030 – 1100 Coffee
1100 – 1200 Workshop continues
1200 – 1330 Lunch
1330 – 1700 Group work. Student presentations.

Wednesday 13 April
0930 -1200 Adele Clarke, UCSF:
Workshop on Images as matter of Situational Analysis
1030 – 1100 Coffee
1100 – 1200 Workshop continues
1200 – 1330 Lunch
1330 – 1500 Group work. Student presentations.
1500 – 1600 Summing up. Plans for follow-up and cooperation.

Speakers
Lisa Cartwright is Professor of Communication and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. Her research areas are film and media studies, feminist and sexuality studies; disability studies; visual culture in science, health and medicine.

Adele Clarke is Professor of Sociology and Adjunct Professor of History of Health Sciences at the University of California San Francisco. Primary research and creative areas are historical and contemporary sociology of biomedical sciences and technologies, the development of qualitative research methodologies, and women’s health.

André Gunthert is a researcher in visual history at l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He is director of le Laboratoire d’histoire visuelle contemporaine (Lhivic), which is a leading French research team in the field of visual studies.

Aud Sissel Hoel is associate professor of visual communication in the Department of Art and Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). She is coordinator of the interdisciplinary research project Picturing the Brain: Perspectives on Neuroimaging and appointed leader of the research priority area PerFormativity at the Faculty of Humanities at NTNU.

Merete Lie is a Professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, NTNU. Her fields of research are gender, technology and globalization.

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

Spanning art, architecture, performance and sustainability, this year’s series of four Salon discussions focus on the matter of ‘matter’ – its nature, substance and the productive forces that govern it. For July Gavin Butt(Goldsmiths College, London), Adrian Heathfield (Roehampton University), and Lois Keidan (Director, Live Art Development Agency) consider Performance Matters.

Co-organised by the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, London, and the Whitechapel Gallery. Book now to avoid disappointment!

Tickets: £8/£6 (includes free glass of wine)

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org