“This special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture is a remarkable and much needed addition to the critical analysis and development of translation as a metaphor for creative acts and products. [...] I can wholeheartedly recommend ‘Acts of Translation’ to anybody interested in the critical engagement with cultures, whether historical or contemporary, visual or linguistic. It deserves to become an essential reference in departments of visual culture, fine art, art history and, importantly, also translation studies.”

Katja Krebs, Translation Studies, May 2010

]]> http://www.journalofvisualculture.org/2011/09/on-acts-of-translation/feed/ 0 http://www.journalofvisualculture.org/2010/11/international-association-for-visual-culture-studies-an-invitation/ http://www.journalofvisualculture.org/2010/11/international-association-for-visual-culture-studies-an-invitation/#comments Tue, 16 Nov 2010 15:50:15 +0000 Marquard Smith http://www.journalofvisualculture.org/?p=253 At the end of the 2010 Visual Culture Studies Conference, the final session discussed the prospect of establishing an International Association for Visual Culture Studies. During this session, a motion was put forward to establish the Association; the motion was carried.

It was a very productive discussion, I felt, and a really good way of beginning to imagine the shape, the role, and the tasks of such an Association.

We’ve set up an online forum as a space where we can discuss the Association, its purpose, role, ambitions, aims and objectives, etc. You are invited to contribute to these on-going discussions by registering as a user at www.journalofvisualculture.org/bbpress.

Once you have registered, you will have to be approved as a user (so we can stop trolls and spam). Do bear with us as we open up this forum to you all. Should you encounter any technical issues, please email contact@visualculturestudies.org.

About the online forum
We have kept the forum open, with one section for aims and objectives, and another for activities – please feel free to add topics under these headings. Also if you have any suggestions for the forum’s development, do let us know.

To explore the Association’s possible composition, structure and purpose, one forum asks:

1. How do we need to imagine this community of scholars, students, emerging scholars, curators, educators, museum professionals, practitioners, and cultural sector specialists?
2. What are the academic, intellectual, and professional ambitions of the Association?

To explore the possible activities of the Association, another forum asks:

1. What will the Association do?
2. What kind of forums are most appropriate/necessary (meetings, networks, conferences, etc.) to support the activities of this community, and facilitate the (formal and informal) exchange of ideas and information, as well as its conviviality, sociality, and collaborative impulse?

Here’s to New York City 2012, and to the launch of the International Association for Visual Culture Studies. And to the many productive conversations that will take place in the next few weeks and months – many thanks for contributing.

Paperweight draws together writers, researchers, academics, enthusiasts, designers, artists and curators, with each issue taking a timely theme related to visual and material culture; contributors use this theme as a starting point, or an end point, or something in-between, to explore the territory from different vantage points.

The aim for the publication is to offer an alternative space to the journal article, the book, the exhibition catalogue or the gallery; and to promote the work of visual and material culture to as broad an audience as possible. For more information see here.

The first issue of Paperweight, ‘Screen: The Birthday Issue’ is now available for sale via the newspaper’s website for an incredibly modest £3. To order a copy, see here. As a special introductory offer, Paperweight is also offering a subscription to issues 2 and 3 for only £4.

The contents of the first issue of Paperweight are:

Mervyn Heard on Smoke Screens / Øyvind Vågnes on the Cultural History of the Zapruder Film / Matt Lodder on Televising the Tattoo / Marquard Smith on Metadata / Howard Pensly on Boatology / Zoe Hendon on Sun and Screens / Laine Nooney on Female Gamers / Geo Takach on Writing Between Stage and Screen / Paul Micklethwaite on Screen Ecology / Scientific Encounters with Alexander Doust / Harriet Riches on Sally Mann’s ‘The Family and The Land’ / Rebecca Onion with Some Notes on Toys

The second issue, due for publication in April 2010, will take ‘ghosts’ as its theme. Ideas for possible submissions are invited through submissions@polygraphia.co.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.”

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

In 2008, Journal of Visual Culture inaugurated a new Events section, with a multi-authored critical dissection of Documenta 12 (vol.7, no.2). The move is a response to a shift over the past few decades, which has seen the exhibition and/as event encroaching on the territory once steadfastly occupied by the academy and its related publications, as sites for positing theories, exploring histories, and pertinent analyses of visual culture past and present. While the art exhibition, industrial fair, archive, and museum and gallery displays have long played a pivotal role in structuring our public and private experiences of visual culture — temporally, spatially and textually — educational projects, screenings, performances, and festivals have also gained in influence as instances of visual culture in their own right and, simultaneously, as discursive frames for thinking through visual culture. As such, the Events section is envisaged as an experimental forum for analyzing events — very broadly defined as noteworthy occasions or occurrences in visual culture — beyond the limits of their temporal, spatial, and practical boundaries.

We appreciate but do not favour actuality: no event is too far in the past, too present, or too far into the future for our consideration. We encourage reflections that diverge from the formats, perspectives and styles readily available in the weekly or monthly press, or in specialist academic journals; we welcome single, multiple, and interdisciplinary points of view, dialogues, polemics and debates, from artists, writers, academics, curators, and critics alike (as well as none of the above).

Submissions: 1,000 to 2,000 words, following the Journal of Visual Culture house-style where appropriate—for further info, see here.

Deadlines:  End of January (August issue), end of May (December issue), end of September (April issue)

Contact: s [dot] lok [at] journalofvisualculture [dot] org

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)

Contents are:

Matilde Nardelli’s Moving Pictures: Cinema and Its Obsolescence in Contemporary Art
Adrian Rifkin’s Apart from Sex
Nanna Verhoeff’s Theoretical Consoles: Concepts for Gadget Analysis
Joy Sleeman’s Land Art and the Moon Landing
Erkki Huhtamo’s The Sky is (not) the Limit: Envisioning the Ultimate Public Media Display
Julian Stallabrass and Ashley Gilbertson In Conversation
Jeannine Tang’s Events Review

Happy reading!

12:00 Registration

1:00 Welcome

1:05-2:15 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 of Art and Design)
Will Cobbing (Wimbledon College of Art)
Joanne Morra (School of Art, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design)
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)

4:15-4:45 Break

4:45-6:30 Session 3
Gary Hall (Media and Performing Arts, Coventry University)
Esther Leslie (Political Aesthetics, Birkbeck, 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 (Aesthetics/Urban 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)

4:00-4:30 Break

4:30-5:45 Session 7
Lisa Cartwright (Communication, UC, San Diego) and Marita Sturken (Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University)

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
Joanna Zylinska (Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, 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)
Laura Mulvey (Screen Media, Birkbeck, University of 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

Visual Culture Studies in Europe will host a conference in late 2009. Details forthcoming.

Participants:
Joachin Barriendos, Curator, Santa Monica Art Centre, Barcelona, Spain
Professor Jose Luis Brea, Editor of Estudios Visuales, Madrid, Spain
Professor Iain Chambers, University of Naples, Italy
Professor Anna Maria Guasch, University of Barcelona, Spain
Professor Oliver Grau, Danube University Krems, Austria
Dr Joanne Morra, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, England
Dr Almira Ousmanova, European Humanities University Belarus/Lithuania
Kresimir Purgar, Center for Visual Studies Zagreb, Croatia
Dr Vivian Rehberg, Parsons Paris School of Art + Design, France
Dr Marquard Smith, University of Westminster, England
Dr Oyvind Vagnes, University of Bergen, Norway
Dr Nina Lager Vestberg, Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim, Norway