Programme

Abstracts (Keynote speakers)

Abstracts (other speakers)

Conference

University of Edinburgh, 17-20 September 2003

Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, The University of Edinburgh
Arts and Humanities Research Institute, University of Glasgow
Edinburgh College of Art

Conference Proceedings

Institute Homepage

This interdisciplinary conference will investigate the role of visual technologies in informing, shaping and creating knowledge. Its overarching aim is to investigate the claims of scholars such as Barbara Stafford, Martin Jay, and Timothy Binkley that our own culture is currently, in the wake of the electronic revolution, undergoing a shift in which the visual medium, traditionally playing a secondary role as the illustration of text, is becoming the dominant medium of thought.

The conference will project forward by casting backwards in time to survey the role of successive new technologies of vision in generating new cultures of knowledge, perception, and experience. From the seventeenth-century invention of the telescope and the microscope, and the progressive elaboration of spatial representation in photography, cinema, the x-ray, scanning technologies and the interactive computer screen, the conference addresses the broad role of technologies of the visible in culture.

Conference sessions will include both historical and thematic panels (see below). All will be asked to reflect on the relationship of their topic to the emerging history of the new media and its cultural consequences.

Plenary speakers will include:

John Bender (Director, Stanford Humanities Center)
Tony Bennett (Director, Pavis Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Open University)
Jonathan Crary (Professor, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University)
Simon During (Robert Wallace Professor of English,University of Melbourne)
John Gillies (Professor, Department of Literature, University of Essex)
Martin Kemp (Professor of the History of Art, University of Oxford)
Celia Lury (Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London)
Michael Marrinan (Associate Professor of Art and Art History, Stanford University)
Joel Snyder (Professor of Art History, University of Chicago)
Mark Wigley (Professor of Architecture, Columbia University)

Conference Sessions:

• Diagrams and Visual Communication
  
• Microscopes and Macroscopes
• Cultures of Mapping
• Visual Geographies
• Visual Technology and Artistic Practice
• The Camera's Eye
• Architecture and Urban Planning in the Digital Age
• Vision and Illusion
• Medicine and Technologies of Viewing
  
• A Social History of Viewing
  
• Exhibition and Display
• Image and Text in the New Media: Thinking on Screen
• Cultures of Virtual Interaction
• Logo and Brand: Advertising and Global Space
• Visual Pedagogies
  

Further information from:
Professor John Frow
Director
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
The University of Edinburgh
Hope Park Square
Edinburgh, EH8 9NW
Email: iash@ed.ac.uk

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