Visual Knowledges

Conference 17-20 September 2003

Co-organisers:

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

This interdisciplinary conference investigated the role of visual technologies in informing, shaping and creating knowledge. Its overarching aim was 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 projected 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 Proceedings

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

Conference Programme, including links to full papers where available.

Jump to: Thursday, Friday, Saturday

Thursday, 18 September 2003

9 a.m.	SESSION 1: PLENARY SESSION Jonathan Crary: Vision between Spectacle and Community	Playfair Library Chair: John Frow
10.30 a.m.	Coffee	Raeburn Room
11 a.m.	SESSION 2
	Diagrams and visual communication Christelle Rabier: Constructing the Surgical Gaze: Visual knowledge in operative surgery (1760-1830) Bronwen Wilson: Learning How to Read: Print, physiognomy, and recognition at the end of the Renaissance	Moot Court Room
	Microscopes and Macroscopes Angela Fischel: Microscopic evidence: prints and the reproduction of knowledge in early Microscopy Jennifer Downes: The astronomer as artist: Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687) and the problem of accurate representation in seventeenth-century telescopic astronomy Janet Vertesi: Picturing the Moon: Hevelius’ and Riccioli’s Visual Debate	Lecture Theatre 183
	Cultures of Mapping Kathryn Yusoff: The visual mapping of Antarctica as a place in time; from the geological sublime to ‘real time’ John Crowley: The Creation of a Global Landscape in British Visual Culture c. 1750-1820	Lorimer Room
	Visual technology and artistic practice Lyle Massey: Corpus Anamorphosis: The Embodied Space of Renaissance Perspective Francis Halsall: The Limits to Art History’s Perspective	Lecture Theatre 175 Chair: Genevieve Warwick
	Vision and Illusion Frances Robertson: Vision and Illusion: Photography, the moon landscape and SFX model-making Vinzenz Hediger: Extending the Realm of the Visible into Prehistoric Times: Natural History and Animal Visibility in the Age of Digital Imaging Technologies	Lecture Theatre 270
	Exhibition and display Jill Fernie-Clarke: Hierarchy and Display in Painting and Print: Exhibiting Images of the Lower Orders in Late Eighteenth-Century London Judith Green: Exhibiting Imperial Knowledges: Curious Specimens of China in the 1870s	Playfair Library Chair: Stacy Boldrick
12.30 p.m.	Lunch	Talbot Rice Gallery
1.45 p.m.	SESSION 3
	Visual geographies Joyce Hsiu-yen Yeh: Visualizing Englishness through the Taiwanese Camera’s Eye Michael Pesek: The boma and the peripatetic ruler. Mapping colonial rule in German East Africa, 1889-1903	Playfair Library
	The camera’s eye Andrea Nelson: Reading Montage: German and American Photo-Books and the Construction of Historical Memory Bernhard Malkmus: Photography as suspension of oblivion in the work of W.G. Sebald Angi Buettner: Haunted Images: The Aesthetics of Catastrophe in a post-Holocaust World	Lecture Theatre 183
	Medicine and technologies of viewing Katherine Boulay: Perfecting the Match: The Visual Economy of the Fertility Industry Jennifer Shaw: Alien Life: Ultrasound as Extension of and Challenge to the Medical Gaze Shannon Lowe: Neurotracing the Brainchild	Lorimer Room
	A social history of viewing Chair: John Frow Richard Rushton: Mosaic time of the image Cheryce Kramer Tight Sight – Liberal Arts in the Service of the Visual Content Industry René Bruckner: Bergson’s Duration and the Disappearance of Ordinary Thought	Lecture Theatre 270 Chair: John Frow
	Image and text in the new media: thinking on screen Janet Harbord: Diffusion and its discontents: the computer/cinema interface Orit Halpern and Tal Halpern: Dreams for Our Perceptual Present: Archives, Interfaces, and Networks in Cybernetics	Moot Court Room
	Visual Pedagogies Judith de Luce: Digital Technology and Seeing the Ancient World Better Laura Mandell: Critical Mapping, or Spreading out: Meeting the Country House, the Author, and Postmodernity in the MOO Carlos Monroy, Richard Furuta, Eduardo Urbina and Enrique Mallen: Texts, Images, Knowledge: Visualizing Cervantes and Picasso	Lecture Theatre 175
3.15 p.m.	Tea	Raeburn Room
3.45 p.m.	SESSION 4
	Diagrams and visual communication Mary Greig: The Aberdeen Beastiary, Television Soapies and God’s Imaginary Chris Werry: Ocularcentrism, Inscription & the Figure of the Computer in Cognitive Theories of Language	Moot Court Room
	Visual technology and artistic practice Karl Hansson: The Figural and the Moving Image – Jean Epstein vs. Bill Viola David Lomas: “Modest ‘Recording Instruments'”: Science, Surrealism and the Medium of Visuality	Lecture Theatre 270
	The Camera’s Eye Sudeshna Guha: The Camera and the Spade: Photography in the making of archaeological knowledge. Guha Images (separate pdf) Paula Summerly: Anonymising the Patient: Clinical Photography in the late Nineteenth Century Josh Ellenbogen: Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: Alphonse Bertillon at the Paris Prefecture of Police	Lorimer Room
	Vision and Illusion Koen Vermeir: The Magic of the Magic Lantern Uta Kornmeier: ‘Embedded’ in the French Revolution – Waxworks as reality reports around 1800	Lecture Theatre 175
	Exhibition and display Cinzia Sicca: “A Warehouse filled with statuary that sent its goods principally to the English and American markets” (J.F. Cooper 1838). The Micali emporium in Leghorn, 1760-1868 Julia Noordegraaf: The Emergence of the Museum in the ‘Spectacular’ Nineteenth Century	Lecture Theatre 183 Chair: Genevieve Warwick
5.15 p.m.	Video Screening: “Standards (A Salute to the 20th Century)”Luis Valdovino	Lecture Theatre 183
6.00 p.m.	Conclusion
6.30 p.m.	Buffet Supper	Raeburn Room
8.00 p.m.	SESSION 5: CONCURRENT PLENARY SESSIONS:
	Martin Kemp: Modelling Set-Ups in Paintings: the cases of Campin and Caravaggio	Playfair Library Chair: Genevieve Warwick
	John Gillies: “Our vacant room”, body and space in the early modern world picture	Lecture Theatre 175 Chair: John Frow
9.30 p.m.	Conclusion

Friday, 19 September 2003

SESSION 6
Microscopes and macroscopes Jutta Schickore: Investigating vision: Thomas Young, Michael Faraday, and David Brewster on microscopical deceptions Ohad Parnes: The appropriation of the microscopical	Playfair Library Chair: Genevieve Warwick
Visual geographies Beatrice Kümin: From Expedition Drawing to Ethnographic Photography: The Portraits of Brazilian Indians in the 19th Century Daniela Bleichmar: Viewing as possessing: the visual culture of natural history and the locality of colonial science, 1750-1800	Lecture Theatre 183 Chair: Mark Dorrian
The camera’s eye – Chair: John Frow Barbie Zelizer: Journalism and the Voice of the Visual Pia Sivenius: Photography and Psychoanalytic Knowledge	Lorimer Room
A social history of viewing Haidee Wasson: Moving Images, Film Libraries, and the Cosmopolitan Home – 16mm in the 1920s Niamh McCole: The Cinematographe in Rural Ireland 1896-1905 David Hulks: Impermanence and Ephemerality: artistic and critical responses to the emergence of the Electronic Age	Lecture Theatre 270
Architecture and urban planning in the digital age Yannis Zavoleas: New Technologies and Identity: new modes of representation in cyberspace Zavoleas images Joanna Weddell: Cybervisuality and Architecture Jennifer Gabrys: Cité Multimédia: Noise and Contamination in the Information City	Lecture Theatre 175
Visual pedagogies Peter McKinney: The visual text. The experiences of collaborative creation of hypertext fiction John Bonnett: Changing the Aesthetics of History: The 3D Virtual Buildings Project	Moot Court Room
Coffee	Raeburn Room
SESSION 7
Diagrams and visual communication Elaine Yakura: Visual Presentations as Feature in Information Technology Consulting	Lorimer Room
Visual technology and artistic practice Ted Wayland: Turntablism Miriam van Rijsingen: LabWork: artistic in-sights in medical and microbiological visualisation technologies Rijsingen images Gerhard Lang: How do discoverers discover?	Lecture Theatre 270
Medicine and technologies of viewing Heather Delday: Genescapes: visualization and value finding Meegan Kennedy: The Magic of Figures: Visual Narratives in the Nineteenth-century Case History	Moot Court RoomChair: Mark Dorrian
Exhibition and display – Chair: Andrew Patrizio Samuel Alberti: Viewing pathology in nineteenth-century medical museums Elizabeth Carlson: Luminous Labyrinths: Mirrored Palaces at the 1900 Paris Exposition	Playfair LibraryChair: Andrew Patrizio
Cultures of virtual interaction Stephanie Polsky: Previewing Digital Visual Knowledge Greg Elmer: Profiling Machines Michele White: Screen Differences by Design: Rendering Liveness, Presence, and Lived Space through the Internet, Webcams, and Television	Lecture Theatre 183
Visual Pedagogies Lindsay Fitzclarence: Dirty Dancing meets Watson’s and Crick’s theory of DNA: The use of rock musical presentations to promote science and technology in schools Yvonne Eriksson: The use of pictures in teaching and its relation to scientific illustrations Maria Teresa di Palma: Vision: Illusion vs Knowledge. Geographical teaching and movies: a new approach	Lecture Theatre 175
Lunch	Talbot Rice Gallery
SESSION 8
Microscopes and macroscopes Mieneke te Hennepe: A view inside the skin: Microscopy and the illustration of diseased skin Roberta McGrath: Looking for Life: Microscopy and Modernity	Lecture Theatre 175
The camera’s eye Jeffrey Bleam: Performing Technology: Photography and the Actor’s Body in Nineteenth Century France Rolf Nohr: Picture-it!: “One dime – one minute – one picture” Damian Sutton: Rustling Leaves and Blimp-shots: CGI, Lumières, and perception after photography	Lecture Theatre 183Chair: Mark Dorrian
Image and text in the new media: thinking on screen Susan Currell: Screening Words: Rapid Reading and Visual Knowledge in America from 1879 to 1940 Charles R. Acland: The Swift View: Tachistoscopes and the Residual Modern	Lecture Theatre 270
Logo and brand: advertising and global space Andreas Kitzmann: The Creativity Age: thinking differently in the Age of Networked Capitalism Ella Chmielewska: ‘Logos’ or the Resonance of Branding: close reading of the visual landscape of Warsaw	Lorimer Room
Tea	Raeburn Room
SESSION 9: CONCURRENT PLENARY SESSIONS:
Mark Wigley: Back to Black: Color in the Age of Digital Architecture	Lecture Theatre 175Chair: Stephen Cairns
Simon During: Miltonic shows: literature, magic and the origins of modern spectacle	Playfair LibraryChair: Genevieve Warwick
Conclusion
Conference Dinner – admission by ticket only	George Heriot’s School, Lauriston Place

Saturday, 20 September 2003

SESSION 10
Diagrams and visual communication Alex Purves: Re-viewing the Muse: Cartography and Visual Enquiry in Early Greek Thought Janina Wellmann: On the pictorial origins of modern biology: Pictorial instructions and developmental thinking	Lorimer Room
The camera’s eye Susanne Ramsenthaler: Playing at Distance: Photographic Perception and the Aspect of Touch Joy James: Becoming photographs: imag(in)ing selves Kelley Wilder: Seeing the Negative	Lecture Theatre 183Chair: Mark Dorrian
Vision and illusion Joseph Wachelder: The origins of rhythm in visual aesthetics Sudeep Dasgupta: Between the Retina and the Body: Regimes of Visuality and the Truths of Modernity Rob Shields: Perspective, Remembrance and Techniques of the Virtual	Lecture Theatre 270
A social history of viewing Phillippa Plock: Regarding painting through the eyes of a woman. A social technology of gendered viewing in seventeenth-century Rome Amanda Macdonald: The character of bande dessinée’s historical knowledge: technological lag and epistemological anticipation Michèle Martin: When the illustrated press was a new media: Confrontation between image and text	Moot Court Room
Exhibition and display – Chair: Andrew Patrizio Susan Hazan: The Musesphere and the E-Museum	Lecture Theatre 175Chair: Andrew Patrizio
Coffee	Moot Court Room
SESSION 11: CONCLUDING SESSION Celia Lury: The brand as a new media object Tony Bennett: Slow modernism: seeing, evolution and the constitution of society	Lecture Theatre 175Chair: John Frow
Buffet Lunch	Talbot Rice Gallery

Abstracts of Keynote Speakers’ Papers

VISUAL KNOWLEDGES CONFERENCE

Abstracts of Papers by speakers in parallel sessions

VISUAL KNOWLEDGES CONFERENCE2