Wednesday 8th February, 4 – 6pm
Westminster Forum, University of Westminster, 5^th Floor, Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

PROPAGANDA ON THE SOCIALIST PERIPHERY
Power, reform and identity in Soviet Uzbek posters
Dr Elizabeth Waters, University of Westminster

Recent work on Soviet propaganda has looked both at the techniques used to convey political messages and the extent to which the USSR succeeded in controlling information and public opinion. Scholarship on Central Asia has examined the power of peripheral elites to influence centrally generated plans and of populations to resist communist change. Disagreement continues over whether the ‘Soviet project’ in the region was one of affirmative action or of colonial intent. This seminar looks at these issues in relation to Uzbekistan in the early decades of Soviet power and assesses the evidence on the character and impact of social, economic and political reforms that is provided by posters used in campaigns to promote women’s emancipation, cotton production and Uzbek identity.

Elizabeth Waters is Principal Lecturer in the Department of Modern and Applied Languages at the University of Westminster. Most of her previous research has been on Soviet social history in the 1920s. Recently she participated in a study of alcohol consumption in Kazakhstan. This seminar represents work-in-progress on her new project on Uzbek Soviet propaganda.

Hosted by the Contemporary China Centre. All welcome, but non-University of Westminster attendees please register at: d.hird@westminster.ac.uk

Following the event, a report entitled ‘Situating Korean Fine Art Practice in a Western Context’ written by Dr John Cussans came to our attention. It is attached here, many thanks to John for making it available, and our apologies for the delay in posting it:

SITUATING KOREAN FINE ART

We are pleased to report that the winner of the first Blip Prize for Creative Technologies was announced last night. The prize is awarded, courtesy of Blip Creative, to the best student project design for the IMCC’s new public display screen at Wells Street. The 2011 winner was Sophie Meter for her beautiful butterfly animation. Runners up were Kristian Agustin, Eleni Tziourtzia, David Itzcovitz and Yen Ooi. The winning videos can be seen (when opened in firefox) at http://www.blipcreative.com/blog.html Or, of course, you can check them out live on the corner of Wells Street and Booths Place.

The Blip Prize is the latest stage in the IMCC’s development of exciting content for the extraordinary state-of-the-art wall-hanging LED installation that is our contribution to The International Distributed Display Initiative, and which is part of the Institute’s New Media Theory research project, coordinated by Peter Cornwell at Blip with Alison Craighead and David Cunningham at the IMCC. Using an interface that has been designed such that no prior programming skills are assumed, staff and students will be making work for this experimental new media laboratory that will allow them to explore in hands-on fashion what it means to translate, phenomenalize, or even perform media-theoretical issues as, and in, new media.

Watch this space!

UPDATE: Video of the awards ceremony courtesy of David Itzcovitz:

‘New Ways of Working with Image’ Seminar and Workshop
Wednesday 14 September 2011, 11.00am – 4.30pm
Room 257, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

Update: Schedule Announced:
11.00 welcome and introductions (RS257)
11.15 opening panel (Jesse Ash, Andrew Fisher, Elena Gualtieri, Nigel Mapp)
12.30 lunch
13.30 workgroups (chairs)
Image and Performance (Marquard Smith)
Imagescapes (David Cunningham)
Imaginary Image (Jarkko Toikkanen)
Remediating Image (Lise Mortensen)
15.00 coffee
15.30 closing discussion 

How do we understand ‘image’ today, and how has our notion of the image changed over time? What is the status of the image in current theory, and how does the study of image translate into visual culture? In which ways do words and verbal communication relate to or conflict with images? Do we work differently with images today, compared to the practices of previous generations? And if we do, why? Questions such as these underlie the Institute’s autumn Workshop which focuses on a practical, hands-on angle approach to working with image today.

Participants in this experiment are invited to discuss what they understand by the notion of ‘image’ and which methods they have chosen to work with it. Instead of discussing general themes and motifs without knowledge of each other’s premises, talking about what one does, and how one does it, reduces the chance of conceptual miscommunication and provides the opportunity for learning from new viewpoints. Interested academics, scholars and postgraduate students in particular are all invited to attend!

The format of the day will be an interactive opening panel of invited speakers from art history, photographic theory, visual culture, philosophy and literary studies reflecting on their own approaches to the image in both disciplinary and transdisciplinary terms, followed by smaller group workshop sessions open to signed-up members of the audience, and concluding with general discussion. Individual workshop themes will include: (1) Image and Performance: on the nature and role of images in and as performance; (2) Imagescapes: what kinds of scenes and spaces images form and come to interact in; (3) Imaginary Image: how images condition and affect the reading experience; (4) Remediating Image: the slide and change of images between different semiotic modes.

Confirmed panel participants and workshop chairs include: David Cunningham (IMCC, Westminster), Andrew Fisher (Visual Culture, Goldsmiths College), Elena Gualtieri (Centre for Visual Fields, Sussex), Nigel Mapp (English Literature, Westminster), Lise Majgaard Mortensen (Aarhus University/IMCC), Marquard Smith (IMCC, Westminster), Jarkko Toikkanen (University of Tampere/IMCC).

This workshop is free and convened by our Visiting Research Fellows in the Institute, Lise Majgaard Mortensen and Jarkko Toikkanen. For further information or to reserve a place (numbers are strictly limited!), please email Jarkko at: Jarkko.Toikkanen@uta.fi

Contemporary Vernacular Photographies
Saturday 3rd September 2011, 9.30 – 5.00
Portland Hall, University of Westminster, 101 New Cavendish Street, London W1W

The term ‘vernacular photography’ has been used to describe a type of imagery that has been produced by a non-professional for private purposes, and can also refer to photographs of vernacular practices that have been sanctioned by state mechanisms. In these contexts, this symposium will specifically address the political, cultural, and aesthetic ramifications of the relationship between private images and their migration to the public realm in the era of digitisation.

The day-long symposium will examine ways in which contemporary practices might contest traditional definitions of vernacular photography today, and topics for discussion will include: authenticity in light of citizenship journalism; personal images on shared online platforms; the ethics of family imagery in the media; oral history and the family album; and the problematic ubiquity of digital media and computing.

Speakers: Dr Sophie Beard (UCA); Dr Sarah Kember (Goldsmiths); Trish Morrissey (Photographer); Dr Annebella Pollen (University of Brighton); Prof Gillian Rose (The Open University); and Prof Julian Stallabrass (The Courtauld Institute of Art).

Click the red links for abstracts and timetable.

Tickets are free for University of Westminster staff and students in English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, but numbers are limited so please book a place by email from Sas Mays: s.mays@westminster.ac.uk Other interested parties should book tickets online through The Photographers’ Gallery.

Co-Organised by Sas Mays (IMCC), in association with Johanna Empson and Karen McQuaid at The Photographer’s Gallery.

Our friends in University of Westminster’s Contemporary China Centre present:

Through Time and Space with Chairman Mao:? The Afterlife and Global Impact of the Great Helmsman
A panel discussion with Pankaj Mishra and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, chaired by Harriet Evans
Monday, July 4, 2011, 5.00 p.m. – 6.30 p.m.
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

How is Mao thought about in contemporary China and in other parts of Asia? In what ways have debates about his legacy and posthumous uses of his image paralleled or diverged from those of other larger-than-life figures associated with independence movements from Nehru to Nasser and from Ho to Che? What should we make of the “red song” movement sweeping through the PRC, which can be treated as fueled by nostalgic yearning or attributed to political manoeuvring?

Pankaj Mishra is the author of The Romantics: A Novel, which won the LA Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, and Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond. His new book The Rise of Asia and the Remaking of the Modern World will be published next year.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Professor of History and Chair of the Department at UC Irvine, where he also serves as the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. His books include Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China (1991), China’s Brave New World (2007), Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 (2009), and China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (2011). He is a co-founder of the “China Beat” blog/electronic magazine.

Harriet Evans is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, and Director of the Contemporary China Centre, University of Westminster, and is curator of the exhibition ‘Poster Power: Images from Mao’s China, Then and Now.’

Contemporary China Centre
www.westminster.ac.uk/schools/humanities/research/asian-studies

For enquiries about the Contemporary China Centre, please contact
Professor Harriet Evans: evansh@westminster.ac.uk

‘New Ways of Working with Image’ Seminar and Workshop
Wednesday 14 September 2011
University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London

How do we understand ‘image’ today, and how has our notion of the image changed over time? What is the status of the image in current theory, and how does the study of image translate into visual culture? In which ways do words and verbal communication relate to or conflict with images? Do we work differently with images today, compared to the practices of previous generations? And if we do, why? Questions such as these underlie the Institute’s autumn Workshop which focuses on a practical, hands-on angle approach to working with image today.

Participants in this experiment are invited to discuss what they understand by the notion of ‘image’ and which methods they have chosen to work with it. Instead of discussing general themes and motifs without knowledge of each other’s premises, talking about what one does, and how one does it, reduces the chance of conceptual miscommunication and provides the opportunity for learning from new viewpoints. Interested academics, scholars and postgraduate students are all invited to attend.

The format of the day will be an interactive opening panel of invited speakers from art history, photographic theory, visual culture, philosophy and literary studies reflecting on their own approaches to the image in both disciplinary and transdisciplinary terms, followed by smaller group workshop sessions open to signed-up members of the audience, and concluding with general discussion. Individual workshop themes will include: (1) Image and Performance: on the nature and role of images in and as performance; (2) Imagescapes: what kinds of scenes and spaces images form and come to interact in; (3) Imaginary Image: how images condition and affect the reading experience; (4) Remediating Image: the slide and change of images between different semiotic modes.

Confirmed panel participants and workshop chairs include: David Cunningham (IMCC, Westminster), Mick Finch (Fine Art, Central Saint Martins), Andrew Fisher (Visual Culture, Goldsmiths College), Elena Gualtieri (Centre for Visual Fields, Sussex), Nigel Mapp (English Literature, Westminster), Lise Majgaard Mortensen (Aarhus University/IMCC), Luke Skrebowski (History of Art, Cambridge), Marquard Smith (IMCC, Westminster), Jarkko Toikanen (Tampere University/IMCC)

This workshop is convened by our Visiting Research Fellows in the Institute, Lise Majgaard Mortensen and Jarkko Toikkanen. For further information or to reserve a place (numbers are strictly limited!), please email Jarkko at: Jarkko.Toikkanen@uta.fi

Any local flâneurs passing recently by the IMCC’s Wells Street base may have noticed the legend ‘All That Is Solid Melts Into Air’ beaming out of our side window. We can no longer keep it a secret! The IMCC is delighted to announce the installation of the Institute’s very own public display screen, provided courtesy of our friends and collaborators at Blip Creative, which will, once fully operational, be streaming a changing array of staff and student work at our site.

The state-of-the-art wall-hanging LED installation is our contribution to The International Distributed Display Initiative, which currently links together screens at Westminster, Central Saint Martins and Princeton, and is part of the Institute’s New Media Theory research project, coordinated by Peter Cornwell at Blip with Alison Craighead and David Cunningham at the IMCC. Using an interface that has been designed such that no prior programming skills are assumed, staff and students will be making work for this experimental new media laboratory that will allow them to explore in hands-on fashion what it means to translate, phenomenalize, or even perform media-theoretical issues as, and in, new media. When fully operational, the screen will then be part of a permanent internet link between installations at various international sites, allowing each collaborating institution to load and display and, using a webcam, observe content at the sites of the other organizations.

We will be staging an official launch soon, as well as announcing further details of staff and student artworks and curated exhibitions for the screen. Long live the Democratic Billboard! Watch this space …

Cloning Tom: An Audience with W.J.T. Mitchell
Monday 13^th June 2011, 2:00-6:00pm , 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster

To celebrate the publication of Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (University of Chicago Press), the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture is thrilled to host an audience with Professor W. J.T. Mitchell. Mitchell will deliver a presentation entitled ‘The Historical Uncanny:  Phantoms, Doubles, and Repetition in the War on Terror’. His presentation will be followed by a Roundtable with contributors including Maxime Boidy (Strasbourg), Abdelwahab El-Affendi (Westminster), Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths), and Mitchell himself. The event will be chaired by Dr Marquard Smith (Westminster).

The event is FREE but booking is essential so please RSVP to Sharon Sinclair: sinclas@wmin.ac.uk

Professor W. J. T. Mitchell is Editor of Critical Inquiry and the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Art History, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of seminal books including What Do Pictures Want? and Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, and editor of collections such as Against Theory, Landscape and Power, On Narrative, and Picture Theory.

Maxime Boidy is the French translator of W.J.T. Mitchell’s Cloning Terror (with S. Roth) and has also translated books by Susan Buck-Morss and Mike Davis, as well as Mitchell’s Iconography. He is a doctorial candidate in the Laboratoire Cultures et Sociétés en Europe at Université de Strasbourg.

Dr Abdelwahab El-Affendi is Reader in Politics at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster and co-ordinator of the Centre’s Democracy and Islam Programme. He is also currently an ESRC/AHRC Fellow in the Global Uncertainties Programme working on a project entitled ‘Narratives of Insecurity, Democratization and the Justification of (Mass) Violence.’ Dr El-Affendi is author of books including About Muhammad: The Other Western Perspective on the Prophet of Islam, The Conquest of Muslim Hearts and Minds, For a State of Peace: Conflict and the Future of Democracy in Sudan, Rethinking Islam and Modernity, and Who Needs an Islamic State?

Dr Marquard Smith is Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture.

Dr Eyal Weizman is Director of the Centre of Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. His work includes buildings and stage sets in Israel/Palestine and Europe. Weizman works with a variety of NGOs and Human right groups in Israel/Palestine. He co-curated the exhibition A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, and co-edited the publication of the same title. These projects were based on his human-rights research, and were banned by the Israeli Association of Architects. They were later shown in the exhibition Territories in New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Malmoe, Tel Aviv and Ramallah. His books include Lesser Evils, Hollow Land, A Civilian Occupation, and the series Territories 1,2 and 3.

Wednesday 11th May 2011, 6:30-8:30 p.m
309 Regent Street Gallery, University of Westminster, London

You are invited to the Private View of:
‘Poster Power: Images from Mao’s China, Then and Now’

Exhibition continues 12th May – 14th July

Invitation to the Private View attached. Further information here.

Posters from Mao’s China exercise an enduring appeal to audiences across the globe, more than sixty years after the events that produced them. They are revisited in modern and contemporary Chinese art and commercial design, and curated in exhibitions in China, the US and Europe.

So why does imagery produced to support a revolutionary ideology half a century ago continue to resonate with current Chinese and Western audiences? What is the China we see between posters of the Mao years and their contemporary consumerist reinventions? How do we explain the diverse responses such imagery evokes? And what does the appeal of the posters of Mao’s China tell us about the country’s ‘red legacy’?

Poster Power explores some of these questions through setting up a visual dialogue between posters produced during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and their echoes in recent years. With posters from the University of Westminster’s Chinese Poster Collection, Chinese video art, documentary film, photographs, and contemporary items such as playing cards, nightclub advertising and tourist travel publicity, the exhibition invites viewers to explore the posters’ ambiguities of appeal to their audiences. As visual reminders of both autocratic rule and exuberant youthful idealism, they evoke diverse responses, challenging the idea that Cultural Revolution poster propaganda transmitted a single, transparent meaning. These posters’ capacity to inspire ambiguous responses opens up new narratives of what remains a complex period of China’s recent past, and sheds light on its changing significance in contemporary China.

Please do come along. And bring a friend. Or two.

Visualizing Europe
The Geopolitical and Intercultural Boundaries of Visual Culture
Second Conference of Visual Culture in Europe
University of Barcelona, April 11-12 2011

Following its successful launch at the Institute, with a conference at Westminster in February last year, the 2nd Conference of Visual Culture in Europe will be hosted by our partners at the University of Barcelona, Spain on April 11-12, 2011. The conference elaborates on the interplay between the geopolitical designs of the European Union and transnational visual cultures in the region. Taking as a point of departure the strategic expansion and uneven porosity of Europe’s political and cultural boundaries, this conference will explore the role that visuality has played in the process of reinvention and postcolonial relocation of the cultural image of the EU.
 
Further details and programme here.

Hosted by the Institute, Tom Mitchell will be at the University of Westminster on the afternoon of 13th June, with a number of shiny interlocutors, to discuss his new book Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. Watch this space for further details.

From The University of Chicago Press website: The  phrase “War on Terror” has quietly been retired from official usage, but it persists in the American psyche, and our understanding of it is hardly complete. Nor will it be, W. J. T Mitchell argues, without a grasp of the images that it spawned, and that spawned it. Exploring the role of verbal and visual images in the War on Terror, Mitchell finds a conflict whose shaky metaphoric and imaginary conception has created its own reality. At the same time, Mitchell locates in the concept of clones and cloning an anxiety about new forms of image-making that has amplified the political effects of the War on Terror. Cloning and terror, he argues, share an uncanny structural resemblance, shuttling back and forth between imaginary and real, metaphoric and literal manifestations. In Mitchell’s startling analysis, cloning terror emerges as the inevitable metaphor for the way in which the War on Terror has not only helped recruit more fighters to the jihadist cause but undermined the American constitution with “faith-based” foreign and domestic policies.

Bringing together the hooded prisoners of Abu Ghraib with the cloned stormtroopers of the Star Wars saga, Mitchell draws attention to the figures of faceless anonymity that stalk the ever-shifting and unlocatable “fronts” of the War on Terror. A striking new investigation of the role of images from our foremost scholar of iconology, Cloning Terror will expand our understanding of the visual legacy of a new kind of war and reframe our understanding of contemporary biopower and biopolitics.

W. J. T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America. His publications include: “The Pictorial Turn,” Artforum, March 1992; “What Do Pictures Want?” October, Summer 1996; What Do Pictures Want? (2005); The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (1998); Picture Theory (1994); Art and the Public Sphere (1993); Landscape and Power (1992); Iconology (1987); The Language of Images (1980); On Narrative(1981); and The Politics of Interpretation (1984).

Thomson and Craighead’s A short film about War has been nominated for the Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films 2011 at the Rotterdam Film Festival.  Screenings take place on Saturday 29th and Sunday 30th January, with the award ceremony happening at 10pm on Monday 31st at the VPRO Late Night Talk Show. More info on the festival here

In other news: Thomson and Craighead will be showing their recent work, The Time Machine in alphabetical order, from 2nd – 13th February as part of Several Interruptions, a sequence of exhibitions celebrating 15 Years of the Slade Centre for Electronic Media in Fine Art to be held at the North Lodge, Gower Street. They’ll also be contributing to Cloud Sounds at the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam, where they will be re-staging their installation, Unprepared Piano, 19th February – 29th April 2011.

Wednesday 15 December 2010, 4-6pm
Room 350, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Paul Gladston (University of Nottingham)
‘Towards a Polylogue of Western and Chinese Contemporary Art Criticism’

Organised by our friends in the Contemporary China Centre.

Paul Gladston is Associate Professor of Critical Theory and Visual Culture in the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham. He has written extensively on the subject of contemporary Chinese art and contemporary Chinese art criticism for numerous magazines and journals, and recent publications include the monograph Art History after Deconstruction (Magnolia, 2005) and an edited collection of essays China and Other Spaces (CCCP, 2009). He is currently preparing a monograph on the theory and practice of contemporary Chinese art for Reaktion and, in collaboration with Katie Hill, a guest edited edition of the journal Contemporary Art Practice with the theme ‘Contemporary Chinese Art and Criticality’.

At the end of the 2010 Visual Culture Studies Conference hosted by the IMCC in May, 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.

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

To explore the possible activities of the Association, another forum asks:
What will the Association do?
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.

For the interest, entertainment, and amusement of IMCC-types: A new publication of visual and material culture, a newspaper called Paperweight, has been launched in the last week.

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.

IMAGE=GESTURE
The 2011 Nomadikon Conference
Bergen, November 9-11, 2011

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

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

In the interests of Open Access, we are very pleased to attach Visual Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers (Sage, 2008), a PDF of the IMCC Director Marq Smith’s book of interviews with Mieke Bal, Giuliana Bruno, Mark Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, Susan Buck-Morss, Lisa Cartwright, Lennard J. Davis, Hal Foster, Paul Gilroy, Martin Jay, Nicholas Mirzoeff, W.J.T. Mitchell, Peggy Phelan, and Vivian Sobchack. Enjoy, and feel free to circulate.

Limited places still available! To book email info@instituteformodern.co.uk or download the booking form here

FREE content: Entire Obama Issue of ‘Journal of Visual Culture’, including contributions by Dora Apel, Lauren Berlant, Lisa Cartwright, Anna Everett, Raimi Gbadamosi, Curtis Marez, Nicholas Mirzoeff, W.J.T. Mitchell, Shawn Michelle Smith, Gayatri Spivak, Julian Stallabrass, Marita Sturken, and many, many more.

To access go to:
http://vcu.sagepub.com/current.dtl

Click on link by each article marked ‘PDF’.

Download, read, enjoy, circulate.