For our Dutch friends: Director of the IMCC, Marq Smith, is contributing to Epistemic Encounters, on the future of the Graduate Art School, at MaHKU (The Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design) this Friday 11 December, as part of an ongoing research project exploring the specificity of artistic knowledge production in the context of exhibition making, art in public space projects, and the significance of research-based practices for the (reformulation of the) curriculum in the current art academy. Why not join him…

Further details here.

Journal of Visual Culture has launched its new WordPress site. Please go to http://www.journalofvisualculture.org/ for details of recent/forthcoming issues such as its current ‘Questionnaire on Barack Obama’, free content, and information on related projects, conferences, and events. Join jvc on Facebook, etc.

Start date: 27 May 2010 12.00pm
End date: 29 May 2010 4.00pm  
Hosts: University of Westminster
(organised by NYU, University of the Arts London, and University of Westminster)
Cost: £50/£25 concs.
Download a booking form here 

Confirmed contributors: Glen Adamson (RCA/V&A); Dipti Bhagat (London Met); Lisa Cartwright (UC, San Diego); Sarah Chaplin (Greenwich); Will Cobbing (Wimbledon College of Art); David Cunningham (Westminster); Mark Dunhill (Central Saint Martins); Esther Gabara (Duke); Elizabeth Guffey (SUNY, Purchase); Raiford Guins (SUNY, Stony Brook); Gary Hall (Coventry); Michael Ann Holly (The Clark Institute); Guy Julier (Leeds Met); Esther Leslie (Birkbeck); Stephen Melville (Ohio State); Nicholas Mirzoeff (NYU); W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago); Joanne Morra (Central Saint Martins); Keith Moxey (Columbia); Laura Mulvey (Birkbeck); Griselda Pollock (Leeds); Adrian Rifkin (Goldsmiths); Joy Sleeman (Slade); Marquard Smith (Westminster); Penny Spark (Kingston); Marita Sturken (NYU); Divya P. Tolia-Kelly (Durham); Victoria Walsh (Tate Britain); Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths) 

Friday 5 February 2010, 10am
Room 2.05c, 4-12 Little Titchfield Street, University of Westminster, London W1W 7UW
Cost: £20/£10 concs.
Download a booking form here

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

This conference is a collaboration between established and emerging scholars, curators, educators, and editors from across a number of European universities and cultural institutions with a commitment to Visual Culture Studies in Europe, and the study of visual culture. The event aims to:

•  Track the ongoing, uneven emergence in Europe of Visual Culture Studies as a field of inquiry across the Arts and Humanities.

•  Explore the ways in which these diverse trajectories in the emergence of the study of visual culture are historically and theoretically distinctive because of the unique characteristics of a specific country, location, language, peoples, their histories of migration, governmental policies, and the contexts within which universities function as sites for interdisciplinary learning.

• Interrogate some of the hazards of this distinctiveness – around, for instance, the hegemony of the Anglo-American, English as the lingua franca of the academic humanities, and questions of publishing and dissemination.

• Discuss how the advent of Visual Culture Studies, with its new ways of seeing, knowing, understanding, and participating might (1) extend our studies beyond the university (2) generate particular kinds of cultural practices, and (3) be itself responding to activities in anything from art and curating to policy making and industry initiatives.

For our Catalan friends: David Cunningham will be representing the IMCC in Barcelona this week at the Catalan Association of Art Critics’ Fifth International Symposium on Art Criticism in a Global World. His opening address to the conference, entitled ‘Global Art/Global Modernities’, will be at 4.30pm on Friday 20 November at the MACBA Auditorium.

Further details here.

Another Thursday night and another discussion of the Future at the David Roberts Art Foundation, with Sally O’Reilly, Uriel Orlow, Jon Cairns and, a late special guest passing through London from Yale, David Joselit. The next session takes place on a Saturday afternoon, on November 21st from 2pm, when the discussants will be academic Chris Horrocks, poet and music critic Ben Watson, and, from Chicago, Visiting Professor at the IMCC, Lennard J. Davis. See you there.

Professor Pepper’s Ghost: Six Evenings of Visual Magic
The Old Cinema, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street

A collaboration between the IMCC and the Magic Lantern Society, following on from a successful series of events in 2008, the old Polytechnic cinema at the University of Westminster’s Regent Street building, where the first ever motion picture was shown in the UK, will be hosting a series of six Thursday night lectures on pre-cinematic technologies of the visual.

All the talks start at 7pm, with doors open from 6pm, and are free of charge.

Thursday 12 November 2009
‘Professor’ Mervyn Heard, ‘Phantasmagoria-mania’

Thursday 26 November 2009
Simon Warner, ‘Lavater – The Shadow of History’

Thursday 10 December 2009
Dr Frank Gray, ‘Visualising the Marvellous: G.A. Smith and his film Santa Claus’

Thursday 28 January 2010
Paul Kieve, ‘Grappling with Ghosts: Staging Ghost Effects in the Modern Theatre’

Thursday 11 February 2010
Mark Butterworth, ‘Geared to the Stars: Victorian Astronomy through the Magic Lantern’

Thursday 25 February 2010
Stephen Herbert, ‘From Anorthoscope to Zoopraxiscope: An A-Z of Victorian Animated Cartoons’

Download the programme here.

Watch the Old Cinema slideshow on the BBC News website here.