Visualities beyond Ocularcentrism

a 2009-2010 Public Conference Series
on Sense Perception and Experience before and in the Wake of the Digital

To confront the changes catalyzed by the introduction of new digital technologies and the move toward virtualization and simulation, this interdisciplinary series of public conferences takes this dynamic moment of change as an important opportunity to reconsider forms of mediation, modes of perception, and sensory experience by concerted questioning of what is new, what is global, and what remains local, differenced, embodied, affective, and material about cultural interfaces and interactions. Chafing critically against both claims of the radical novelty of new media and flattening analogies between the old and new, the conference emphasizes corporeality, materiality, and the modes of visuality actively attached to the other senses which have shaped much of what we take today to be unprecedented in the wake of new media: its violations of disciplinary boundaries, its questioning of the human (and the differences between human, animal, and machine), its constructions (socially, ideologically, technically) and variability (over time, across culture), its destabilization of truth claims through its modes of simulation, and crossings of senses (e.g., through simulation, haptic or tactile interfaces).

For more information on the Mellon/White Workshop in Visualities beyond Ocularcentrism, click here.

Race as Ocularcentrism
October 5-6, 2009

Monday, October 5:
6:00pm: "Race as Ocularcentrism," a public lecture by Jennifer A. González, Department Chair and Associate Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture, UC Santa Cruz. Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, 800 University Avenue, Lower Level, Room L140.

Lecture abstract: From anthropometry to digital morphing, the question of race has long been articulated in a visual register. Is it possible to argue that race discourse is, in fact, ocularcentric? How have recent theories of race difference engaged the apparatus of visual culture? How has this apparatus been challenged by contemporary artists and scholars?  What are the philosophical and ethical consequences of this challenge?

Tuesday, October 6:
10:30am-12:30pm: "Race as Ocularcentrism," a workshop with Jennifer González. Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, 800 University Avenue, Lower Level Room L166.

Workshop readings:
1. Jennifer González, "Renée Green: Genealogies of Contact," in Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (The MIT Press, 2008): 204-49.
2. Jennifer González, "The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy and Digital Art Practice," in Camera Obscura 70, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2009): 37-65.

JENNIFER A. GONZALEZ is Department Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz. She writes about contemporary art with an emphasis on installation art, digital art and activist art. She is interested in understanding the strategic use of space (exhibition space, public space, virtual space) by contemporary artists and by cultural institutions such as museums. More specifically, she has focused on the representation of the human body and its relation to discourses of race and gender. Her book, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008) examines the work of contemporary artists who use installation art as a way to stage a critical assessment of race politics in the United States. Subject to Display was a finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association. In addition to installation art, Jennifer Gonzalez has written on contemporary digital art and specifically on the visual representation of the body. Several of her articles and book chapters focus on the cyborg body or the hybrid body as both symptoms of and metaphors for cultural transformation. The visual representation of new forms of corporeality often signal a utopian hope or distopic unease with new technologies and imaginary futures. Her publications include "The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy and Digital Art Practice," in Camera Obscura 70, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2009): 37-65; “Morphologies: Race as Visual Technology” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (New York: International Center of Photography, 2003); and "The Appended Subject: Race and Identity as Digital Assemblage,” in Race in Cyberspace, Beth Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, Gil Rodman, eds., (New York: Routledge, 2000).

Seeing Beyond the Art-Science Divide
October 8-9, 2009

Thursday, October 8:
First Annual Eye Research Institute Vision Science & Visual Art Poster and Gallery Session designed to showcase both scientific research and artistic works, and to bring together faculty and students with wide-ranging interests in vision. All events are free and open to the public.

Event Schedule, all events located at Health Sciences Learning Center Atrium, 750 Highland Avenue:
3:30pm to 4:00pm poster and display setup
4:00pm to 5:00pm: poster session 
4:00pm to 5:30pm: Wine & Hors d’oeuvre Reception
5:30pm to 6:30pm: "Aesthetics in Vision Science: Understanding Preferences for Color," a keynote lecture by Stephen Palmer, University of California-Berkeley.

Lecture abstract: I will present an interdisciplinary approach to aesthetic experience in vision that attempts to bridge the art/science divide using human color preferences as the focus.  After some introductory remarks about the nature of aesthetic response, I will summarize what is known about the physics, psychology, physiology, and evolutionary biology of color vision.  I will then extend this knowledge base into the aesthetic domain by describing several results from the Berkeley Color Project in my laboratory. In particular, I will discuss what colors people prefer, why they prefer them, how such preferences vary across gender, artistic training, cultures, and social subcultures, and how colors are associated with emotions and music. 

Friday, October 9:
11:00am-1:00pm: Workshop with Stephen Palmer. Memorial Library Room 362.

Workshop readings:
1. Palmer, S. E.,  Gardner, J. S., & Wickens, T. D. (2008) Aesthetic issues in spatial composition: Effects of position and direction on framing single objects. Spatial Vision. 21, 421–449.
2. Palmer, S. E. (1991) Goodness, Gestalt, Groups, and Garner: Local symmetry subgroups as a theory of figural goodness.  In G. Lockhead & J. Pomerantz (Eds.) The perception of structure: Essays in honor of Wendell R. Garner.  Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
3. Arnheim, R. (1982) "Balance," from The power of the center: A study of composition in the visual arts.  Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 10-41.

STEPHEN PALMER is Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at UC Berkeley. His research and teaching focus on visual perception, a topic closely related to his color photography. He is the author of Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology, an advanced, interdisciplinary textbook on visual perception. He is currently working on a new book about color: Reversing the Rainbow: Reflections on Color and Consciousness.

The Gas Screen: Sense, Surveillance, Sublimation through Fabien Chalon's
Le Monde en marche

Thursday, October 15:
6:00pm: "The Gas Screen: Sense, Surveillance, Sublimation through Fabien Chalon's Le Monde en marche," a public lecture by Brent Keever, Director of the Critical Studies Program at the Paris Center for Critical Studies (CIEE). Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, 800 University Avenue, Lower Level, Room L140.

Lecture abstract: Current debates in France about the relationship between aesthetics and politics note a certain liquidity, volatilization, even evaporation in the states of those elements that make us feel something in both those realms. Through an investigation of a recent multi-media installation at Paris’ Gare du Nord, Fabien Chalon’s Le Monde en marche, we may be able to address these liquid and gaseous critiques in the works of such contemporary French thinkers as Jacques Rancière, Yves Michaud and Bernard Stiegler. If the thing to be observed tends to change states, what changes in sense and the senses might come to pass? How might casting a critical eye on such developments be complicated by a call to other critical senses perhaps more adapted to sensing flow, frequency and fumes? A critical ear, of course, but what of a critical touch, a critical taste, a critical smell?

BRENT KEEVER is Director of the Critical Studies Program at the Paris Center for Critical Studies (CIEE). He received his B.A. in English and Literary Criticism from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in English and Modern Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has taught and lectured all over the U.S. and France, on such topics as satire and humor, the literary and cinematic representations of sound, mysticism, and technology, and ethics in cartoons. His research interests include the history of critical theory and criticism, film studies, musicology, modernist poetry and prose, and the pedagogical possibilities of critical theory. An avid translator and film sub-titler, he has worked with the French children’s literature group, l’école des loisirs, as well as with French politicians. His forthcoming book, Care and Share, throws into question certain theories about listening and sharing.

Neuroarthistory and the Nature of Visual Culture
October 29-30, 2009

Thursday, October 29:
6:00pm: "Neuroarthistory and the Nature of Visual Culture," a public lecture by John Onians, Professor of World Art, University of East Anglia. Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, 800 University Avenue, Lower Level, Room L140.

Lecture abstract: The concept of visual culture was born of a combination of criticism of traditional art history and excitement about the possibilities opened up by the new approaches of the social history of art, semiotics and Post-Structuralism.  Originally it was vehemently opposed to the concept of nature, which was felt to have been frequently abused.  More recently, though, visual culture’s most potent advocates, especially W.J.T. Mitchell and Norman Bryson, have rediscovered nature and have  recommended the adoption of approaches that are explicitly biological.  Bryson has even gone to the extent of relegating most of recent theory to the realm of the purely ‘clerical’ and now looks forward to a new theory of a visceral human subject based in neuroscience. There is nothing mysterious in this change of view.  The neuroscience that now gives him confidence simply wasn’t available to the theorists of ‘social construction’. Now that it is fully accessible, we can see that it provides a basis for evaluating the claims of both positivists and post-structuralists. More importantly it offers a way forward in the study of art and visual culture that incorporates the best of both traditions.

Friday, October 30:
1:30-3:30pm: "What can neuroscience contribute to an understanding of the history of art and of culture?" a workshop with John Onians. University Club, 803 State Street, Room 313. Advanced registration and reading are required. To register and gain access to the readings, please email visualculture@education.wisc.edu.

Workshop description: For two and a half thousand years some of the most important European thinkers on art have drawn on what they perceived to be knowledge of the human neural system.    Today that knowledge has been given much more robust foundations, especially by the latest scanning techniques, and has been dramatically enlarged.   Phenomena such as neural plasticity, neural mirroring and neural empathy, which were previously only vaguely sensed, are now much better understood, and the principles on which they rely are being established.  Now is a good time to review what neuroscience has contributed to an understanding of art from Aristotle to Baxandall and Zeki, and to evaluate the possibilities for the future. One reading outlines the historiography of the field, another provides an example of how contemporary neuroscience can help with the explanation of the origins of art, and the third explores how it can contribute to a broader explanation of culture, in this case, Classical Greek culture.

4:00-6:00pm: Center for Visual Cultures Annual Fall Reception. Fireside Lounge, University Club, 803 State Street. Please join us for appetizers and conversation as we host the Center's third annual reception.

JOHN ONIANS is Emeritus Professor in the School of World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia, and he has held research fellowships in France, Germany, New Zealand and the United States. He was founding editor of the journal Art History (1978) and edited the first Atlas of World Art (2004). His most recent book is Neuroarthistory. From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (2007). His interest in the brain was first sparked by the work of his teacher, Ernst Gombrich, and is now leading him to apply a neural approach to the art, first of Europe and then of the world.

The Newtonian Slave Body
November 16-17, 2009

Monday, November 16:
6:00pm: "The Newtonian Slave Body," a public lecture by James Delbourgo, Associate Professor of the History of Science and Atlantic World at Rutgers University. Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, 800 University Avenue, Lower Level, Room L140.

Lecture abstract: How did place and convention figure in the visualization of enlightened racial anatomies? Enlightenment accounts of human variation have usually been conceptualized in geographically stable and convention-neutral terms, as statements worthy of analysis independent of provenance, authorial situation and conventions of authority. By contrast, this lecture revisits themes of color, enlightenment and empire by describing the project of a Creole journeyman in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world to “see” African skin color through the framework of Newtonian optical theory. Attending to period conventions concerning the authority both of experimental dissection and Newtonian natural philosophy, as well as the geographically distributed career of such knowledge claims, allows us to reconsider the relation between circulation, vision and race in the Enlightenment.

Tuesday, November 17:
1:30-3:30pm: "Fugitive Colors," a workshop with James Delbourgo. Memorial Library Commons, Memorial Library Room 460, 728 State Street. Advanced registration and reading are required. To register and gain access to the readings, please email visualculture@education.wisc.edu.

Workshop readings:
- "Introduction" and James Delbourgo, "Fugitive Colours: Shamans’ Knowledge, Chemical Empire and Atlantic Revolutions," in The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820, Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo, eds. (Sagamore Beach, MA: Watson Publishing International LLC, 2009): p.ix-xxxviii, 271-320.
- James Delbourgo, "Science," in The British Atlantic World 1500-1800, David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds, 2 ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 92-110.

JAMES DELBOURGO is Associate Professor of the History of Science and Atlantic World in the History Department at Rutgers University, where he is also a Fellow at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2003. His interests range from physical science and experiment to natural history and travel, and the intersections between them in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including topics such as history of the body, experimental apparatus, collecting, ethnography and race, and the movement of objects, specimens and techniques through global networks. His recent and current projects include: electricity in early America; go-betweens and imperial knowledge networks; color, chemistry and empire in Guiana; science and the American Enlightenment; race as an enlightened science; the history of underwater exploration; and the relation between collecting and empire in the life and career of Hans Sloane. In relation to this last project, Delbourgo has advised on documentary and museum work for the BBC, the British Museum and Natural History Museum in London, and will curate an exhibit on Sloane, slavery and early modern scientific travel at the John Carter Brown Library in 2010, entitled “Slavery’s Scientific Objects.” His publications include A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2006), Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (co-edited with Nicholas Dew, Routledge, 2007), The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820 (co-editor with Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts and Kapil Raj, Science History Publications, 2009), and forthcoming articles in Modern Intellectual History, the British Journal for the History of Science, and Social Text.

The West Indian Front Room: Domestic Material Culture in and across Migrant Diasporas
December 10-11

Thursday, December 10:
5:30pm: "The West Indian Front Room: Domestic Material Culture in and across Migrant Diasporas," a public lecture by Michael McMillan, writer, playwright, curator and artist. Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, 800 University Avenue, Lower Level, Room L140.

Lecture abstract: The term West Indian Front Room entered the English language at a time when cultural political shifts mediated by anti-colonialist struggles for independence, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements were emblematic of a decolonizing process. When spouses and families arrived in post-war Britain, there was a need for more space, and many used an informal localized saving scheme called the Partner (or Pardner) Hand to raise the deposit for a house or flat. Once they moved in, a front room began to take shape. Like those of other migrant communities, the West Indian front room expressed a yearning for social mobility and as an aspirational shrine was dressed by the mother of the home and was only used if there were guests or on special occasions. Regardless of wealth, she ensured that the front room always looked good, because it symbolized decency and a desire for status and respectability. Its maintenance and social function followed codes of good grooming and conduct that had their roots in the colonial fusion of religion, hygiene and the Protestant Work Ethic
embodied in proverbs such as: ‘Cleanliness as next to godliness’ and ‘By the sweat of your brow, thou shall eat bread’. These ideals were presented in a highly personalized style and self-controlled expression of a specific aesthetic. This aesthetic is not so much a valorization of
white-bias ideals of beauty, but rather the performativity of status and the Creolization of popular culture. There was a desire for artificial things because they lasted longer and things were covered over because they were cherished for the future. As a phenomenon, the front room resonates across diaspora, but this is metaphorical, rather than a search for the pure and authentic homeland, it lives through and with a conception of identity as process: disruptive and continuous. Responding to displacement, exile and alienation, the front room for migrants is a public frontline on a private backyard. Its contradictory nature reveals how post-colonial identities have been contested through inter-generational identifications, disavowal and the negotiation of gendered practices in the domestic domain. It raises fundamental questions about modernity as a theatre of popular desires for material culture in the domestic interior.

Friday, December 11:
1:30-3:30pm: "The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home," a workshop with Michael McMillan. Advanced registration is required. To register please email visualculture@education.wisc.edu. Memorial Library Commons, Memorial Library Room 460, 728 State Street.

This workshop will explore how identities are embodied in the material culture of the front room/living room. As part of the workshop process, participants will be invited to share stories about a small object from their front room/living room that they are being asked to bring with them. Workshop participants will also watch the BBC4 documentary about Michael McMillan's work, “Tales from the Front Room".

MICHAEL MCMILLAN is a writer, playwright, curator and artist of Vincentian parentage. His recent plays include Blood for Britain (BBC Radio 4 Drama 2001), Babel Junction (Maya Productions 2006) & Master Juba (Theatre Is & GLYPT 2006). His books include The Black Boy Pub & Other Stories (Wycombe District Council 1997), Growing up is Hard to Do (Young People’s Health Project 2002), and Same Difference (Daneford Trust 2006). His critically acclaimed installation/exhibition The ‘West Indian’ Front Room (Geffrye Museum 2005-06) inspired the BBC4 documentary Tales from the front room (2007) and a new living room exhibition in Holland Van Huis Uit: the living room of migrants in The Netherlands (Amsterdam, Tilburg & Utrecht 2007-08). The Front Room interactive website was developed in collaboration with inIVA (see www.thefrontroom.org) and The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home will be published by Black Dog in September 2009. He recently curated the exhibition The Beauty Shop (198 Contemporary Arts & Learning, 2008) and is Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the LCC (University of the Arts, London). Michael is also completing a Ph.D. at Middlesex University.

Series supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Chipstone Foundation, the UW-Madison Anonymous Fund, the University Lectures Committee, & the Year of the Humanities. Co-sponsored by the Center for Digital Inquiry into the Arts and Humanities, the Program in Material Culture, the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Companion Program, the UW Eye Research Institute, the Department of Art History, & the Department of French & Italian. Photo courtesy of the Otis Archive.

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