Call for papers: European Science Foundation Exploratory Workshop

Title: Global Theory, Local Practices, and the Research into Visual Matters

Time and place: 20­-22 September 2007, Vilnius, Lithuania

Organiser: Department of Art History and Theory, Vilnius Academy of Arts

Abstract submission deadline: 12 March 2007

Gole and scope
The goal of the workshop is to rethink current research practices and build
awareness of how the site- and school-specific situations determine
scholarly hypotheses and research outcomes and teaching practices. Scholars
working with visual matters and visual thinking of all periods are
encouraged to participate with an aim that their inter- and disciplinary
approaches will bring reflection upon accepted local and universal
interpretations of images. It is expected that workshop participants will
look at different ways of seeing/reading and understanding of visual
matters. The workshop addresses scholarly imagination as practiced within a
broad area of fields investigating visual matter. What does an art
historian, critic, cultural theorist imagine when s/he encounters an image
and decides to analyse it from, let us say, a social perspective? What do
research practices consist of? Participants are invited to present
case-studies offering readings of images coming from various historical
periods and not only from the domain of art, but also from advertisement,
popular photography, the media or any other form of visual expression
including the scientific one. The range of topics listed below points the
theoretical thinking towards a reflexive re-evaluation of its own methods
together with re-interpretation of images.

Proposed topics
/Images as tools of power/
Politics of looking
Dominating and parasitizing attitudes
Tensions between global and local identity
The making of national interiority by using global exteriority
Images as diagrams of power
Delocalisation of images
Absorption of local and global practices

/Visual matter in the mesh of psyche/
Externalization of a collective mentality
Anthropological, semiotic, phenomenological anatomy of visual narratives
Insecurity and anguish of time and art
Hostility to images
The temporal escape and lapses of time in European art

/Research and its limitations/
Looking at images without a theory
Using and misusing the distance from the past
Affections and dislikes of art history
Inventing reality behind the images
Mediated versus immediate experience of art
The deception of images

/The pleasures of reading/
Paradoxes of seeing
Images as puzzles
The non-visual in the visual matter
The fluidity of images and information
The impulse to create meaning

Paper requirements and contacts
Please send a 250-word abstract (Ms Word, doc or rtf) of a proposed
20-minute paper in English to the workshop¹s coordinator Ms. Rasa
Antanaviciute at rasa.antanaviciutevda.lt by 12 March 2007. Decisions will
be made by 16 April 2007.

Workshop format
Three days, four plenary sessions with discussion groups, session summaries
and general conclusions. It is planned that the 2nd day of the workshop
will
include a field trip.

Financial support
Thanks to the generous support of the European Science Foundation, the
organisers will provide hotel accommodation and meals and refund travel
costs (economy, PEX/APEX air-fare; 1st class train tickets) for the
participants of the ESF member states (www.esf.org).

Print version of this Call for papers is attached to this message.

Thank you for your consideration,

Dr. Giedre Mickunaite, convenor
Department of Art History and Theory
Vilnius Academy of Arts
www.vda.lt