[Commlist] cfp: Eleventh International Conference of the Image: Visual Pedagogies: Encounter, Place, Ecologies and Design

    2020 Call for Proposals for Eleventh International Conference of the
    Image: Visual Pedagogies: Encounter, Place, Ecologies and Design.
    University of New South Wales, Sidney, Australia. 9-10 september 2020.

https://ontheimage.com/2020-conference


    The Image research Network. Common Ground Research Networks


We are inviting proposals for paper presentations, workshops/interactive 
sessions, posters/exhibits, virtual lightning talks, virtual posters, or 
colloquia addressing for the *Eleventh International Conference on the 
Image, in University of New South Wales, Sidney, Australia. 9-10 
september 2020. **Conference *will feature plenary sessions by some of 
the world’s leading thinkers and innovators in the field.

You can see all the information and submit your proposals here 
https://ontheimage.com/2020-conference



*1. Scopes:*


    _The Defining Image_

/The foundations of our species being, and the narratives of species 
history are marked by imagery—the parietal, megalithic art and body art 
of first peoples, the iconography and symbology of religions, the 
graphic-representational roots of writing. /

We are, uniquely in natural history, the symbolic species. And within 
our peculiar species history, the development of capacities to create 
images parallel speaking and precede writing.

Since the beginnings of modernity, however, we have increasingly focused 
our attention on language as our species-defining characteristic. After 
half a millennium where the power and prestige of language has held 
sway, we may be in the cusp of a return of the visual, or at least a 
multimodality in which image and text are deeply inveigled in each 
other’s meanings. This can in part be attributed to the affordances of 
the new communications environment. As early as the mid twentieth 
century, photolithography put image and text conveniently back onto the 
same page. Then, since the mid 1970s, digitized communications have 
brought image, text and sound together into the same manufacturing 
processes and transmission media.


    _The Image of Transformation: Properties of Consequence_

/The image has several key properties, of interest to the participants 
in this research network. /

The first is its empirical connection with the world–telling something 
of the world, reflecting the world. It re-presents the world. How does 
it do this? What are its techniques? What are its mediations? What kinds 
of ‘truth’ can we have in images?

A second property of consequence — the image has a normative loading. No 
image can ever solely be a reflection on the world. It is also a 
perspective on the world, an orientation to the world. This is because 
it is the incidental outcome of an act of design. It is the product of 
an act of human agency. An interested image-maker takes available 
resources for meaning (visual grammars, fabrication techniques and focal 
points of attention), undertakes an act of designing (the process of 
image-making), and in so doing re-images the world in a way that it has 
never quite been seen before. The human agent is central.

To the extent that no two conjunctions of human life experience are ever 
precisely the same, interests and perspectives in imaging are infinitely 
varied. In fact, across the dimensions of material conditions (social 
class, locale, family); corporeal attributes (age, race, sex, sexual 
orientation, and physical and mental abilities); and symbolic 
differences (culture, language, gender, affinity and persona) variations 
in perspective are frequently paramount, the focal purpose or implicit 
agenda of the imaging agent.

For viewers, too, every image is seen through available cultural and 
technical resources for viewing, seen in a way particular to their 
interest and perspective. The act of viewing transforms both the image 
and its world. From a normative perspective then, how do interest, 
intention, motivation, perspective, subjectivity and identity intertwine 
themselves in the business of image-making? And what is the role of the 
viewer in reframing and revisualizing the image?

And a third property of consequence — the image is transformational. Its 
potentials are utopian. We see (the empirical). We visualize (the 
normative). We imagine (the utopian). There is a more-than-fortuitous 
etymological connection between ‘image’ and ‘imagination’. Images can be 
willed. Images speak not just of the world, but to the world. They can 
speak to hopes and aspirations. The world reseen is the world 
transformed. What’s in the imagination for now, can become an agenda for 
practice and politics tomorrow. Imagination is the representation of 
possibility.

https://ontheimage.com/2020-conference



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