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KIAS International Conference Program: Images, Artistic and Scientific

Annual Theme Research Group: Images, Artistic and Scientific
Transdiciplinary Research Program
Korea Institute for Advanced Study


Where: 5th Floor, Conference Room, Korea Institute for Advanced Study
When: 24-25 January, 2013 
 

 

Korea Institute for Advanced Study is holding a two-day international conference on the theme “Images: Artistic and Scientific.” Over the last twenty years, the ‘visual turn’ in science studies has provided new and innovative approaches, methodologies, and sources for understanding science and technology. A turn to visual culture in (art) history has also helped historians and social scientists to use visual materials as potential resources to illuminate creative activities in science and art in historically nuanced ways.

 

Our aim is to explore in what ways changes in visual practices and representational media, such as drawings, photographs, films, and most recently digital technologies, influenced the production and circulation of scientific knowledge. By examining how a ‘visual culture’ changes over time, we hope to illuminate, as Bruno Latour asks, “how a culture sees the world, and makes it visible.” At the same time, we intend to reflect upon how past and recent developments in science and technology profoundly shaped a condition for the production, circulation, and consumption of arts: how did new developments in technoscience redefine what is to see as well as what there is to see? In addition, we would like to consider not only visual representations in science but also the collections and repository of visual materials, such as museums, archives, and databases, as a site for exploring a visual culture.

 

Contributors from history of art and science, and from a wide range of disciplines, including some media artists, are invited to consider how to make sense of the multiple interactions between artistic and scientific pursuit in different times and places. In bringing together scholars who work on many different aspects of art and science, we expect this discussion to illuminate some of the key issues in visual culture. Another goal is to marshal the collective knowledge of the participants across disciplines to analyze major shifts in the understanding of visual culture and its implications for science studies, art history, and media studies.