What has emerged over the last decade as one of the most significant aspects of work in Visual Culture is a persistent desire for both a critical sensitivity toward its theoretical underpinnings and an experimental elasticity in its methodological approaches.
This drive is giving rise to a plethora of new investigative practices and multi-directional engagements, particularly vis-a-vis matters of geopolitical urgency and their cultural and spatial implications.
Marking ten years of Visual Culture studies at Vienna University of Technology, this conference aims to bring together a diverse group of researchers and practitioners interested in the dynamics between emergent spatial phenomena and new modes of theoretical inquiry.
Examining the blurring roles of intervention and research, the conference seeks to debate how critical and creative work in Visual Culture negotiates unexpected transitions and oscillations between individual and collective, real and virtual, center and periphery, and activism and academy.
We invite submission of papers that address the current liminalities of theory and practice in Visual Culture.
Participation from graduate students and early career academics is especially welcome. Topics may range from investigating the intimate, indiscreet or collaborative architectures of globalisation to discussing the genealogy of ideas, implemented utopias or unperformed failures.
Current shifts in global politics and economy - financial crises, protest movements, natural disasters, worldwide migrations of people and concepts, new shadow economies - contain a myriad of micro and macro processes whose contingent interactions may offer new perspectives for an emerging culture of research as intervention.
How can we conceptualise the transformations in the way we share space and the political regimes operative in these spaces?
What kinds of strategies does this ambition require?
Where will the novel confluences of spatial realities and practice based research lead Visual Culture as a field of critical investigation?
Institute of Art and Design
Vienna University of Technology
Karlsplatz 13, A-1040 Vienna, Austria
Visual Culture Unit
conference@visuelle-kultur.net
+43 (0)1 58801 26401