The Croatian Writers’ Society, the theory, culture and visual arts journal Tvrda, and the Zagreb Centre for Visual Studies are organizing an international interdisciplinary symposium entitled Visual Construction of Culture, to be held at the Mimara Museum in Zagreb on 26 and 27 October 2007 (Friday and Saturday).
Visual, pictorial and cultural turn marks the liberation of the image from the dominant paradigms in language philosophy and from the prevalent iconology interpretations in art history. Today, the picture is understood as a medium of communication and as a contextual field of autoreferential denotation.
It is no longer a “holy” picture or a picture of High Art, but a multiplied and networked world of visuality which demands its own new grammar, syntax, semiotics and hermeneutics. Culture can no longer be explained by social identity theories. Visual culture is constructed autonomously and in the media age it is a prerequisite for the cognition of reality and its various interpretations. The Symposium will therefore focus especially on the need for a new approach to the concepts of picture, visuality and media in our time.
SYMPOSIUM PROGRAMME
Friday, October 26
10.00 Introduction
10.15 ARKO PAIC, Faculty of Textile Technology, Zagreb “Deconstruction of Image: From Mimesis and Representation to Communication”
11.00 NADEDA CACINOVIC, Faculty of Philosophy, Zagreb “The Visible and Cognition”
11.45 MILAN GALOVIC, Faculty of Textile Technology, Zagreb “Image in Technical Era”
12.30 KRUNO MARTINAC, University of Melbourne , Australia “Someone Looks at Something”
13.30 Lunch break 15.00 ALEKSANDAR MIJATOVIC, Faculty of Philosophy, Zagreb “Profane Iconology”
15.45 IZAR LUNACEK, Ljubljana “The Visual Construction of Carnival Reality”
16.30 SRECKO HORVAT, Zagreb “Holocaust and Media”
17.15 Closing of the first day’s sessions
Saturday, October 27
10.00 KEITH MOXEY, Barnard College , Columbia University , New York “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn”
10.45 NIGEL WHITELEY, Lancaster University “Visual Disciplines in a Post-Disciplinary World”
11.30 SONJA BRISKI UZELAC, Academy of Applied Arts, Rijeka “Art in the Age of Cultural Reconfiguration: From Artifact Towards Visual Text”
12.15 MARCO SENALDI, State University of Milano-Bicocca “Contemporary Art and Television”
13.00 Lunch break
14.30 KLAUDIO TEFANCIC, Center for Visual Studies, Zagreb “User Interface as Space of Cultural Differentiation”
15.15 ANTONIO SANTANGELO, University of Turin “”Real Fiction”: The New Frontiers of Constructing Reality in Television”
16.00 KREIMIR PURGAR, Center for Visual Studies, Zagreb “Visual Turn and Literary Text: Subversive Iconology in the Novel City by Alessandro Baricco”
16.45 Closing of the Symposium