Exhibition: Visual Practices Across the University (13 April-19 June 2005)
History of Art’s James Elkins curated this exhibition for UCC's Lewis Glucksman Art Gallery. The exhibition ran from 13 April until 19 June 2005 and was sponsored by History of Art.
A tremendous force of rhetoric has been brought to bear on the notion that ours is a predominantly visual culture. Theories concerning the visual nature of experience have been proposed in art history, cognitive psychology, anthropology, artificial intelligence, women’s studies, neurobiology, linguistics, and by various philosophers from Bishop Berkeley to Baudrillard.
Throughout the university, learning and research proceed with the use of images. Images can be passkeys to many disciplines, offering insight that cannot be as easily gained by studying texts or mathematics. Curated by James Elkins, this exhibition samples the image-making protocols of the university as a whole. This arresting exhibition fosters interdisciplinary conversations and, through extensive wall texts, explains the relevant science, medicine and technology involved.
A major conference on Visual Literacy was held in UCC in conjunction with this exhibition.
The Book: Visual Practices Across the University published by Wilhelm Fink Verlag (2007).
This book was published, in English, by the German press Wilhelm Fink. It is a study of the range of image-making and image-interpreting practices in an average university, with no particular stress on art.
There are chapters by doctors, lawyers, scientists of all sorts, engineers, humanists, social scientists... it is a cross-section of the actual production of images in the university, and a corrective to the special interests of visual studies.
The book begins with a long introduction, assessing the state of scholarship on art / science links, including critical reviews of scholars who write on the 'science of art' or vice versa. The introduction also draws out common themes in the 30 disciplines that participated in the exhibition, arguing that it is possible to consider images in various fields without using tropes from the humanities or social sciences as explanatory tools -- in other words, by letting the different disciplines speak in their own languages.
The ultimate purpose of the book as a whole is to justify a university-wide course on visual experience, which would introduce students to work in all faculties or divisions of the university. Such a course would be a corrective to the almost exclusively humanities-based perspective of existing 'visual culture' courses; and it would also be an interesting acknowledgment of the visual nature of much of contemporary research and experience (running, as it would, against the grain of other introductory courses, in which words and equations continue to be preeminent).
Most of the book is thirty short chapters on image-making and image-producing practices in different fields:
- 1 Chemistry: Reading Spectrograms
- 2 Performance Art: Problems of Documentation
- 3 Field Geology: Deductions from Beach Stones
- 4 Economics: Sirens in Classics, in Philosophy, and in Economic Theory
- 5 Linguistics: Medieval Irish Color Terms
- 6 Astrophysics: Doppler Tomography of Accretion Disks
- 7 Law: Video-game Technology in the Irish Bloody Sunday Tribunal
- 8 Computer Science: Visualizing the Internet
- 9 Occupational Therapy: Exercises in Doing, Being, and Becoming
- 10 Speech and Hearing Science: Speech Spectrograms
- 11 Restorative Dentistry: Matching Colours in Porcelain Crowns
- 12 Radio Astronomy: Observations of the Galactic Center
- 13 Archaeology: Imaging and Mapping Practices
- 14 Mapping: Uses of Geological Maps
- 15 Art History: Iconographic Analysis
- 16 Civil Engineering: A High Resolution Aerial Photograph
- 17 Anatomy: Fluorescence Microscopy
- 18 Aerodynamics: Video Analysis of Pigeon Flight
- 19 Mathematics: Visual Solutions to a Logic Problem
- 20 Applied Social Studies: Masks in Social Work
- 21 Pathology: Diagnosis of a Kidney Disease
- 22 Epigraphy: Three-Dimensional Laser Scanning of Inscribed Stones
- 23 Geochemistry: Deformation of Grains in Sandstone
- 24 Food Science: Electrophoresis Gels of Cheddar Cheese
- 25 Zoology: Automated Recognition of Individual Cetaceans
- 26 Art History: Political Meanings of John Heartfield’s Photographs
- 27 Microbiology: Visualizing Viruses
- 28 Oceanography: Imaging the Sea Bed Using Side-Scanning Sonar
- 29 Philosophy: Arabic and Russian Visual Tropes
- 30 Legal pedagogy: Teaching Visual Rhetoric to Law Students
