Call for Papers

VIRTUAL REALITY: FRAMEWORKS AND (MIS)-CONCEPTIONS
June 26-28, 2009; London, UK
Organized by
Art, Design and Museology
Department of Arts and Humanities,
Institute of Education, University of London

As early as 1889 Henri Bergson referred to the term virtual in ‘Matter and Memory,’ and later in ‘Time and Free Will’ (1896). Bergson used the term to make an ontological distinction between what is possible and what actual. In 1938 the poet Antonin Artaud, in his seminal book ‘The Theatre and its Double’ understood virtual reality as something that dealt with imagination. Taking these theorists as a point of departure, this conference aims to further elaborate on both historic and contemporary understandings of virtual reality. The conference particularly invites submissions that challenge orthodox ways of thinking about virtual reality and examine the term beyond its current technological definitions and applications. We welcome interdisciplinary papers on the following themes:
• historiographies of virtual reality
• aesthetics of virtual reality
• virtual reality and imagination
• virtual reality and space
• virtual reality and narratives
• virtual reality and the sacred
• power, politics and virtual reality

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words by email both to:
Dr. Elena Stylianou, Conference Organizer, e.stylianou@ioe.ac.uk and
Dr. Pam Meecham, Co-Organizer, p.meecham@ioe.ac.uk

All paper proposals must be received by January 15, 2009
Notifications of accepted papers by February 1, 2009
Submission of full papers by April 1, 2009

Life Before Death

The German photographer Walter Schels and his partner Beate Lakotta presented their work at the Wellcome Collection in London in an exhibition titled 'Life Before Death' just a couple of weeks ago. They worked with terminally ill people while in hospices, interviewed, and photographed them before and just after their death. Their subjects' faces often indicate despair or fear, other times simply happiness or hope. For some, death is only the beginning of something else, something better than their current condition. But, there is something unique about displaying death. Death is the ultimate taboo of our societies, the signified ending in the human corpse, and the signifier or part of the definition of the socially abject. In the photographs of the exhibition the moments of the 'before' and the 'after' are beautifully captured in empty backgrounds. There is nothing else in the pictures, other than the fragmented faces of these people, like limbs of an already mutilated body. Muscles let go, eyes close, mouths open slightly, indicating the just recorded movement of the lips as they open to let their last breath. Silence, stability, melancholia. This is it. This is what you get. The bodies desire to communicate the inevitability of their state. No fanfare, no trumpets, just the silent passing from being to non-being. It is as if the corpse says in his captured beauty: 'actually, this is not that bad.'

The cleanness and sterility of the black and white photographs seems rather appropriate for the space in which the photographs are presented. (The largest charity in the UK for biomedical research, the Wellcome Trust spends millions every year to support the best and most innovative scientific research projects.) As if out of the chemist's lab the faces in the photographs let the viewer closely examine them and at times they even seem to smile, welcoming the viewer to accept the reality of life's ending. It is ok. Even the short narratives next to the photographs seem out of place, stand out as irrelevant to the beauty of death. After all, in the universal reality of the inexorable relationship between life and death no narrative is relevant. The narrative is abolished, diminished, it vanishes like thin air. The ancient Greeks feared being lost and wished to be remembered after their death (hysterophemia). They also knew that what one can leave behind is just a name. A name, however, dislocated, ripped from its object - that is the human body - means nothing. It is only a sign for a memory and a memory is barely true to one's living existence. But then again, does it even matter? What matters most is that we are suddenly forced to look at the hidden ending, the forgotten taboo, the most real of our reality: death.

Is the Renaissance scholar dead?

There is indeed something to be said if not to be vividly and strongly argued about the gradual disappearance of expert knowledge in the arts, as interdisciplinarity and crossing of borders between areas of study that were previously firmly disparate, are fashionable tendencies of the contemporary academic circles. In a live and continuous debate, Prof Adrian Monck and Simon Woodroffe went head to head with AC Grayling and Stephen Bayley over the question, 'Is the Renaissance scholar dead?' (Guardian, April 10, 2008). Apart from the simple minded dichotomy between practical knowledge that contributes to the advancement of the economic machine of nation-states, and the theoretical knowledge that aims to develop culturally engaged members of society, there is the question of who exactly can be this Renaissance scholar. Who has access to these two extremes of the polarity? And are we forever doomed to dwell between these two edges of the line without ever being able to bring them closer or even in a meaningful dialogue? Why should we ever argue for either practical and arguably technological and scientific knowledge or for theoretical and philosophical knowledge very specific to an area in which very few others would be ever interested? Certainly, both are quite useful in their own right but they remain rather entertaining, even sad at times, if isolated from each other. One would have assumed that we have moved away from such hiatus and that theory and practice are interchangeable – or at least ought to be – otherwise they remain empty signifiers; the first cynical and the latter romantic, both masturbatory practices of old men.

Of Photography ...

The iconic photographs of a naked and very pregnant Demi Moore, of a powerful Margaret Thatcher, who stands firm in her own shadows, and of firefighters at the scene of the Twin Towers’ collapse after the attack, are familiar to the public consciousness. Image like the above and hundreds of others have circulated in the mainstream and the everyday through Vanity Fair: an American magazine of fashion, culture and politics. Even though the magazine has published critical articles on both politics and culture, it is mostly known for its close relationship to Hollywood, that even though highly ‘political’ and ‘cultural’ remains mostly ‘spectacular.’ Thus, these photographs stand in our consciousness as posters for decorating the walls of our houses, the room of the undergrad student or a kid’s paper collage. They are pictures easily reprinted, easily accessed, easily remembered, and rarely thought of as art – at least in the traditional sense. The implications in understanding fashion photography or photojournalism through the exhibition of such photographs (currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery) are enormous. I walked among dozens of others in the already cramped space of the gallery and even though forced to move linearly from the one photograph to the next (both due to the crowd and to the museum display) I was much enjoying the photographs of famous people (Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Madonna). It took me some time to realize that I had no clue who took these pictures, so I forced my self to walk back to the beginning and pay attention to the images again as well as to the artists who took them. I soon realized that the reason for not paying attention to the artists was simply the lack of information. Apart from a name and a couple of bio references (that if we wish to be honest seemed irrelevant), the artists got lost in the pictures and the crowd of visitors. I stood in the middle of the gallery space and looked around. This looked as commercial as the magazine from which the pictures come from. An apothecary of famous faces, celebrities of the twentieth and twenty-first century, that stare at you in their freeze moments. Maybe it is ok that the exhibition does not talk about photography per se. After all, what a better way to talk about photography than to illustrate the commodification of individuals as disposable celebrity subjects, thus subjects of admiration and desire, ready for our consumption.

Juan Munoz

As I moved from one room to the next, in the new retrospective show of the Spanish artist Juan Munoz at the Tate Modern I found myself completely drawn into the display. I moved between rooms fast, almost frenetic, wishing to see everything at once, incapable of waiting to slowly pave my way through the exhibition. Instead, I roamed around in full excitement attempting to capture all images in one single panoramic view of Munoz work. I was sitting next to the work on display, staring at it from far away or from close proximity, aiming to get a better, more affectionate look. And, there was no single moment I searched for an explanation, or for information about his work. It seemed unnecessary. It seems the Tate shares my opinion as there is no text on the walls apart from small, very short labels indicating the title of each piece, and a small booklet with more information about the displays in each room - and which visitors are given as they walk in the exhibition space. Admittedly, I never used that booklet while in the exhibition space. It was not until later, when I sat for a cup of coffee, that I became curious about it. I couldn’t help thinking that sometimes art is indeed capable of engaging the visitor in a silent dialogue, consuming her into its space, capturing her imagination and gaze. In cases like this, text becomes a secondary means of communicating the works’ messages, only a complementary means for approaching art.

Juan Munoz’s work is itself engaging through its ironies, humor, and playfulness. Munoz's figures are standing, sitting, facing the wall and staring at mirrors, completely ignoring the presence of the spectator, forcing the viewer to notice them through their presented indifference. His figures are caught in self-indulgence, having their backs towards the viewer, prison in their own spaces, creating the sense they belong to a different reality, outside of one's own, and engaged in an illusionary universe to which they only have access. In the room No10, the work 'Many Times' (1999) comprises of 100 figures, identical in their attire, color and facial characteristics, but yet different in their gestures and posture. They are displayed, either in pairs or in small groups, and are seemingly interacting with each other, forming a dense space of imagined, unattainable communication. The visitor can walk by them, through the empty spaces between the small groups of figures, but she is always left in a space ‘outside.’ The spectator is after all an outsider to the community of gray figurines. They all seem to be laughing, which causes the viewer an immediate smile, a desire to be part of the irony, be part of the imagined joke. I came back to room No10 several times before I leave the exhibition. There was something in that room, which drew me back into it. It was the immediate relation I had with the figures of the work constructed on the basis of difference. I was excluded from the gray community, because of my appearance. I and the rest of the visitors were becoming part of the work, part of the built community of the 100 figures, all sharing the same understanding that we didn’t really belong to that which was unfolding in their silence and fixed positioning.