Once apparently marginal, critical debate in visual culture over mobility, actual, virtual and imaginary, has become crucial to formulating positions both in relation to changes in communications technologies and in social and political relations. Digital visual technologies, it is claimed, have multiplied the sites of viewing, shifting audiences from positions of passive receptivity, associated with discourses of modern visual culture, into a series of modes of interaction. Yet, it is also argued that the encoding of kinaesthetic responsiveness in such forms of interaction represents a more thorough penetration of imaginative activities than ever before.

The symposium will thus aim to review thinking on mobility in relation to critical issues in the conceptualization of modern and postmodern visual culture as it is implicated in orientalisms, neo-orientalisms and counter-orientalisms, but also in respect of socio-political and cultural boundaries more generally, particularly in the light of competing accounts of globalization or ‘transculture’.

Keynote speakers:
Stephen Bann, Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow, History of Art, University of Bristol, F.B.A., F.S.A., C. B. E.
Victor Burgin, Professor Emeritus, History of Consciousness, University of California Santa Cruz and History of Consciousness and Media Philosophy, European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland; artist
Lisa Parks, Professor and Program Director, Film and Media Studies, University of California Santa Barbara