Concrete art is older, but conceptual and computational art first appear in the mid-1960s. All three, however, share various aspects. Two or three examples will be discussed in detail from each of the three modes of art in an attempt to characterize each one of those. Commonalities and differences will be identified. Algorithmic art will be considered more closely from the point of view of a semiotic aesthetics: the work of art is a sign of complex nature, and the artist’s intention is to create starting points for semioses of a special kind. In the cases of algorithmic and interactive art (or any other of the digital arts), those signs are singled out by their algorithmic character. They possess an upside and a downside, and there are always two interpreting agents present.

Digital communication among individuals leads to vast complex networks of interactions. As participants in online worlds we are socially blind and unaware of the complex patterns within these electronic structures. However, knowledge of these structures is relevant to understand power, fluidity, access to information and social ressources. Some researchers suggested the concept of social translucency and started a discussion of how users in virtual spaces can benefit from utilizing visualization. Outside research, different visualization forms of social spaces are published every day. For example, sites such as visualcomplexity.com collect and classify more than 700 different approaches. Many of them take the form of networks. Such network visualizations of complex systems appear to be very attractive and fascinating to humans, especially if they can spot their position within the large net. Still we don’t know ystematically, what makes one visualization more suitable than the other? Research has developed approaches such as network analysis to relate quantitative structural metrics to network graphs in order to derive insights from the complex patterns. But what are users perceiving? How can such visualizations of complex systems benefit the users? What should be the ideal form of conveying a complex system so that the user can grasp some information from it? We don’t even know in which situations people would consider network visualizations of their own interaction helpful or dangerous or what visual variables are important. The talk concludes with motivating a discussion of interesting research issues relating to visual competence in the context of complex networks of electronic interaction.

The power of color for attracting attention is abundant. But how is it brought about? According to the contingent-capture hypothesis, it depends on our goals and colors attract our attention by their fit to the goal templates. By contrast, bottom-up theories consider stimulus-driven capture by color contrast as the major governing principle for where attention is directed. In the talk I will review the relevant evidence and defend the contingent-capture hypothesis. On an empirical level, I will re-evaluate the evidence that seemingly demonstrated bottom-up capture. On a theoretical level, I will explain how the top-down control could be accommodated if the system is faced with new visual information from the environment.

All are welcome!

The discovery (or invention) of non-Euclidean geometry and of the higher dimensions (from the fourth on), the new idea of space to summarize, is one of the most interesting example of the profound repercussions that mathematical ideas have on humanistic culture, art and architecture.

All are welcome!

How and why did documentary photography develop in the way that it did within apartheid South Africa? How this was viewed and experienced by those involved? And how does the work of this period continue to shape photography in a post-apartheid era? These questions have provided the focus of the research project I shall talk about in this presentation. Based on interviews with photographers, editors and curators, and through the analysis of photographs held in collections and displayed in museums, this research has explored the distinctive contribution of photography to South African visual culture, and its interrelationship with the social and political context during the second half of the twentieth century.

The research has had three key objectives. First, to analyse the photographs in their original contexts of production; for example, I consider: the photography from Drum magazine, known particularly for its visual record of 1950s urban black culture; Ernest Cole’s classic photo-documentary book House of Bondage (published in 1967); and material drawn from the photographic collection of the anti-apartheid International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF). Second, to understand the working practices of the photographers from this period, the conditions they worked under and the ideas that were influential on their practice. Third, to assess the significance of this work for contemporary visual culture in South Africa: for example, how photographs produced during the apartheid era are now being re-used in the presentation of the country’s recent history in a range of museums and exhibitions.

A book based on this research was published by the University of South Africa (UNISA) Press in 2010, Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa.

Visual studies continues to grow very rapidly; it has at least three different forms in North America and the UK; in Scandinavia and German-speaking countries; in Latin America; and in China and Taiwan.

Yet it has not fulfilled its initial promise as a place to study visuality and visual practices of all sorts; and it has not consolidated any common set of purposes or methods. In this talk I survey the original purposes of the field and its current condition, and I suggest several reasons why it may be time to say farewell to visual studies.

Paul Cézanne saw a form of semiotics as a future framework for the visual arts. Charles Biederman in 1948 suggested that art is an ongoing exploration and revelation of visual cognition. By 1968, Jack Burnham suggested that one future for the arts was the creation of autonomous, self-evolving agents. Such observations from the recent history of art build the background for the main thesis of the lecture.

It is common belief that the ideologies of modernity and postmodernity are for the most part contradictory and mutually incompatible. The rift between them is considered historically relatively abrupt. Brown’s hypothesis, by contrast, suggests that this is not and never was the case. He argues for a reinvestigation of the period of transition with the aim of building bridges that will reunite these perceived ‚foes’, discover compatibilities and demonstrate historical mergence and emergence. Both the modern and postmodern appear as concurrent, valid, often complementary although at times divergent interpretations of the same phenomenon. ‚Difficult’ instantiations, like early computer art, can better be acknowledged and restored to their correct historical place.