What does it mean to be visible? Answers to this question depend on cultures, eras, disciplines, and the agendas of those who speak. The visible: is it what can be seen, or rather what is seen? Artists, writers, poets, philosophers, and scientists have different vocabularies for visibility. Impassable borders often separate these fields with walls marking epistemological, ethical, cultural, and ideological divides.
To understand these issues, we must first consider the boundaries that reveal visibility and visible things. Of course, there are boundaries between different discourses of visibility. But what is beyond the border limits of the visible? Since existence is not limited to the visible, is visibility only a mere surface of the superficial? Then why does visibility have such a privileged status? The root theo in theory means to see: is knowing seeing? Is knowing seeing-something?
It is therefore necessary to investigate the boundaries of the visible. This is a philosophical problem as such, but also a scientific and epistemological problem. Today we have urgent contemporary questions: visibility in the era of the Internet, supra-visibility in the era of surveillance cameras and drones, the contemporary myth of immediacy in social media. Is invisibility on the other side of these boundaries?
Organizers: Jean-Christian Bourcart, Anne-Lise Large + François Soulages
Moderators: Jean-Christian Bourcart + Anne-Lise Large
Schedule:
2:30
Susan Oyama, Professor Emeritus, John Jay College & the Graduate Center, CUNY, New York The World Looks Back
3:15
Vibeke Jensen, Artist, New York
[In]visibility Conundrum
3:45
Avi Gupta, Director of Photography for US News/World report & Photographer, Washington
In One’s Element
4:15
Coffee
4:30pm
Jean-Christian Bourcart, Artist Photographer, New York
Seeing With One Own Eyes
5:00pm
Maria Burns, Filmmaker, New York
Onus
5:30pm
Marie-Lise Paoli, Professor at Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France
Surviving Images in a North American Landscape
6:00pm
End
Date + Times
Monday, June 8
2:30—6pm
Admission
Free
Location
Main Space
51 Bergen St