Showing Making: An International Conference on the Representation of Image Making and Creative Practices in Ritual, Art, Media, and Science
June 18 & 19 2009, Filmmuseum, Amsterdam
If making is thinking, as Richard Sennett has recently argued in his book The Craftsman, studying making can enable us to understand visual artefacts. Paintings, films, computer animation, or scientific images are the results of skilled procedures and complex interaction between makers, materials, tools and technologies, which generate and shape meaning. Mainly based on tacit knowledge though, these procedures and interactions tend to evade textual description and are, although enclosed in the finished product, usually not recorded. How do we get our hands and minds at these material procedures if we want to study the meaning of making?
This conference focuses on visual genres specifically dedicated to the representation of image making; depictions of practice that have a long tradition, ranging from St. Luke painting the Virgin Mary and the making-of as a genre in film to early documentaries and youtube videos. Although these depictions contain information about the social, anthropological, technological, material and aesthetic dimensions of image production, they are also shaped by interesting paradoxes. On the one hand they enable a peak behind the scenes, providing knowledge about image making procedures. On the other hand they invest creation with magical qualities and mystify the actions of image-makers. As mediated constructs, they display ideal aspects of creative processes and tend to omit failure or routine - as art works they foreground self-referentiality as critical strategy. Taking these aspects into consideration showing making can be turned into a theoretical tool to study image making as intellectual and meaningful practice, pushing past general considerations of materiality in visual studies today.
Renowned specialists from art history, film studies, anthropology, religion studies and history of science have been invited to study the epistemic and performative elements of showing making, to analyze how image-making procedures and technologies are represented, and to create a framework in which the visualizations of image making and creative practices can be theorized.
The Filmmuseum presents an accompanying program featuring early films of artists and craftsman at work in different historical and geographical settings.
Keynote speakers:
Timothy Ingold, Social Anthropology, University of Aberdeen
H. Perry Chapman, Art History, University of Delaware
Pamela H. Smith, History, Columbia University
Donald Swearer, Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, Mass.
John Wyver, Illuminations & University of Westminster, London
Download:
Full programme download (pdf)