Registration deadline: Sep 20, 2018

Human societies have always produced artefacts and events intended to stand out visually, to command visual attention. In describing the achievements of remarkable or unusual visibility, the archaeologies and ethnographies of visual conspicuousness have traditionally assumed cultural distance between the researcher and her subject such that the researcher ought to mistrust or resist her own evaluative sensibilities – rooted as they are in a different visual culture. The conference will address the present standing of this heuristic stricture by discussing the procedures and theoretical underpinnings of reconstructing the visual conspicuousness or authority of artefacts from remote cultures.

Speakers:

Gregory Currie (York), Whitney Davis (UC Berkeley), Jonas Grethlein (Heidelberg), Marilynn Johnson (FIU Miami), Marion Lauschke (HU Berlin), Lambros Malafouris (Oxford), Sam Rose (St. Andrews), Jakub Stejskal (FU Berlin), Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge)

Programme:

27 September

10:00am

Introduction

10:15am

MARILYN STRATHERN, Making Invisible: The Limitations of Enquiry

11:15am – coffee break

11:45am

LAMBROS MALAFOURIS, Material Engagement and the Prehistory of Pictorial Skill: A Cognitive Ecology of Forms and Material Signs

12:45pm – lunch break

2:30pm

MARION LAUSCHKE, What Images Afford

3:30pm – coffee break

4pm

WHITNEY DAVIS, Pictorial Authority: How It Looks and What It’s Like

28 September

10:15am

JONAS GRETHLEIN, Aesthetics in Greco-Roman Antiquity? Ancient Visual Culture and the Phenomenology of Pictorial Seeing

11:15am – coffee break

11:45am

GREGORY CURRIE, Bowers, Handaxes, Depictions

12:45pm – lunch break

2:15pm

MARILYNN JOHNSON, Philosophical Perspectives on Communication by Prehistoric Bodily Adornment

3:15pm – coffee break

3:30pm

SAM ROSE, The Expansion of the Author

4:30pm – coffee break

5:00pm

JAKUB STEJSKAL, Alien Aesthetics: The Heuristic Implications of Radical Remoteness

The conference is organized by Jakub Stejskal (jakub.stejskal@fu-berlin.de) and supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG). There are no registration fees, but please e-mail Luca Banhierl (ba0lu@zedat.fu-berlin.de) by September 20 to register.