Visual Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers - Tapa dura

Visual Culture Studies presents 13 engaging and detailed interviews with some of the most influential intellectuals working today on the objects, subjects, media and environments of visual culture.

Exploring historical and theoretical questions of vision, the visual and visuality, this collection reveals the provocative insights of these thinkers as they have contributed in exhilarating ways to disturbing the parameters of more traditional areas of study across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In so doing they have key roles in establishing Visual Culture Studies as a significant field of inquiry.

Each interview draws out the interests and commitments of the interviewee to critically interrogate the past, present and future possibilities of Visual Culture Studies and visual culture itself. The discussions concentrate on three broad areas of deliberation: 

• The intellectual and institutional status of Visual Culture Studies.
• The histories, genealogies and archaeologies of visual culture and its study.
• The diverse ways in which the experiences of vision, and the visual, can be articulated and mobilized to political, aesthetic and ethical ends.

This book demonstrates the intellectual significance of Visual Culture Studies, and the ongoing importance of the study of the visual.

Marquard Smith is Reader in Visual and Material Culture at Kingston University, London, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Visual Culture.

Marq is Founding Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture; Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture; publishes widely on the visual and cultural study of bodies, technologies, and sexualities in Modernity; has monographs forthcoming with Yale University Press and Reaktion Books; is supervising PhD students on projects around Visual Culture Studies, the body, technology, the human and post-humanism; and is an AHRC Peer Review Panel Member. Marquard Smith was educated at the Universities of Northumbria (BA Hons) and Leeds (MA, PhD). His research concerns lie in two sometimes interwoven areas of interest: the intellectual, institutional, and political tasks of Visual Culture Studies, Cultural Studies, and Art History as interdisciplinary fields of inquiry; and the changing dynamics between bodies, technologies, and sexualities in the visual, material, and immaterial culture of Modernity. Recent major publications are detailed below. His forthcoming single-authored monographs are The Erotic Doll: A Tale of Artificial Love (Yale University Press) and Bio Art: The Future of Life (Reaktion), and he has collections in development on archives, interdisciplinarity, and hope. Prior to arriving at Westminster, Marq was Reader in Visual and Material Culture and Head of Public Programmes in the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture at Kingston University, London, where he was co-director of the Visual and Material Culture Research Centre, and Founding Editor of KIOSK, a magazine of art, design, and architecture. He has also taught at Birkbeck, Middlesex, Goldsmiths, Leeds Met, and University of Leeds, and spent time working in the world of commercial publishing as a Commissioning Editor for Reaktion Books. Marq was a Founder (1992) and Editor (1992-98) of the Cultural Studies journal parallax (Routledge/Taylor & Francis), and the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the international peer-refereed Journal of Visual Culture (Sage, 2000-onwards). As part of this ongoing commitment to developing collaborative projects, he is currently involved in heading three arts and humanities network projects on: Visual Culture Studies in Europe; Bio-Cultures; and the Network for Editors of Interdisciplinary Journals. Marq has programmed conferences and events at The ICA, Tate, The Whitechapel Gallery, and The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamsburgh, Mass, USA. He has made contributions to recent events at: MIT; Bilgi University, Turkey; University of Cambridge; European Humanities University, Lithuania; Hong Ik, Seoul, South Korea; Goldsmiths; ICA, London; UC Berkeley; The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute; Universitat Zurich, Switzerland; University of London; Victoria & Albert Museum; Centre d'Art Santa Monica, Barcelona; Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design; The London Consortium; and the Whitechapel Gallery. Dr Marquard Smith would welcome approaches from students wishing to develop MRes and PhD projects on Visual Culture Studies, the Post-Humanities, and bodies, technologies, and sexualities in the visual, material and immaterial culture of Modernity. Marq is currently Director of Studies or Supervisor for a number of PhD projects including: Bjorn Franke, 'Post-Humanism, Techne, Phenomenology' (RCA) Juliette Kristensen, 'Writing Acts: Body, Technology, and Practice' (Kingston) Ghassan Massri, 'Lebanon: Privacy, Curation, Publicness' (Westminster) Kirsten Norrie, 'Your Body is Out There! Animating Artificial Anatomy (Prosthesis) in the Everyday Extension of Performative Human Form and Identity, from Dada to Jimmy Durham (The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford) Portia Ungely, 'Leon Bakst: The Intersection of Orientalism and Visual Culture in Avant-Garde Paris' (Kingston) Julijonas Urbonas, 'Gravitational Aesthetics' (RCA) Gemma Ward, 'Installation, Phenomenology, Time' (Westminster)