Lecture series: Facing Forward #2 "FUTURE IMAGE"

Following the successful lecture series and publications Right About Now: Art & Theory in the 1990s and Now is the Time: Art & Theory in the 21st Century, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the University of Amsterdam, de Appel arts centre, W139, the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, and Metropolis M, jointly present a new series of lectures and debates: "Facing Forward: Art & Theory from a Future Perspective."

This series and its forthcoming publication will discuss art and theory of the future, focusing on seven themes that together envision possible futures for contemporary art and theory, and offering innovative models and strategies with which to look at our collective future.

Over the course of seven evenings, renowned international speakers will share their perspectives on the topics of Future Tech, Future Image, Future History, Future Freedom, Future Museum, Future City and ultimately, Future’s Future.

Part 2: "Future Image", with James Elkins and Jalal Toufic

Speakers: James Elkins, Jalal Toufic

Moderator: to be confirmed

The fact that we will live – or are already living – in a culture dominated by images is an assumption which is often used to paint a bleak picture of the future. In contemporary popular culture, the future is portrayed as an endless series of screen landscapes which transmit a flow of images that completely inundates defenseless viewers. Will the image really become so ubiquitous in the future, or will verbal culture based on experience gain more ground? And how will art be influenced by these developments? The recent and contemporary practice of art has placed the image in perspective, by both showing the strength of the image and by embracing production methods of art which are based more on text and processes. What is the future of the image in the visual arts?

About the speakers:

JAMES ELKINS is an art historian and art critic. He holds a PhD in Art History, which he finished in 1989. Since then he has been teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is currently E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism. His writing focuses on the history and theory of images in art, science, and nature. Some of his books are exclusively on fine art (What Painting Is, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?), other publications discuss scientific and non-art images, writing systems, and archaeology (The Domain of Images, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them). He has also edited numerous volumes, among which the series The Art Seminar, on urgent topics in art history and aesthetics. Current projects include a series called the Stone Summer Theory Institutes, a book called The Project of Painting: 1900-2000, and a series called Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Art. His most recent book is What Photography Is, written against Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida.

JALAL TOUFIC is a thinker and a mortal to death. He was born in 1962 in Beirut or Baghdad and died before dying in 1989 in Evanston, Illinois. He is the author of Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), Over-Sensitivity (1996; 2nd ed., 2009), Forthcoming (2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (2002), Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You (2005), ‘Âshûrâ’: This Blood Spilled in My Veins (2005), Undeserving Lebanon (2007), The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (2009), Graziella: The Corrected Edition (2009), What Is the Sum of Recurrently? (2010), and The Portrait of the Pubescent Girl: A Rite of Non-Passage (2011). Many of his books, most of which were published by Forthcoming Books, are available for download as PDF files on his website: www.jalaltoufic.com. He is presently a guest for the year 2011 of the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD.

Take the conformation e-mail with you to the event. This is your entrance ticket.

See here for more info.