a lecture by WJT Mitchell, Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago

WJT Mitchell. Photo by Domenico Aronica.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

University Museum of Contemporary Art   from 5:30 pm to 6:30 pm
*Free and open to the public

"The Future of the Image" is an attempt to understand the various temporalities of the image--historical, prophetic, diagnostic--by surveying the way the entire history of the image has been punctuated at various points by the figure of the animal.

Departing from Jacques Ranciere's recent book by this title, the lecture examines not only some possible and probable futures for image technologies, but also the way futures as such are constituted by image-making.

WJT Mitchell is professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology. He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues.

This event has been made possible by the University Museum of Contemporary Art and the Umass English Department in collaboration with the following entities:

Art History and English at Amherst College, Five Colleges, Inc., Humanities Program at Hampshire College, English at Mount Holyoke College, Art at Smith College, and Art History, English, German and Scandinavian Studies, and the Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.