To confront the changes catalyzed by the introduction of new digital technologies and the move toward virtualization and simulation and thinking with the new findings in neuroscience relating to perception, this interdisciplinary workshop takes this dynamic moment of change as an important opportunity to reconsider forms of mediation, modes of perception, and sensory experience of visual and material culture by concerted questioning of what is new, what is global, and what remains local, differenced, embodied, affective, and material about cultural interfaces and interactions. The proposed workshop is timed to coincide with and take synergistic advantage of the College of Letters and Science’s Year of the Humanities (2009-10), Bringing together a broad range of specialists in the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Sciences (i.e., from Visual Culture Studies, Material Culture Studies, Art, Art History, Afro-American Studies, African Studies, Classics, Communication Arts, East Asian Languages and Literatures, English, French and Italian, German, Languages and Cultures of Asia, Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies, Psychology, and Neuroscience), the seminar will compare the complex, changing, and mediated modes of perspective and experience historically, cross-culturally, and trans-disciplinarily.
