A series of public lectures by distinguished scholars in Visual and Cultural Studies

European Humanities University and the Contemporary Art Centre
present a series of public lectures by distinguished scholars
in Visual and Cultural Studies

Friday 23 April,18.00, CAC Reading Room
James Elkins “Can pictures think?”

James Elkins – E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (USA). 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?). Others include scientific and non-art images, writing systems, and archaeology (The Domain of Images, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them), and some are about natural history (How to Use Your Eyes). Current projects include a series called the Stone Summer Theory Institutes, a book called The Project of Painting: 1900-2000, a series called Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Art, and a book written against Camera Lucida.
The lecture will be followed by the presentation of the book Studying the Visual World (translated into Russian – EHU Press, 2010)

Tuesday 27 April, 18.00, CAC Reading Room
Lev Manovich “Visualization as The New Language of Theory”

Lev Manovich is a Professor at the Visual Arts Department, University of California – San Diego (UCSD) where he teaches practical courses in digital art as well as history ad theory of digital culture. Manovich is the author of Software Takes Command (2008), Black Box – White Cube (Merve Verlag Berlin, 2005), Soft Cinema DVD (The MIT Press, 2005), The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001), Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture (Chicago University Press, 1993) as well as 94 articles which have been published in 30+ countries and reprinted over 300 times .The Language of New Media is translated into Italian, Spanish, Polish, Slovenian, Latvian, Greek, Korean and Lithuanian. In 2007 Manovich has founded Software Studies Initiative in order to facilitate the work in the new emerging field of software studies. The lab is also developing a new paradigm of Cultural Analytics: data mining and visualization of patterns in large cultural data sets.
The lecture will be followed by the presentation of the book The Language of New Media (translated into Lithuanian)

Thursday 29 April, 18.00, CAC Reading Room
Scott Lash “Capitalist Power and the Social Imaginary”

Scott Lash is a professor of sociology and cultural studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His books include The End of Organized Capitalism (with John Urry, 1987), Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity (co-edited, 1987), Sociology of Postmodernism (1990), Modernity and Identity (co-edited, 1992), Economies of Signs and Space (with John Urry, 1994), Reflexive Modernization (with Beck and Giddens, 1994), Global Modernities (co-edited, 1995), Risk, Environment and Modernity (co-edited, 1995), Detraditionalization (co-edited, 1996), Time and Value (co-edited, 1998) and Another Modernity, A Different Rationality (1999). He has also has been an editor of Theory, Culture and Society – the journal and the book series – since 1989. His books have been translated into ten languages.

Saturday 1 May, 18.00, CAC Reading Room
Janet Wolff “The question of a sociological poetics: metaphors, models and theory”

Janet Wolff is Professor of Cultural Sociology and the director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts at the University of Manchester. She was the founding director of the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, where she taught from 1973 to 1987. She was Director of the PhD program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University Rochester, New York (1991-2001), and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Columbia University (2001-6). She has written substantially on the sociology of art and culture, aspects of cultural production, gender, modernity, and early twentieth-century art. Her books include Hermeneutic Philosophy and the Sociology of Art (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1975), The Social Production of Art (Macmillan, London 1981), Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art (Allen & Unwin, London 1983), Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Polity Press and the University of California Press 1990), Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism (Polity Press and Yale University Press 1995), AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in England and the U.S. (Cornell University Press 2003) and The Aesthetics of Uncertainty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)

This series is sponsored by HESP OSI and held in the framework of HESP Challenge seminar Visual Studies of Immedia: Exploring the Postmodern Immediacy of mass media (EHU, Laboratory of Visual and Cultural Studies)
For more information on these and other events, please visit the websites at: www.ehu.lt, www.viscult.ehu.lt

All events are free and open to the public.