Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Images and Information

Artistic engagement with “factual” evidence necessarily unsettles the relationship between society and its creative interpretation. Contemporary scholarship recognizes that pictorial, statistical and textual data produced in the name of science, technology and research can be considered similarly. How might this kind of creative thinking about information and its representation be deployed toward ethical and political ends in a variety of disciplines? What new critical tools do we need to take account of access, information flow and interaction with images that result from new digital developments? For instance, analysis of the digital offered by media theory has caused us to rethink the methodologies traditionally employed to analyze visual art, poetry and music. What further analyses might we introduce across other disciplines, in our ongoing response to and interpretation of image and information, either in freshly-researched or already-criticized form?