Polar Visual Culture: An International Conference is a two day event to take place in the Arts Building Lecture Theatre of the University of St Andrews on 17-18 June 2011. This conference brings together a diverse, internationally recognised group of scholars from the humanities and social sciences to present new research on the visual culture of polar exploration. The polar environment, and its potential destruction, is now receiving heightened attention in the mass media, with extensive scientific study and urgent results on climate change reported daily. Our objective is to focus attention upon the unique, prolific and hitherto under-examined visual culture - painting and graphic illustration, expedition and frontier narratives, installations and poetic geographies, films and photography - that the expeditions to the two polar regions have inspired since the early nineteenth century, and which forms a fundamental part of our perception of these environments. We invite all those interested in these themes to register for this important conference and join us in St Andrews.
Confirmed speakers include:
Thomas Joshua Cooper (Artist and Senior Researcher, Glasgow School of Art)
TRUE and other Polar Stories two years on the ice
Jan Anders Diesen (Lillehammer University College, Norway)
The Cinematic Race to the Poles: Roald Amundsen”s South Pole Expedition (1910-12)
and Other Polar Films in the Heroic Era
Robert Dixon (University of Sydney)
‘Shackleton's Marvellous Moving Pictures’: The Ontology of the Early Travelogue
Luke Gartlan (University of St Andrews)
Fragile Views: The Scottish National Antarctic Expedition, 1902-04
Elena Glasberg (Princeton University)
Chiasmus Antarctica
Sophie Gordon (Royal Photograph Collection, Windsor Castle)
At the Ends of the Earth: Polar Images and Royal Collections
Matthew Jarron (University of Dundee)
From Dundee with the Whalers: Early Visual Representations of the Arctic and Antarctic
Tyrone Martinsson (University of Gothenburg, Sweden)
The Andrée Polar Expedition – With Camera towards Death
Shane McCorristine (NUI Maynooth and Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge)
Icarian Icescapes and Daedalean Dreamscapes: Envisioning Victorian Arctic Exploration
Alexandra Neel (Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles)
Performing Antarctica
Russell A. Potter (Rhode Island College, Providence)
From Panoramas to Early Cinema: Arctic Spectacles 1893-1930
Alistair Rider (University of St Andrews)
Ice, Meltwater and Mutability in Contemporary Art
Camille Seaman (Artist, Emeryville, California)
Artist Presentation
For further information please contact Dr Luke Gartlan (lg321@st-andrews.ac.uk)