The departments of Film and Digital Media and History of Art and Visual Culture present an Arts Colloquium:
 

W.J.T. MITCHELL

Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago
 
"Seeing Madness: Insanity, Media, and Visual Culture"

Reception 5-6pm
Lecture 6-8pm

Digital Arts Research Center, room 108

“This is a report on a seminar that I co-taught with Francoise Meltzer at the University of Chicago in the winter of 2011.  The purpose of the course was to put into question the visibility of madness and the madness of visuality, whether in graphic stereotypes, scientific classifications, theatrical spectacle, ritual performance, or cinema and new media.
 
This lecture will trace our thinking about two questions:  1) what is at stake in the visibility of madness?  2) what do movies, as well as pre-cinematic media and extended cinema, bring to the subject of madness, and what does madness bring to them?  The conclusion of the report is an eccentric speculation on the role of smoke, smoking, and the Cold War in American noir mediations of madness.”
 
Professor Mitchell is the editor of the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry and the author of nine books, inlcuding Iconolgy (1987), Art and the Public Sphere (1993), Picture Theory (1994), and What Do Pictures Want? (2005). His work is primarily focused on the interplay of vision and language in art,  literature, and media. The subjects of his articles range from general problems in the theory of representation, to specific issues in cultural politics and  political culture.
 
Sponsored by the Arts Research Institute and the Arts Division


In advance of his talk, Professor Mitchell has asked the attached materials be distributed: