School of Visual Arts presents Critical Information, an interdisciplinary graduate student conference examining the contemporary dialogue between art, media and society. Sponsored by the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department at SVA, the Critical Information conference provides a forum for current scholarship exploring the juncture of media, theory, criticism and the visual arts. Lawrence Weschler, director emeritus of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, will deliver the keynote address, “A Typology of Convergences: Towards a Unified Field Theory of Cultural Transmission.”
Conference panels will take place from 10:00am , 3:30pm at the Art Criticism and Writing Department, 132 West 21st Street, 6th floor, and the keynote address will take place at the SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street, 4:00 , 5:30pm.
Weschler was a staff writer at The New Yorker for over twenty years, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award (for cultural reporting in 1988 and magazine reporting in 1992) and was also a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award (1998). Recent books include an expanded edition of Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (University of California Press, 2009), comprising thirty years of conversations with Robert Irwin, a companion volume, True to Life: Twenty Five Years of Conversation with David Hockney (University of California Press, 2009) and the collection Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative (Counterpoint, 2012).
Under the keynote address theme “A Typology of Convergences,” the conference’s international roster of participants from a wide cross-section of disciplines will present papers and projects on the following six panels: Of the Word; Indented Margins; Artwork/Network; Art and Sensuality; Identity: Construction, Transmission, Rejection and Concerns in the Age of Media and Information: Its Effects on Culture and Communication.
Free and open to the public.