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This interdisciplinary conference examines the way that coding and representation are enmeshed. Cultural instances will be examined from the nineteenth century to the present. Fine art, graphic imagery, film and photography, literature, scientific concepts and political form will be considered. In an era of electrical, and eventually digital, communication, the use of codes and machine code in transmission became ubiquitous. The conference considers representation in this broad range of categories in the light of the constraints and possibilities of code. This conference coincides with the last few days of the exhibition currently on at the Guildhall Art Gallery, London ‘Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy’. Those attending the conference will have the chance to view the exhibition on Friday evening, after the opening keynote paper to be given at the Guildhall Art Gallery by Mary Ann Doane (author of The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency and the Archive, 2002). The second day of the conference is held at The Courtauld Institute for Art with a concluding keynote paper by Gail Day (author of Dialectical Passions: Negation and Postwar Art Theory, 2010) and Steve Edwards (author of Martha Rosler, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, 2012).
We are grateful for the generous support of the AHRC; the McDougall Fund; King’s College London, Faculty Research Committee; and Media History.
The exhibition and conference emerge from the 2013-17 research project, ‘Scrambled Messages: the Telegraphic Imaginary 1857-1900’. We acknowledge the generosity of the AHRC in funding this research.
More info and registration: http://courtauld.ac.uk/event/coding-and-representation
