Presentation at 3rd International Conference on the Image, Poznan, Poland

By Ruth Skilbeck

My paper, ‘Last Things: Reflections on a Photographic Series’, was accepted for presentation at the Third International Conference on the Image, held at the Higher School of Humanities and Journalism, Poznan, Poland, 14-16 September 2012. This annual conference is organized by Common Ground, in collaboration this year with the Polish Mediations Biennale 'The Unknown- Nieznane'. Plenary speakers included: Jasia Reichardt, and Dragan Zivadivia. Virtual presenters included: Professor Michael Friedman. The special theme of the conference was "The Thread to the Unknown."

"Is the Unknown a construct? Can we hold the pretense that human hands and minds organize the realm of the Unknown? Are our constructions replicas of known things that hide the unknown from us?" 

The conference aimed to explore: "the boundaries of language, culture, scientific research, artistic production, and visual communication in relation to the Unknown – Are there structural limits in science and human society that necessarily hide what is unknown from us? Or is the Unknown the complex and enormous form of existence that includes our knowledge and consciousness as one very small element?" http://ontheimage.com

I gave a “virtual presentation” at this conference.

Giving virtual presentations would seem to be a happy medium to enable academic researchers unable to travel, for whatever reasons, to nonetheless participate in international research dialogue, so long as researchers are able to also participate in some conferences in ‘full bodied’ capacity, it allows them to disseminate their research more widely, and reach a larger, global audience.

What it may also mean is a chance to submit one’s paper to a peer-reviewed journal. Linked to the Image conference is a new journal: The International Journal on the Image, whose editors are based at the New School for Social Research, New York City, New York.

Last Things: Reflection on a Photographic Series

Author: Ruth Skilbeck

This reflective practice paper discusses the psychology of perception and the proposition of processing trauma and loss through digital photography focusing on 'Last Things' and 'In the Sky' series of photographic images by the author. The paper reflexively explores the proposition of Art making as means of processing Traumatic experience, of loss, and shock of the unknown, in this case literally as well as symbolically, in images that go beyond words. The room was “empty” but needed to be cleared of the last things. She entered the room with digital camera held to her face as shield and lens and took photographs of objects that she found there. The author learned from her own response, that she turned to the visual, to images, before words; she used her digital SLR camera. This experience shifted her focus, as arts journalist, to reflectively writing of her own experience, and the images made in those moments. Here, she also refers to further published and exhibited photographic works that she has come across by artists and writers as primary image-based responses in the grieving/healing process following bereavement, specifically loss of a mother. She discusses works by Barthes, in his Camera Lucida and Mourning Diary, as well as by contemporary women artists. This is part of her ongoing research into conceptual art, subjectivity, affect, women artists, and the Mother in contemporary arts writing.


Keywords: Theme: The Form of the Image, Digital Photography, Reflective Practice

Stream: The Thread to the Unknown

Presentation Type: Virtual Presentation in English 

Dr. Ruth Skilbeck Lecturer, Journalism and Media Research Centre Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales Sydney, NSW, Australia

Ruth Skilbeck, PhD, is an arts journalism specialist, media producer, and arts journalism scholar. She is a Lecturer in Journalism and Communication on MA programs at the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. Her professional background includes living and working as an arts writer and freelance journalist in Sydney, Dublin, and London, and starting up a Sydney-based media organisation, Arts Features International, specialising in writing on Australian and international contemporary art and culture. Recent awards for her research projects include an Australia Council Visual Arts grant (to write on contemporary Australian women artists); and a grant from the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism (to write on exiled writers, journalism and trauma). Her work is published in anthologies and journals including Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, The International Journal of the Arts in Society, Pacific Journalism Review. Current research focuses on new forms of digital media production and arts writing. She holds a PhD on The Writer’s Fugue: Musicalization, Trauma and Subjectivity in the Literature of Modernity (University of Technology, Sydney), an MA in creative writing (UTS), and BA Hons in Philosophy (University of London).

© Copyright  Ruth Skilbeck 2012
 
Conference website:
http://ontheimage.com/conference-archives/2012-conference/2012cfp.