Intro
Vision and Depiction 2024 took place from 7 to 9 February 2024. There are two ways to relive the experience:
- The program contains the abstract book but also a great number of video recordings.
- The photos made by Yuguang Zhao greatly captured the atmosphere.
After two conferences The Skin of Things 2018 and 2021 that focussed on the depiction and perception of material properties, we decided to broaden the scope and organise Vision and Depiction 2024. As this event lies in the past, the information below is not so relevant anymore.
Venue & transport
The conference will take place in the building of Industrial Design Engineering, adress is Landbergstraat 15. It is located on the TU Delft campus which is surprisingly close to the city center and train station. So close that you can actually walk everything. But if you want to take a bus, you can take them either at the train station or at the next stop Zuidpoort. Two stops further and you’ll already be at the venue.
For transportation planning you can best use the website or app of the national railways NS which contains all public transport scheduling. There are direct trains between Delft and Schiphol. If the travel planner suggest to take a so-called ‘intercity direct’ I would ignore it as you need to buy a ticked supplement and it travels via Rotterdam where you need to transfer.
About
This conference about pictorial production and perception aims to bring artists, designers, and scientists together to discuss various overlapping themes. These themes are based on our Vision and Depiction framework that has been developed while teaching about perception and communication. The framework describes the form and content of pictures. For now, we envision talk sessions centring around the elements of the framework. Within these themes, we hope to evoke discussions on both the medium and representation but also in the directions of semiotics and iconography and further contextual contemplation.
Information for presenters
Poster presentation
Posters should be prepaired in A0 portrait orientation (118.8 cm high and 84 cm wide). If you want, you can print your poster in Delft at CSinBKCity, here are the prices. In order to do so:
- Send your poster to info@csinbkcity.nl
- Let them know that it concerns a “Poster for conference Maarten Wijntjes”
- Latest ordering date is 6 Februari 18:30. It will be ready the next morning and can be picked up across the train station at adres Westvest 47.
Oral presentation
You can bring your own laptop or a USB. Please check whether everything works during the break before your session. Duration of talks is 12 minutes and then 3 minutes time for questions.
Special activities
Workshop by Delft Design Drawing
The design education in Delft has a long tradition of design drawing. During the workshop, they will ensure that you will not only contemplate but also practice Vision and Depiction.
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When Images Remain
Before heading out for dinner, we will have a short evening walk to the TU Delft library to visit the on-campus art installation ‘When Images Remain’. In the photo below a light emitting strip can be seen, which is actually a window towards the TU Delft heritage collection. Here, When Images Remain shows a collection of magic lantern slides used in art eduction around 1930, complemented with images used in contemporary art education, interpolated by a generative prompting: the Vision and Depiction framework in action.
Participants
We hope to attract a wide variety of scientists and artists. Here is an indication of potential disciplines that we envision.
- Artists/designers: Every artist/designer who is involved in visual culture either be reflecting upon, or experimenting with various forms and techniques of visual communication.
- Vision science: Researchers involved in visual perception related to the arts or more specifically to any of the Vision and Depiction framework elements.
- Art history: Scholars from (technical) art history investigating various aspects of motifs and/or medium. Also subjects such as style, and the mystery of mastery are relevant.
- Computer science: Computer vision and graphics has a long tradition of image synthesis that has clear parallels with the longer art history of depiction.
- Digital humanities: With the emergences of large open access image databases, a new field has emerged around the computational analysis of image collections and more recently also using AI both as analytical tools but also as subject matter.
- Archeology and Anthropology: The usage of images, pictorial traditions and conventions throughout various (historical) cultures.
The keynote collective
We are very excited to host a group of artists and scientists that represent both the core and the breadth of Vision and Depiction. While we may add one or two extra, we can now confirm the participation of the artists:
… and scientists:
- Ann-Sophie Lehmann - Art History
- Hannah Smithson - Vision Science
- Paul Pettitt - Archeology
… and our special guest:
Themes
We have a top-down idea about our ideal set op topics, although this will critically depend on the submissions we attract. In reality the program will likely be also driven by a bottom up approach where we cluster the available contributions into meaningful units. But before reality hits, these topics would ideally serve as pillars:
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Texture: Although the word ‘texture’ may have different meanings in different disciplines, the structure of patterns seems a universally fascinating. The 3D texture of paint, generative algorithms replicating natural phenomena, ornamental patterns, traces of various media (such as half tone dots or etch lines), interactions between textures in the medium and textures in the representation, texture bias in deep neural networks, these are just a few examples that bring together vision and depiction.
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Color and Light: Both color and light have their own traces throughout visual culture, e.g. the treatment and meaning of shadows, the invention of pigments (from Vanta black to DayGlow fluorescent), the colour of shadows, the depiction of time of day, and so on.
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Space: While Apple just announced the ‘revolutionary’ Vision Pro, there is a long history of revolutions related to pictorial space. Choices and conventions relating to the 3D composition of scenes and the perception of space and spatial relations can be studied from both vision and depiction perspectives.
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Material: As opposed to space, there is much less known about the depiction of material, although in recent years many new studies have been published. It still is one of the most fascinating themes both in art history and in contemporary image creation and artistic practice.
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Context and meaning: All the formal elements lead up to meaning and reference which also implies the importance of context. Not only does the pattern of colours evoke human recognition and identification of the depicted motif, i.e. the study of visual object recognition, the motif also refers to something outside the framed canvas, e.g. to other cultural modalities (e.g. literature).
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Medium vs Motif / real vs reproduction: There is always an interplay between the physical manifestation of an artwork and what it represents. This interplay becomes even more interesting when considering reproductions, either digital or physical.
Location and venue
The conference will take place in the city of Vermeer, Delft, which is both a unique historical city in the Netherlands and hosts the Delft University of Technology. The city easy to reach by bike, car and train, and is a 38 minutes train ride away from Schiphol (Amsterdam) Airport. Everything is so close-by that in most cases you do not even need a bicycle. When walking from the train station to the campus you actually pass by the place Vermeer painted View on Delft, although it looks a bit different nowadays. The main conference will be on campus, but we may have some activities elsewhere.
Timeline
- Abstract submission opens: 15 October 2023
- Abstract submission closes: 15 November 2023
- Notification of Acceptance: 30 November 2023
- Early bird registration: 15 December 2023
- Conference: 7-9 February 2024
Registration
Registration is now open and can be done here. If you also submit an abstract, you should use mention the title of you contribution in the registration form.
We have some funding but to cover the total cost of the conference we need to ask for a registration fee:
| Type | Early bird (until 15 december) | Late |
|---|---|---|
| Full rate | €120 | €170 |
| Reduced | €70 | €100 |
| Waiver | free | free |
Waivers are available for (a limited amount of) artists. Please reach out if you have questions about the waiver program.
Cancellation policy
- Cancellation before 7 December: 100% refund excl. €10 admin.
- Cancellation before 7 Januari: 50% refund excl. €10 admin.
- Cancellation after 7 Januari: no refund because by that time we have already paid contracts.
Online
The talks will be recorded and shared (if speakers permit), but participation and interaction is aimed to be in-person.
Abstract submission and presentation types
Please submit a 300 word abstract of your contribution between 15 October and 15 November 2023. You can only submit one abstract as first author, but as many as you want as co-author. During the submission process you can share your preference for a poster or oral presentation. It could happen that the preferred oral presentations exceed the time we have for the conference. In that case we will assign posters on the basis of the reviewer assessments. We hope that poster presentations will not be seen as something less than oral presentations, posters are great media to facilitate direct and unrestricted discussions.
Instructions
- After submitting your email adres in the link above you will be emailed further instructions.
- Do not forget to register for the conference here as we will only review abstracts of registered participants.
- Only exception of the above is when you are an artist, in that case you do not need to register prior to submitting your abstract, but will receive a waiver after a selection procedure. In case you do not receive a waiver, you will be allowed to register for the early bird fee.
- You can only submit one abstract as main author.
- You can give a preference of poster or oral presentation.
Contact
Organizing committee
Maarten Wijntjes
Catelijne van Middelkoop
Nim Goede
Gul Onat<>
Funding
- Dutch Research Council (NWO), project number 276-54-001
- TU Delft - Library
- Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology
- The Dutch Data Prize
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