Visual Imagination Conference 2016

An international conference at Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

21 – 22 May 2016

The visual imagination is one of the most powerful human capacities.

It plays a vital role in art and literature, religion and science, and has been studied and celebrated by artists, writers, philosophers, psychologists, and, now, neuroscientists.

The event, which is the culmination of the AHRC-funded research project, ‘The Eye’s Mind’, brought together leaders in all these fields to shape a new and more integrated understanding of this mysterious mental resource.

Keynote speakers included Paul Broks (psychology), Joel Pearson (neuroscience) and Michael Tye (philosophy).

Conference_programme

Conference blog

Posters and presentations

Susan Aldworth – The art of imagination

Renate Brosch – What we ‘see’ when reading literary narratives: default visualization and vivid images

S.C. Chapman – Electrodynamics and astrophysics: Thinking in pictures

Juliana Dresvina – What Julian saw: the re-examination of the bodily and ghostly sight in Julian of Norwich’s “Showings”

Gyöngyvér Horváth – Visual imagination and the narrative image. The art historian’s approach

Xiaoyan Hu – Painting as the image of mind

Maithilee Kunda – Visual imagination – A view from artificial intelligence

Radu Leca – Spatial immersion through iconographic cues in seventeenth-century Japanese images

Matthew MacKisack – Imagery from Ancient to Modern, and back

Fiona Macpherson– Imagination and perception

Shaun May – Visual imagination in actor training

Bence Nanay – Mental imagery in the perception of visual art

Nick Watkins – (A)phantasia and SDAM: Personal, scientific and human perspectives

Nuala Watt – Partial sight and poetic form

Crawford Winlove  – Neural correlates of visual imagery

Paul Worthington – The eye’s mind: Visual imaginations neuroscience and the humanities

David Zagoury – The teratological imagination: Fantasia and the creation of monsters in Renaissance art theory

Adam Zeman – The Eye’s Mind: visual imagination neuroscience and the humanitities

Session recordings