Global Maritime History Conference Programme: Ways of Seeing (Royal Museums Greenwich)

‘The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled’
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)

Greenwich has long been a site intimately connected with processes of looking. From court pageantry to astronomical observation, perfection of a maritime art genre to the training of boys for naval duties, its buildings have developed around concerns for presentation and representation, seeing and being seen.

For the 2015 Queen’s House conference, we take our current contemporary art exhibition as inspiration to think about processes of looking and recording. Unseen: The Lives of Looking by Dryden Goodwin considers seven modern and historic lives that have had a particular relationship with looking: an eye surgeon, planetary explorer, human rights lawyer, contemporary artist, astronomer royal, marine draughtsman, and astronomy assistant. Their lives emerge through Dryden Goodwin’s intense drawn and filmed portraits, the tools and papers of their trades, and objects from the museum’s collection.

Together these lives make us think about how we look in the modern world, what we do and do not choose to see, and what the histories and legacies of these processes might be. The different uses of eye and hand to observe and record, combined with increasingly complex technologies, highlight the ever-changing relationships between what we see and what we know, and the centrality of representation to that relationship.

Draft Programme

09.00: Registration, coffee and viewing Unseen: The Lives of Looking

10.00: Welcome and introduction – Katy Barrett, Royal Museums Greenwich

10.10: Keynote Lecture – Dryden Goodwin

11.00: Coffee and tea

11.30: Session 1 – Seeing from afar

A Glimpse of Mars through fractured illusion: The Materiality of the stereo image – Luci Eldridge, Royal College of Art, London
Seeing Empire in J.F.W. des Barre’s Atlantic Neptune – Emily Casey, University of Delaware
Learning to see from above: Eye-witnessing, disorientation, and the aerial view – William Nelson, University of Toronto

13.00: Lunch and free time to visit exhibition

14.00: Session 2 – Seeing with the body

Cut and Connect: Some parallels between anatomical section, image montage and the theatre of memory Angela Breidbach, Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg
Cubist Ways of Seeing – Maria Hayes, visual artist
Are sketches good visual representations of the world? – Quoc Vuong, Gabriele Jordan, Michael Cox and Yoav Tadmore, Newcastle University

15.30: Coffee and tea

16.00: Session 3 – Seeing at the surface

‘The Body which throbs’: Photography and graphic intervention – Sarah Chapman, University of Plymouth
‘Eluding the All-Seeing Eye’ – Dr Rahma Khazam, art critic and independent scholar
The Contact Sheet in Close up – Jacqui Knight, University of Plymouth

17.30: Wrap up and discussion – led by Damian Smith, RMIT University, Melbourne

18.00: Drinks reception