The keyword for this year’s World Picture Conference is ‘models’. Organized in cooperation with the ICI Berlin, it stages a collaboration with the current ICI Research Project, which reflects upon modelling practices across different fields, with a particular focus on the role of reduction and its critical potentials.

A model can be an object of admiration, a miniature or prototype, an abstracted phenomenon or applied theory, a literary text — practically anything from a human body on a catwalk to a mathematical description of a system. It can elicit desire, provide understanding, guide action or thought. Despite the polysemy of the term, models across disciplines and fields share a fundamental characteristic: their effect depends on a specific relational quality. A model is always a model of or for something else, and the relation is reductive insofar as it is selective and considers only certain aspects of both object and model. The literary examples of maps made to the scale of a territory described by Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges humorously point to the absurdity of thinking that models keep improving by becoming less reductive until they eventually coincide with their target.

For further details of the ICI Focus ‘Models’, please see https://www.ici-berlin.org/projects/models.

In English

9:30 Welcome and Introduction

9:30-11:30 Session: Corporeality (Lecture Hall)
Jules O’Dwyer (chair)

Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell
Penis Models and Model Penises: Queer Exceptionalism and Achieving a Trans Ideal

Rizvana Bradley
Technesis of the Flesh

Lawrence Alexander
From Girl Head to Blackface: Cosmetic Models of Race and Gender in Hito Steyerl

Kanika Lawton
Can’t Exist: Trans Negativity After the Tipping Point

11:45-13:15 Session: Worlding (Lecture Hall)
Meghan Sutherland (chair)

Seb Franklin
Modeling Racial Capitalism in 1969

Jennifer Pranolo
Ian Cheng’s Live Simulations

Lauren Cramer
Skin Deep

11:45-13:15 Session: Risk (Library)
Elizabeth Wijaya (chair)

Tomas Percival
Prison Records: Unveiling Models of Risky Subjects

Bhaskar Sarkar
Homo Financius

Bishnupriya Ghosh
Modeling for Complexity: The Co-Production of the HIV-1 Macromolecule

13:15-15:00 Lunch break

15:00-16:30 Session: Muses (Lecture Hall)
Meghan Sutherland (chair)

Max Cavitch
The Model Mother in James McNeil Whistler’s ‘Arrangements’

Sam Dolbear
Looking Beyond the Subject with a Commodity on its Head: On Doris von Schönthan

Francis Whorrall-Campbell
Isa Genzken, Adorno, and the Dollhouse of Gender

15:00-16:30 Session: Platform (Library)
Elizabeth Wijaya (chair)

Markos Hadjioannou
Activating the Minor Image

Jillian Vasko
Stars–They’re Just Like Us: Celebrities, ASMR, and OnlyFans

Sudeep Dasgupta
Aesthetic Experience between Political Fictions and the Realities of the Image

16:30-17:00 Coffee break

17:00-18:00 Session: Content (Lecture Hall)
Veronica Fitzpatrick (chair)

Brian Price
Moral Models

Eugenie Brinkema
Lydia Tár, Role Model

18:00-19:30 Coffee break

19:30 Keynote: Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
Models as Media of Worlding in Sadie Benning and Fernand Deligny

Introduction: Christoph F. E. Holzhey

9:30-11:00 Session: Scale (Lecture Hall)
Elizabeth Wijaya (chair)

Steven Swarbrick &Jean-Thomas Tremblay
Ecological Thought Against the Wall

Nicolaj Lübecker
Alain Resnais, Henri Laborit and the World-Brain Feedback Loop

Abe Geil
Empathy at Scale

9:30-11:00 Session: Re-vision (Library)
Ian Fleishman (chair)

Ruochen Bo
Modeling in Remaking: Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon

Mynt Marsellus
Hitchcock as Model: De Palma as Body Double

Manuele Gragnolati & Francesca Southerden
Sex, Power, and Capital: Keats’s and Pasolini’s Rep(l)otting of Boccaccio

11:30-13:00 Session: Uprising (Lecture Hall)
Meghan Sutherland (chair)

Kyle Stevens
The Ontological Insistence of Camp

Ian Fleishman
Model Citizens: The Pornographic Landscapes of Roosevelt’s Tree Army

11:30-13:00 Session: Artifact (Library)
B Camminga (chair)

Ruth Ramsden-Karelse
Gays, Girls, and Ghosts: Remodelling the World with the Archived Photographs of Kewpie of District Six

Maria Teresa Costa
How to Deal with the Destruction and (Re)construction of Models in Art Histories

Alessandra Raengo
Black Art and Self-Same Ecologies of Art Care

13:00-15:00 Lunch Break

15:00-17:00 Session: Things (Lecture Hall)
Veronica Fitzpatrick (chair)

Georgina Evans
Modelling the Volcano on Film

Amy Rust
Animating Props

John David Rhodes
Prop Value

15:00-17:00 Session: Mediation (Library)
Ruth Ramsden-Karelse (chair)

Roberto Filippello
Queer Stealth: Fashioning Fugitivity in Palestine

Stephen Woo
Modeling the Counter/Forensic Gaze

Matthew Thompson
Vegetal Legibility: Mediated Plants in the 1970s

Elizabeth Wijaya
Another Shape of Time: Trees, Rocks, Caves and other Models of Relational Lives

17:00-17:30 Coffee break

17:30-19:00 Session: Forms (Lecture Hall)
Jules O’Dwyer (chair)

Jeff Scheible
Ping Pong, Modelwork, and Contemporary Television

Jonathan Harris
‘Dear Jim, Your Last Film Takes Us Too Far into the Bowel Regions’:
The Body According to Jim Davis

Jacob Engelberg
The Affordances of the Bisexual Triangle

19:00-19:30 Coffee break

19:30 A Live Performance by Final Party (Barry Johnston)
Introduction: John David Rhodes

With

17 November 2023, 19:30
Keynote by Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky (Bochum/ICI Berlin)

18 November 2023, 19:30
A Live Performance by Final Party

Organized by

A World Picture Conference in cooperation with Cambridge Film & Screen and ICI Berlin

Organized by Veronica Fitzpatrick (co-editor, World Picture/Brown University), Manuele Gragnolati (Sorbonne Université/ICI Berlin), Christoph Holzhey (ICI Berlin), Jules O’Dwyer (co-editor, World Picture/Cambridge), Brian Price (co-editor, World Picture/University of Toronto), John David Rhodes (co-editor, World Picture/Cambridge), and Meghan Sutherland (co-editor, World Picture/University of Toronto), Elizabeth Wijaya (co-editor, World Picture/University of Toronto)

The recording of Rizvana Bradley’s talk is available in the ICI Library archive only.

KV World Picture Conference

Image Credit © Claudia Peppel