51st Annual IVLA Conference

Parallel sessions: Thinking the Visual

Thinking about the visual is as old as the practice of producing images. In different fields, scholars continue to think about theoretical models of the visual. The session maps theoretical approaches from different disciplines and stimulates interesting cross-pollination.

Parallel sessions: Applying the Visual

The visual invades the private life of people through old and new media on a daily basis. Understanding the mechanisms behind this is crucial. This session includes contributions on visual strategies, techniquesand methodologies that are used in advertising, the art market, social media studies and time-based media.

Workshop on (visual) Emotion Design by Studio Louter.

Case study: The Gothic Saint Peter’s church in Leuven

How can you use mixed reality to create a meaningful, unforgettable and authentic visitor experience within a sacred site? How can you reveal the versatile stories of a church filled with Flemish masterpieces to a wider audience? In this talk M – Museum Leuven and Studio Louter explain how they applied the Emotion Design method to develop a meaningful and unique digital sensory visitor experience in the restored St Peter’s Church. Mixed Reality on a HoloLens allows to extend the physical space beyond its limitations and brings centuries-old artworks such as Dieric Bouts’ masterpiece TheLast Supper closer than ever before.

Parallel sessions: Measuring the Visual

The visual has a large impact on our thinking and behavior. Several disciplines try to map this influence trough data sets based on phenomena/topics such as color, digital imagery and spatial skills. This session comprises several methodologies such as eye tracking and psychometric analysis.

Parallel sessions: Learning the Visual

To enhance visual literacy competencies and stimulate critical thinking, specific visual (learning) experiences are created in specific contexts, such as classrooms, museum galleries, and other public spaces. This has created a myriad of good practices in very different settings.  This session brings together scholars and practitioners from the field of education, museum studies and cultural heritage institutions.  Together they will focus on the questions of ‘why’ and ‘how’ the visual should take a central role in education.

Workshop on eye movement research by Johan Wagemans

Johan Wagemans is a full professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences and head of the Experimental Psychology Unit (University of Leuven) and has decades of experience in psycho-aesthetics of visual arts.

Did you see it? This question is sometimes difficult to answer. As it happens, everybody sees things differently. This makes looking at art and the experience of art unique. There is no better place than a museum to research how people look at art and analyze the processes that are involved in the interpretation and appreciation of an image. M – Museum Leuven organized an experiment, in cooperation with the Laboratory for Experimental Psychology KU Leuven, which mapped the eye movement patterns of over 2000 visitors. During this workshop, Prof. Dr. Johan Wagemans provides insight into the biology of perception and the research possibilities of eye movement research and visual arts.

Workshop on Collective Visual Memory by Rutger van der Hoeven

Over 80 years, people around the world have been exposed to identical news images. Has this created a collective visual memory on a global scale? Cultural historian Rutger van der Hoeven believes it has – and believes he has found evidence of its existence. In this workshop, he explains his method and argues how we can use international internet surveys to enhance our knowledge of how people ‘read’ and remember photographs