Interdisciplinary symposium “From Looking to Seeing: Visual Literacy in the Visual World”

From May 27 to 29, an international interdisciplinary symposium “From Looking to Seeing: Visual Literacy in the Visual World” will take place at the University of Latvia (UL), organized by the UL FORTHEM Art and Aesthetics Laboratory.

The contemporary world is saturated with images, screens, and visual data, yet the question of what it truly means to see is becoming increasingly relevant. The symposium invites participants to jointly reflect on the concept of the image and seeing in philosophy, education, art, and other fields of the humanities, marking a transition from passive looking to conscious, critical, and creative seeing.

The symposium is intended for doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career researchers, as well as professors, educators, artists, theorists, designers, and practitioners in the fields of the humanities and the arts.

At the symposium, visual literacy will be examined as the ability not only to “read” images, but also to interact with them in a reflective way, forming meaning, knowledge, and creative practice. The aim of the event is to create an international academic space for discussions on how visuality influences thinking, teaching, learning, research, and cultural processes.

Discussions at the symposium will be structured around three closely interconnected thematic strands. The first will focus on questions of perception and the senses, exploring how the transition from aesthetic and sensory experience to cognition and deeper understanding takes place.

The second strand will emphasize visual culture and visual literacy, analyzing how art media, algorithms, and images generated by artificial intelligence influence contemporary processes of seeing, creating, and interpretation.

Meanwhile, the third thematic strand — learning to see differently — will highlight the importance of the humanities and arts education in expanding the ability to broaden one’s perspective in a globalized world diverse in cultures and identities.

The event will take place in English.

Program of the public part of the symposium (.pdf)

Please register here.