RIT Conference Explores Imaging Revolution, April 16

Imaging technologies are transforming the ways we know and represent our world. This involves everything from how scientific inquiry is performed and publicized to how citizens understand and communicate with each other. The digital revolution has left no academic discipline and no social interaction unaffected.

A multidisciplinary conference at Rochester Institute of Technology will explore the impact of the imaging revolution. The one-day conference, Rethinking Theories and Practices of Imaging: Technology, Representation and the Disciplines, will take place from 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Friday, April 16, in the auditorium of RIT’s Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science.

A range of panel sessions will explore the challenges facing the sciences and the humanities as they together attempt to grasp the wider implications resulting from new imaging technologies. Sessions will cover such topics as technologies for representing the brain and “human nature”; the role of computer graphics and cinema in knowing and representing ourselves; and the ways in which science and engineering are transformed by new hybrid technologies such as nanotechnology. The conference will also involve general philosophical concerns for how best to understand the impact, opportunities and challenges of new imaging technologies.

Panelists will include scholars from Harvard University, Iowa State University, RIT, Stony Brook University, University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Pittsburgh.

“We are undergoing a digital revolution which transforms the way we see and what we’re able to ‘see’,” says Timothy Engström, professor of philosophy at RIT. “And while making new forms of knowledge available, the virtual world creates new kinds of distances from the real world which need to be considered.”

The event is sponsored by RIT’s Department of Philosophy, College of Liberal Arts, College of Science, College of Imaging Arts and Sciences, Office of the Provost and the RIT General Education Honors Program. Event co-directors are Engström and Evan Selinger, assistant professor of philosophy at RIT.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Engström at thegsh@rit.edu or Selinger at emsgsh@rit.edu.