Small World, Large Universe: the image as microcosm for ideas of order and 
disorder

Talk by: Lilly Koltun, Director of the Portrait Gallery of Canada

Abstract:

There is a sense in which all images are miniatures, even the giant
hamburgers of Claes Oldenburg or the wrapped buildings of Christo. They
embody in microcosm the encompassing global order within which they are
intelligible. That order concurrently also fences out what represents
disorder and this too is inherent in those images. On a personal ramble from 
the age of the Ptolemies to the present, this lecture will explore the 
mechanisms of images for signalling these global orders and implicit 
disorders. There is value in this for archivists. Having been criticized in 
the postmodern age for unknowingly conforming to totalizing collecting and 
cataloguing ambitions, archivists are now challenged by the Internet with 
collecting the multiple totalizing worldviews which proliferate there. 
Perceiving how images have embodied such breadth and variousness in the past 
can provide clues to how it's done now -- through new destabilizing 
definitions of realism and of the heroic.

Date: Tuesday, January 9th , 2007

Time: 12 pm - 1:30 pm

Place: Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto, 140 St. George 
St., Room 728

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