Over the course of two days at the end of September, Carleton College will host an innovative conference entitled “Visual Learning: Transforming the Liberal Arts.” The event brings together leaders from 42 esteemed institutions around the nation—academics representing a variety of disciplines, as well as graduate students, museum curators, photographers, photojournalists, graphic artists, film-makers, technologists, and musicians. What this diverse group of people has in common is the ever-growing realization of the significance of visual learning in the liberal arts.

Carleton is part of a larger movement in higher education that seeks to investigate possibilities, made primarily by new advances in technology and media, along with an emphasis on interactive, hands-on learning.  “Visual Learning: Transforming the Liberal Arts” will offer visionary lectures and speculative conversations, as well as hands-on sessions highlighting successful assignments, faculty-staff partnerships, exhibitions, and performances. Held in the Weitz Center for Creativity, Carleton’s new center for interdisciplinary arts and visual collaboration, the conference will address topics ranging from the theoretical to the practical.

A complete schedule of the conference (including an event blog) can be found at http://apps.carleton.edu/vizconference/.

Highlights from the conference include:

• Friday, Sept. 28 at 7:30 p.m.: Keynote address by comics artist and interpreter Scott McCloud.
• Saturday, Sept. 29 at 10:30 a.m.: “Truth or Consequences: Meaning and Intent in Images” asks how we ‘read’ a photograph, how we understand if a photo is propaganda or ‘real,’ and how we interpret the content of images.
• Saturday, Sept. 29 at 1:30 p.m.: “The Metaphysics of Notation,” a 70-foot pictographic score, musical notation appearing on the faces of wristwatches, and other radical approaches to indeterminate notation, presented by musician and professor Mark Applebaum.
• Sunday, Sept. 30 at 2 p.m.: “Sound and Vision,” a vibrant multimedia performance curated by Nikki Melville, Carleton associate professor of music (and acclaimed composer and pianist) and featuring a diverse group of student artists using dance, film, computer graphics, and studio art to reinterpret and broaden the sensory experience.

“Visual Learning: Transforming the Liberal Arts” is the capstone event of the Visualizing the Liberal Arts (Viz) Initiative at Carleton, funded by a grant awarded to the College by the Mellon Foundation. Thanks to this unique initiative, in only three years Carleton College now stands poised, along with other like-minded colleges and universities across the nation, to seriously explore new ways of teaching and learning in the 21st century. The significance of this innovative approach to teaching and learning will provide the framework for a series of transformative conversations and exciting presentations reflecting the growing use of visual tools in higher education.

For more information, including disability accommodations, contact Aisling Quigley at (507) 222-5487 or by email at aquigley@carleton.edu. The Weitz Center for Creativity is located at 320 North Third Street in Northfield. Hours for the Perlman Teaching Museum are: Monday-Wednesday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Thursday-Friday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; and Saturday-Sunday, 12 p.m. to 4 p.m.; the Museum is closed on Sundays. Enter the Perlman Teaching Museum, Weitz Center for Creativity, at Third and College Streets.