Preview 8: Beyond the Material at the Napa Lighted Art Festival 19 Jan 2019

Members of the Ordered Universe team will be in California in January 2019 for the Napa Lighted Art Festival, bringing our favourite blend of medieval history, modern science and mesmerising art to the west coast of the USA for the first time.

This is the eighth in a series of posts designed to tell you more about each of our events at the Napa Lighted Art Festival and how you can get involved.

Details

Event: Beyond the Material
Date: 19 Jan 2019
Time: 10:00am – 11:00am
Location: First Presbyterian Church, 1333 Third Street, Napa, CA 94559
Tickets: We strongly recommend booking tickets for this event. Tickets are free and are available via Eventbrite here.

All that glitters is not gold. Joshua Harvey, an experimental psychologist from the UK and Henrike Lange, an art historian from UC Berkeley, present some of the ways in which the eye can be tricked. Using examples from medieval Norway, modern science of perception, and renaissance art, Joshua and Henrike explore the meaning of materials. How human perception identifies the qualities of materials, for instance in their shininess or luster, is illustrated vividly in artistic media. How artists manipulate and use their materials for optical effects, reveals a great deal about their practice, theory and intentions.

The talk is part of a series curated by the Ordered Universe Research Project and Durham University, UK, for the 2019 Napa Lighted Festival – Beyond.

About the Presenters

Joshua S. Harvey: Joshua is a researcher at the University of Oxford, investigating visual neuroscience with medieval questions. After his first degree—a Masters in Biochemistry at Oxford and the Weizmann Institute, Israel—he undertook a PhD in collaboration with the Ordered Universe research project. His doctoral research explores medieval theories of sensory perception surrounding light, colour, sound and speech. Other research interests involve high-speed imaging of acoustic phenomena, visualization, and display technology.

Professor Henrike C. Lange is Trained at Hamburg, Vienna, and Yale universities, Henrike Lange holds a joint appointment as Assistant Professor in Berkeley’s Departments of History of Art and Italian Studies. She specializes in Italian late medieval / early Renaissance art and architecture history and literature. A second field of expertise is historiography in the European and American late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Her art historical research has focused in recent years on Giotto, Donatello, Mantegna, and the history and theory of relief sculpture. Other current projects include Botticelli’s Dante, the Italian Mediterranean, and a cultural history of triumphs.

Image of the First Presbyterian Church, Napa from First Presbyterian Church, Napa; image of cathedral interior represents work by The Projection Studio.