Andrea Mantegna, Engraving
“… The example of sculpture might suggest masks, masks suggest dance and theater, these in turn suggest music with words, then poetry and storytelling (including acting, dialogue and music along with pictures) and so forth: in short that loose family of production we usually call “representations” normally understood as appealing to the imagination, whatever other uses they might be put to.”
Patrick Maynard (2005)
The seminar ‘Public Representation’ was a weekly informal seminar, which started in October 2008.
We assumed a multidisciplinary approach to study a certain number of “public representations” that is diagrams, hand-drawings, realistic images and also images in movement (for example, in cinema).
Our aims among others was to propose an operational taxonomy for the category of public representations, to understand better their syntactic and semantic properties, and to discuss which method can be used to relate the questions regarding public representation to the corresponding questions regarding mental representations.
Each session was dedicated to the discussion of a paper proposed by one of the participants.
Some special sessions were dedicated to the preparation of the meeting with some authors who are invited in the framework of the Marie Curie Fellowship DBR – ‘Diagram-based Reasoning’.
John Kulvicki, Patrick Maynard, Barbara Tversky and Peter Galison have accepted our invitation.
If you want to know the details, see the seminar page on the website of the Institut Nicod.
