Picturing Aura: A Visual Biography Roundtable Discussion with Jeremy Stolow
When:
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Venue:
External
Picturing Aura (MIT Press 2025), is a historical, anthropological, and philosophical study of modern efforts to visualize the hidden radiant force encompassing the living body known as the aura. It chronicles the rise and global spread of modern instruments and techniques of picturing aura, exploring how its images are put to work in psychical research, esotericism, art photography, popular culture, and the New Age alternative medical and spiritual marketplace. It follows exchanges and conflicts among scientists and occultists, countercultural artists and entrepreneurs, metropolitans and hinterland figures – to show the aura as a boundary object serviceable to the tasks of making art, healing bodies, and mapping a hidden cosmos. In so doing, the book reflects on the challenges posed by attempts to picture aura for settled assumptions about religion, science, and art.
Join us for a conversation with the author and invited respondents: Alison Wright (UCL), Christopher Pinney (UCL), and Richard Noakes (Exeter), moderated by John Tresch (Warburg Institute).
Jeremy Stolow is Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University, Montreal, where he teaches and conducts research on religion and media, the history of technology, occultism and science, and visual culture. In addition to his latest book, Picturing Aura (MIT Press 2025), he is the author of Orthodox By Design (U of California Press 2010) and Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between (Fordham U Press, 2013). For 2025-26, he is a fellow at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study.
This event is co-sponsored by the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology at Birkbeck, University of London and the Warburg Institute.
ATTENDANCE FREE IN PERSON OR ONLINE WITH ADVANCE BOOKING Here: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/news-events/events/picturing-aura-visual-biography
Contact name: Joel Mckim
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