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About Words of Light

Words of Light by Joanna Vestey

'O Say Can You See?' Art, propaganda and the First World War - Professor David Lubin, Rothermere American Institute, Oxford. February 28th 20171/15

Words of Light by Joanna Vestey

Emotional Lives: Intimacy and identity in 18th and 19th Century England - Professor Joanne Begiato, John Henry Brookes Lecture Theatre, Oxford. June 8th 20162/15

Words of Light by Joanna Vestey

The Hippocratic Paradox: When is Resuscitating a Patient Doing Them Harm? Dr Elizabeth Dzeng, Green Templeton College, Oxford. September 15th 20163/15

Words of Light by Joanna Vestey

Inter-city Interaction at the Dawn of Sumerian Civilisation: new insights from the ‘city seals’, 3000-2700 BC - Roger Matthews, Wolfson College, Oxford. May 25th 20164/15

Words of Light by Joanna Vestey

The Chilcot Report - The Unbelievable Lightness of Truth - Sir Ivor Roberts, Wesley Church Hall, Oxford. October 4th 20165/15

Words of Light by Joanna Vestey

At The Frontlines of Change: Feminist leadership transforming lives - Dr Noeleen Heyzer, St Anne’s College, Oxford. October 17th 20166/15

Words of Light by Joanna Vestey

On Madness and Expertise: the Atomic bomb and visions of Global order in the 1940’s - Dr Or Rosenboim, Radcliffe Humanities Building, Oxford. January 20th 20177/15

Words of Light by Joanna Vestey

From broken heart to divided song: ‘divisio’ at the intersection of poetry and music in the Due-and Trecento - Dr Mikhail Lopatin, All Souls College, Oxford. January 26th, 20178/15

Words of Light by Joanna Vestey

Aloïs Riegl and Classical Archaeology - Professor Jaś Elsner, Department of History of Art, Oxford. May 11th 20169/15

Words of Light by Joanna Vestey

‘The Past and Its Publics’ - Professor Simon Schama in conversation with Craig Clunas and Margaret MacMillan, Museum of Natural History Lecture Theatre, Oxford. May 11th 201610/15

Words of Light by Joanna Vestey

Knowing what not to know: Sharing and hiding information in digital societies, Dr Joss Wright, Oxford Martin School, Oxford. February 23rd, 201711/15

Words of Light by Joanna Vestey

The Lure of Paris: The Republic of letters and Eighteenth century speed-dating - Professor Laurence Brockliss, Voltaire Foundation, Oxford. March 6th 201712/15

Words of Light by Joanna Vestey

From the Series Symposia; Michael Sandel - Justice: What is the Right thing to Do? (Harvard, 2009) From left to right: The Moral Side of Murder, Putting a Price Tag on Life, Free to Choose - Who Owns Me?13/15

Words of Light by Joanna Vestey

From the Series Symposia; Photo Archives VI: The Place of Photography (Oxford, 20-21 Apr 2017) From left to right: Kelly Wilder - Photography as Protocol, Chitra Ramalingam - The Laboratory as Photo Archive, Nina Lager Vesterberg - The Place of Photography and the Phases of Digitisation14/15

Words of Light by Joanna Vestey

From the Series Symposia; Michael Sandel - Justice: What is the Right thing to Do? (Harvard, 2009) From left to right: The Moral Side of Murder, Putting a Price Tag on Life, Free to Choose - Who Owns Me?15/15

Thumbnail of 'O Say Can You See?' Art, propaganda and the First World War - Professor David Lubin, Rothermere American Institute, Oxford. February 28th 2017
Thumbnail of Emotional Lives: Intimacy and identity in 18th and 19th Century England - Professor Joanne Begiato, John Henry Brookes Lecture Theatre, Oxford. June 8th 2016
Thumbnail of The Hippocratic Paradox: When is Resuscitating a Patient Doing Them Harm? Dr Elizabeth Dzeng, Green Templeton College, Oxford. September 15th 2016
Thumbnail of Inter-city Interaction at the Dawn of Sumerian Civilisation: new insights from the ‘city seals’, 3000-2700 BC - Roger Matthews, Wolfson College, Oxford. May 25th 2016
Thumbnail of The Chilcot Report - The Unbelievable Lightness of Truth - Sir Ivor Roberts, Wesley Church Hall, Oxford. October 4th 2016
Thumbnail of At The Frontlines of Change: Feminist leadership transforming lives - Dr Noeleen Heyzer, St Anne’s College, Oxford. October 17th 2016
Thumbnail of On Madness and Expertise: the Atomic bomb and visions of Global order in the 1940’s - Dr Or Rosenboim, Radcliffe Humanities Building, Oxford. January 20th 2017
Thumbnail of From broken heart to divided song: ‘divisio’ at the intersection of poetry and music in the Due-and Trecento - Dr Mikhail Lopatin, All Souls College, Oxford. January 26th, 2017
Thumbnail of Aloïs Riegl and Classical Archaeology - Professor Jaś Elsner, Department of History of Art, Oxford. May 11th 2016
Thumbnail of ‘The Past and Its Publics’ - Professor Simon Schama in conversation with Craig Clunas and Margaret MacMillan, Museum of Natural History Lecture Theatre, Oxford. May 11th 2016
Thumbnail of Knowing what not to know: Sharing and hiding information in digital societies, Dr Joss Wright, Oxford Martin School, Oxford. February 23rd, 2017
Thumbnail of The Lure of Paris: The Republic of letters and Eighteenth century speed-dating - Professor Laurence Brockliss, Voltaire Foundation, Oxford. March 6th 2017
Thumbnail of From the Series Symposia; Michael Sandel - Justice: What is the Right thing to Do? (Harvard, 2009) From left to right: The Moral Side of Murder, Putting a Price Tag on Life, Free to Choose - Who Owns Me?
Thumbnail of From the Series Symposia; Photo Archives VI: The Place of Photography (Oxford, 20-21 Apr 2017) From left to right: Kelly Wilder - Photography as Protocol, Chitra Ramalingam - The Laboratory as Photo Archive, Nina Lager Vesterberg - The Place of Photography and the Phases of Digitisation
Thumbnail of From the Series Symposia; Michael Sandel - Justice: What is the Right thing to Do? (Harvard, 2009) From left to right: The Moral Side of Murder, Putting a Price Tag on Life, Free to Choose - Who Owns Me?
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Words of Light

Created over one year at The University of Oxford, these works take as their starting point, audio recordings from thirty six lectures. The lectures span the three academic terms that make up the year – Trinity, Hilary and Michaelmas – and encompass a broad range of academic presentations.  From its beginnings, photography’s power to transform has held a fascination. The camera’s ability to reveal, to make visible, to make permanent things which were fleeting or fugitive, was a key part of it’s early success. “The phenomenon … appears to me to partake of the character of the marvellous”, wrote William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839, “almost as much as any fact which physical investigation has yet brought to our knowledge. The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our ‘natural magic’ and may be fixed for ever in the position which it seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy.”  Lecture Series explores this notion of transformation, converting sounds into sights, taking transient moments and converting them into static, spatial patterns using a hybrid of technologies. The digital audio files have been made visible through a monitor and subsequently photographed, using a long exposure on a 10×8 film camera. The resulting images use the mediums of both past and present to create a physical marking, a trace in some way, a referent to something ordinarily intangible which has taken place. While there are no claims that they directly picture the mechanisms of another sense, these photographs playfully allude to the transformation of one sense to another, and of one medium to another, reflecting both photography’s shift from analogue to digital and the digitisation of knowledge. The images invite the viewer to consider the technological transformations we are experiencing, the seismic shifts in the systems and structures all around us. Picturing the mechanisms of another sense has long been of interest to artists and scientists, from Ernst Chladni (1756-1827), who perfected a technique to visualise acoustic vibrations in dust known as Chladni’s Figures, to Georgia O’keefe (1887-1986). Her paintings, such as Music- Pink and Blue No 1, (1918) and Blue and Green Music (1919) were directly influenced by the famous synesthete Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). Kandinsky reportedly could ‘see sound’. In his art he looked to invoke sound itself through vision: “Our hearing of colours is so precise,” he wrote, “…Colour is a means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul. Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposely sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key. Thus it is clear that the harmony of colours can only be based upon the principle of purposefully touching the human soul.”

In notebook P, arguably some of his most important writing, William Henry Fox Talbot referred mysteriously to ‘Words of Light’. My hope is that in Lecture Series, you enjoy these lectures in their new form, as ‘Words of Light’.