Thursday 26 March 2015 – Lunchtime seminar with Georgia Flouda (Curator, Heraklion Archaeological Museum)

Title: The materiality of Linear A and Linear B: Modes of visual display and perception
Speaker: Georgia Flouda (Curator, Herakleion Archaeological Museum)
Hosted by Melanie Levick-Parkin (Visual Communication. SHU)

Georgia Flouda is a Curator at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, where she has been involved in designing and implementing the redisplay of the Minoan Collection. She is specializing in Aegean prehistory and classical archaeology (Ph.D. University of Athens) with a special focus on the Aegean scripts. Her interests centre upon the cognitive aspects of the Aegean writing systems, theoretical approaches to funerary practice, museum exhibits design and interconnecting museum narratives with traditional field research and archaeological material studies. In 2011, she was awarded a Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellowship in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. In the fall of 2014 she held a Fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University at Washington, DC writing a monograph on the materialization of burial ideology in the Minoan community of Apesokari in the Mesara/Crete.

Georgia is currently acting as a specialist advisor to an ADRC funded research project called ‘Visual translation of ancient heritage – Re-contextualising ancient European script through contemporary visual communication methods and media’. The purpose of this practice led research is to explore the application of design thinking methodology to multi-modal audience engagement strategies concerned with heritage encounters in Archaeology and is undertaken by design researchers from the Visual Communication subject group.

In traditional narratives of Minoan and Mycenaean archaeology, the visual display of writing is usually overlooked. Nonetheless, recent cross-disciplinary studies on the materiality of writing have demonstrated that attention should be directed not only to the written messages of inscriptions – the signified, but also to the physical aspects of their material supports, such as size, shape, material and functional aspects, as these were probably also perceived by past actors as signifiers employed and transmitted within various material and ideological contexts. This presentation seeks to outline a framework for exploring how Linear A and Linear B may operate as systems of visual encoding and communication. Semiotic relationships that are grounded in the material and symbolic properties of relevant inscribed artefacts as well as the way inscriptions were organized on the graphic space will also be discussed.

1.00PM – 2.00PM
THURSDAY 26 MARCH 2015
CANTOR 9016

See here for details of other seminars in the series.

All SHU staff and students are welcome to attend the C3RI Lunchtime Research Seminars. If you are from outside of the University and would like to attend a seminar, please email C3RI Administrator to arrange entry.