International Journal for Digital Art History
The peer-reviewed, open-access journal gathers current developments in the field of digital art history and fosters discourse on the subject from both art history and information science.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY-NC-ND)
Strata and Aesthetic Categories of Digital Art
The aim of this article is to offer an account of the digital work of art based on Nicolai Hartmann’s ontological and aesthetic ideas regarding the strata, categories, and values that constitute the realm of art. This approach is embraced here as a contribution to ongoing academic debates about the aesthetics of the virtual world. The method advanced is an ontological hermeneutics. Starting from Hartmann’s philosophical framework I outline an account of the aesthetic strata of digital art (material, logicial, orectic, and virtual) and of their corresponding categorial domains. The result is to be understood as a partial component of a more encompassing aesthetic theory of art in the realm of digital virtuality.
Zonas de Contacto – Art History in a Global Network
Copyright (c) 2026 Author retains ownership of all rights under copyright in all versions of the written article. Journal retains ownership of the layout and design of the DAHJ version of the article. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A Digital Experiment in Reconstructing Ancient Roman Perspective Spaces
The study of ancient Greco-Roman perspective constructions has long been subject to debate. One aspect of this debate has revolved around the apparently conflicting testimonies provided by relatively meager surviving textual sources— especially those of the architectural theorist Vitruvius—and scant material remains, particularly in the form of late Republican Roman wall painting. Using Rhino, a digital modeling software, this initial report on ongoing research proposes a new model of ancient perspective construction that seeks to accommodate both Vitruvius’s texts and extant Roman wall painting dated to the mid- to late-first century BCE. It considers the built environment in which the painting was produced, the surface of the painted wall, and the fictive space it depicts. The geometric flexibility and the ability to work across multiple planes with 3D modeling software permits the reconstruction of the method today; in antiquity, however, it would have been intuitively produced using relatively simple tools and limited theoretical knowledge.
Technical Methods for Material Understanding
Controversy and hype have long accompanied the arrival of new image-making technologies. Today, the rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools has ignited new debates over the role of technology in creative production and the extent to which machine outputs might constitute human creativity. Like photography in the nineteenth century, however, AI is emergent and experimental with a continuously developing relationship to the artworld. This article places AI in dialogue with the history of photography not only to contextualize its emergence within a longer trajectory of data-driven, image-making technologies, but also to demonstrate the theoretical frameworks that link them. By tracing historical development, function, and public reception, we argue that the convergence of AI and photography signals a shift in how photography itself is being understood, taught, and received. Ultimately, we demonstrate how photography’s legacy provides a conceptual foundation for situating AI within the field of critical art history.
Responsiveness and Responsibility in Times of AI
Ian Cheng’s BOB (Bag of Beliefs) (2018–19) is a unique combination of contemporary digital media—an animated, AI-driven live simulation. It focuses on the activities of the artificial lifeform named, BOB, a mutable, snake-like entity generated and driven by a basic motivational and behavioral AI system and an inductive sensory learning engine of viewer inputs via an interactive app, BOB Shrine. This study considers the artwork’s deployment of digital media and strategies that likewise underpin our contemporary existence in the real world. By examining BOB (Bag of Beliefs) through the pararealistic—an analytical framework that engenders new insights into reality—this essay considers how BOB, as an artificial lifeform, has significant import for our humanity, undermining individual autonomy and modulating systems of beliefs. This study ultimately contends that individual autonomy has shifted to a “synthetic autonomy,” a term introduced here to designate a neohuman autonomy that has emerged in the wake of advanced AI.
Copyright (c) 2025 Author retains ownership of all rights under copyright in all versions of the written article. Journal retains ownership of the layout and design of the DAHJ version of the article. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Provenance—the history of an artwork’s locations and ownership over time—has been particularly resistant to analysis in the form of data. Especially large amounts of provenance material is difficult to regularize since provenance is often rather fragmentary and has been recorded in semi-narrative form. Our project has regularized the provenance data for 765 paintings by Baroque artist Jan Brueghel and then visualized it. This article discusses what those data can tell us about the artist’s patrons in his home city of Antwerp and elsewhere in Europe, and then about the travels of his works and how their movement registers shifts in taste.
Roman imperial portraits are commonly recognized and identified by relating specific sculptures to commonly accepted types. The feature that has played a central role in this regard has been hairstyle. Based on the portrayed emperor’s coiffure and facial hair (or lack thereof), scholars have connected portraits to known classifications and prototypes. However, by focusing mainly on hairstyle, this method runs the risk of excluding portraits that do not adhere to the recognized repertoire as possible representations of Roman emperors altogether. Advances in digital art history and computational methods, however, may help solve this problem. By using DCNN-based methods, this article investigates the possibilities of digital identification of Roman imperial portraiture at a quantitative level, without using hairstyle. It demonstrates that there are sufficient visual markers in imperial portraits, aside from hairstyle, that allow facial recognition software to classify portraits when hairstyle is excluded.
Nestoras Papanikolopoulos, A Pioneer of Digital Art in Greece
The aim of this paper is to explore the work of the pioneer artist Nestoras Papanikolopoulos, who, since 1984, has created digital images using the computer as a medium at a time when this practice was almost unknown in Greece. It is noteworthy that, in Greece, for many years, the leading visual artists who used the personal computer as a means of artistic expression remained for many years on the margins of the visual discourse on contemporary art, as well as its official representatives, art critics, state museums and galleries. Now that the digital image has penetrated most aspects of human activity and, consequently, of art, it is time to acknowledge the contribution of artists who opened new paths in the adoption of a practice based on interdisciplinary thinking and contributed to the creative process of the immaterial image.
This essay wonders aloud about the limitations of generative AI imagery in relationship to descriptive language. It looks at the questionably ekphrastic nature of generative AI and asks whether models and platforms such as Dall-E 2 spur creativity or constrain it by the underlying and opaque way the models use literal descriptive language.
Reimagining the Catalogue Raisonné as Generative Digital Scholarship
Catalogues raisonnés have long determined the artistic relevance, authenticity, and market value of an artist’s work. While catalogue raisonné publishers and authors have grappled for decades with the challenges and opportunities of digital formats, conventions around scholarly authority have set boundaries for exploring a more expansive view of the catalogue raisonné as generative digital scholarship. In the case of digital scholarly publishing, how might we consider analog and digital formats not as a convergence of but rather a divergence from a broader transformation of these important resources? This paper explores how taking the catalogue raisonné as generative digital scholarship imbues old structures with new meaning, wherein the chronology of historical events can change shape across time. Furthermore, by embedding processes of verifiability, evidence, and transparency—key principles for supporting a generative scholarly ecosystem—the digital catalogue raisonné allows for a diversity of voices and thoughts in dialogue. With revisionist histories and technical information on artists and artworks in continuous flux, the generative catalogue raisonné model is an opportunity to rethink the past by considering how to construct narratives in the historical present.
Copyright (c) 2023 Author retains ownership of all rights under copyright in all versions of the written article. Journal retains ownership of the layout and design of the DAHJ version of the article. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In this article we examine four international artists whose art has its origin in everyday life and its concerns. The story of this art should be rewritten in terms of a historiography of the average underprivileged person, who does not reap the benefits of a discriminatory economy. Artists discussed here, namely, Daniel Cruz (Chile), Gilbert Prado (Brazil), Kausik Mukhopadhyay (India), and Probir Gupta (India) have been creating art on the impoverished side of the digital innovation divide, within their own respective niches and horizons of belief. Discarded gadgets, scraps, broken circuits or sensors, microphones, and other junk are incorporated to create fragile but impactful installations. Junk animism and low-fi artificial intelligence often inform their work. Such artists do not inhabit traditionally-defined borders of nation, class or identity; rather, they inhabit spaces across fault lines which divide and exacerbate human society from within. Cruz’ Surfonic, for example, operates on internet gateways that fall outside the reach of global communications industries, while Mukhopadhyay uses scrap or junk media for his installations. These artists’ commitment to an art of voluntary defeatism upends a culture of spectacle. The artist is like an underdog flaneur or technological fakir, reviving human interest against the greed and pretensions of a global art market.
Copyright (c) 2021 Author retains ownership of all rights under copyright in all versions of the written article. Journal retains ownership of the layout and design of the DAHJ version of the article. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Artificial intelligence has become an increasingly popular tool in contemporary art production, ushering in new forms of creativity, exploration, and artistic expression that were not possible before it existed. As such, AI has the potential to transform the art world and the way artists work and produce. However, working with and understanding AI, as a creation tool, raises a series of questions in relation to its internal functioning, its ethical implications, and how human critical capacity intervenes in the man-machine creative process. For this reason, with the human will to dialogue with AI as a direct inquiry about the environment, the research methodology that gives meaning to the content of this creative essay has been carried out emulating the Socratic method. Through this teaching technique based on dialogue and questions, an attempt will be made to surround the truth, and to frame the state of the art of AI in relation to the creative process. The steps that have been followed have been: extract the information-story through the ChatGPT assistance tool, filter and verify, add own content to the story. The goal: to show a dialogue (διά + λόγος) as a creative process, which incorporates a critical sense along the chain-sequence of informational return and wandering meaning.
This research constitutes an experimental case study to see if geometric morphometrics (statistical shape analysis) can help elucidate authenticity, likeness and artistic style in historical portraits depicting the same sitter. Specifically, we take this approach to identify which of a highly diverse range of original and derivative 18th century portraits depicting the Russian military commander, Generalissimo Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov, show greater agreement with both the iconographic studies undertaken by 19th and 20th century Russian art historians, and the relatively reliable fluctuating asymmetries evident in Suvorov’s death mask. Our findings are that geometric morphometrics is able to identify the extent to which the depictions of the facial features vary, with the results indicating that the derivative works have tended to alter Suvorov’s head pose, there are inconsistencies in the representation of 2D perspective due to a strict adherence to artistic conventions of the period, and that some of the portraits considered derivative are more likely to be primary. Furthermore, an original oil painting by the Austrian Imperial Royal Court painter, Josef Kreutzinger (1757-1829), which was rapidly reproduced and widely dispersed across Western Europe and North America, has evidence of presenting the famously mirror-averse Suvorov in mirror-reverse. We have found, therefore, that geometric morphometrics may have a deep, as well as broad, applicability to the direct concerns of art historians.
This article presents a solution for the sustained use of a legacy database by means of data curation based on the example of a research project undertaken by the German Center for Art History Paris (DFK Paris). The wave of digitization of the 1990s and early 2000s gave rise to a large number of databases that are, today, becoming obsolete by lack of technical support. This means that the research data, as a slice of academic history, is in danger of being lost. This article’s contribution describes a possible form of recontextualization within a data curation project that takes the example of a database that originated at DFK Paris between 1999 and 2006: the project “Deutsch-französische Kunstvermittlung 1870–1940 und 1945–1960” (Art discourse between France and Germany 1870–1940 and 1945–1960). In three stages, the authors examine the semantic enrichment of the data, the historical context of the project and, employing mediaarchaeological and other methods, the reconstruction of the original data structure. The data’s character as an artifact is taken into consideration throughout, and a restructuring of the data ruled out. The historicity of the database “Deutsch-französische Kunstvermittlung” is also reflected in its new user interface.
Galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) across the globe are building new datasets to render their collections open, machine-readable, and internet-accessible. The new generation of GLAM datasets have wide reach, offering to turn institutions inside-out so that remote audiences can view, download, share, and remix digital assets. GLAM institutions have treated the associated turn to open data as inherently positive—able to promote cultural understanding and appreciation in ways that promise scale, accessibility, and customization. However, some critics suggest that upsides of technology for GLAM datasets need to be balanced with risks that can arise from their design, development, and integration into artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. In this work we ask: how should GLAMs account for the emergence of AI-driven experiences built upon GLAM datasets? We seek to answer this question by flagging key ethics and governance issues in tandem with supplying some guardrails for navigating them. We examine GLAM datasets from a sociotechnical perspective. Drawing on our experiences as researchers spanning multiple areas (computer science, computer vision, AI ethics, art history, and cybersecurity) and working in different sectors (industry and academia), we identify salient concerns and remediations from critical technology discourse on dataset development for AI systems.
Recruiting Collective Intelligence to Level Art World Stratification
Departing from the cultural impacts of physical museums, this article explores two significant virtual benefits of online digitized art collections. Based on empirical research, it speculates that these increasingly interconnected collections have the potential to implement a new model of cultural participation able to sustain power sharing beyond public consultation, and transform the art system’s inherent stratification, viz. modulate the art world’s access barriers to institutional prestige, thus benefiting artists by levelling the playing field. The claim is that they can serve as a digital infrastructure to recruit collective intelligence on a mass scale in order to democratize culture and foster more equality and diversity in the art world. However, these impacts cannot simply be achieved by turning users into citizen curators or leveraging ‘altmetrics’ (i.e., views and likes) to influence selection and modulate order within an aggregated or distributed database. The main obstacle to these virtual impacts is not online access barriers, nor insufficient participation. Multiplying eyeballs, facilitating discovery and promoting public choices are all vital; but, these initiatives cannot hope to transform the art system if the individual judgment being captured is subject to different spheres of influence and network effects driving inequality. To overcome these effects, the article proposes a novel, choice-based, pathfinding tool designed to recruit users’ sensemaking faculty, as opposed to their personal taste, and in so doing, more effectively capture what users find meaningful (and institute a new value proposition for art).
We present a web application that facilitates multimodal search within institutional image collections using current-generation machine learning models like CLIP. Further, we discuss image retrieval as a combined computer vision/human-computer interaction problem, and propose that the standardization of feature extraction is one of the main problems that digital art history faces today.
In this multi-authored essay, thirteen participants in the 2019-2022 Getty Advanced Workshop on Network Analysis + Digital Art History (NA+DAH) discuss their experiences learning and working together at the intersection of these two fields of inquiry. The piece begins with a preface offering background on the workshop, continues with a series of “project biographies” for the NA+DAH teams participating in this roundtable, and then proceeds to the teams’ reflections on a series of probing questions crafted by the participants themselves. The authors reflect on what the NA+DAH Workshop has meant for their scholarship and their community-building efforts, hoping that these insights, acquired over years of productive discussion, can serve as a foundation of knowledge for other scholars who are interested in bringing these areas of study together in their research and teaching.
AI has become an increasingly prevalent tool for researchers working in Digital Art History. The promise of AI is great, but so are the ethical and intellectual issues it raises. Here we propose 10 axioms related to the use of AI in art historical research that scholars should consider when embarking on such projects, and we make some proposals for how these axioms might be integrated into disciplinary conversations.
Two early modern prints that represent Venice—Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice, ca. 1500, and Ludovico Ughi’s Iconographica rappresentatione della inclita città di Venezia, 1729— were the focal points of two interactive, multimedia exhibitions at Duke University in 2017 and 2019. The overall intention of these exhibitions was to enhance visitors’ engagement with, and understanding of, the value of historic representations of places and spaces, while expanding cultural understandings of Venice, past and present. Placed in conversation with augmented reality (AR) technology, the novelty of the prints mirrored the methodological innovations of digital art history. The AR installations in each exhibition connected viewers with historic and present-day representations of Venice through virtual layers of information that encouraged them to return to the original objects for close engagement. This article describes the AR displays within the 2017 and 2019 exhibitions at Duke and presents the results of visitor interaction based on anonymous data and observation. It also documents AR installation strategies and methods, and it anticipates AR’s applications and expansions for public-facing art historical scholarship. Finally, it shares these processes and findings in an effort to assist colleagues in the advancement of future installations at academic, museum, and cultural heritage institutions.
Digital reproductions of artifacts are utilized in an increasing range of professional work with cultural heritage. Because paintings are relatively easy to capture and transfer to the digital realm, an increasing number of them are now being photographed and made accessible in databases. However, as this article points out, paintings can be used as a point of departure for a wide range of digitally-based copies of their material and visual components, a phenomenon described as the visual culture of painting. By employing Greimas’ square, this article explores how computer-aided reproductions of paintings can be differentiated, distributed, and described according to their basic formal qualities from digital photography and analytical imaging to 3D-printed versions. The square also enables a description of formal features and outlines the limitations of each type of reproduction by placing painting in relation to its historical counterpart, sculpture. In this mapping, tensions between opposites appear, including the virtual versus the material, two- versus three-dimensionality, surface versus matter, and the multifaceted struggle to cope with invisible structures. These issues have been illustrated and negotiated for hundreds of years in the practice of making and appreciating paintings, but this article reframes them for the digital realm.
Memory and the Digital Archive of Contemporary Art
This article outlines some reflections about digital reality, contemporary art production, and possible ways of archiving and constructing memory through and for a historiography of contemporary art in light of the project Archivo Español de Media Art / Spanish Archive of Media Art (AEMA/SAOMA). In the first part I propose a definition and an account of media art and its artifacts. In the second part I present and describe the SAOMA project, and its antecedent, the MIDECIANT museum project, and discuss the conceptual and technical requirements of an archive devoted to the media arts. In the third part I sketch some interconnections between the concepts of memory and archive with reference to new media art and outline the difficulties that are inherent to any effort to define and archive these art forms. The final section includes some concluding thoughts and a brief explanation of what I regard as the most urgent needs for any archival project in the realm of digital art (digital restoration, documentation, and narrative).
In this article we reflect on the need to create repositories for information about art practice in a location regarded as marginal to the Mexican and Latin American art worlds, through digital technologies and open source digital resources. We analyze the experience of creating the Information System on Art Practice in San Luis Potosí, México, and the Jesús Ramos Frías Art Documentation Center, two cases that allow us to study the significance of such spaces in peripheral locations from the greater Global South. Our working hypothesis is that the existence of documentary repositories is indispensable to knowledge, research, and dissemination of artistic heritage, and a crucial component of art education.
Image Spam Errors in the Age of Hyperconnection
This essay examines the relevance of the connected digital image to some of our everyday life environments in a hyperconnected society. Image spam conveys an atmosphere of information overload and leaked images traveling at accelerated velocities to be copied, edited, and relinked in digital environments. Internet connectivity is the feature of media culture that enables the coexistence of image spam. This essay offers an account of the infrastructure of connectivity as the physical basis for information technologies in order to situate the pathways, the context, the way of being, and the errors of image spam.
Processed Pictures, Photoshop, and Unsharp Mask
The project presented here examines techniques and practices of digital image processing using the consumer application Adobe Photoshop as an example. My study aims at a theory of contemporary visual culture that addresses digital images in their distinct quality of being processed pictures instead of in general terms or abstract notions of digitality. To achieve this goal, I will conduct an in-depth investigation of Photoshop at the levels of both the cultural layer of interfaces and uses, and the computational layer of code and data structures. Using the methodologies of software studies and media archaeology, the project will give a first comprehensive account of Photoshop as one of the most influential tools for the production of digital culture. I illustrate the application of the software studies approach to image processing by giving a short but exemplary analysis of Photoshop’s popular Unsharp Mask feature.
Image Synthesis as a Method of Knowledge Production in Art History
Digital images enable us to virtually assemble, group, and rearrange works of art as image datasets. The highly complex similarities and dissimilarities between data points in an image dataset can be analyzed. Understanding the meaning of computationally defined similarities and dissimilarities, however, requires disentangling the representations learned by the computer in the process. By utilizing generative methods from deep learning, we aim to design a new methodology for the analysis and interpretation of digital images. Building on refined methods of disentanglement from computer science, our goal is to establish the synthetic image as a novel means of knowledge production in art history.
Copyright (c) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Digital images increasingly determine the way people interact with their environment. New imaging and sensing technologies register, process, and transmit information about the physical world in real time and make it possible to continuously adapt visualizations to specific spatio-temporal settings and in relation to motion, location and perspective. With this constant feedback loop between image and environment, images gain in perceptive and practical importance. The convergence of visual, spatial and performative dimensions heralds a new type of visual media described here as “adaptive images”. Drawing on selected cases of adaptive techniques in applied contexts, such as surgery, entertainment, industrial manufacturing and psychotherapy, the paper introduces the emerging field of adaptive imaging and discusses its respective aesthetic, spatial, and operational conditions and implications. It thereby provides a tentative survey of how adaptive images challenge visual studies and media theory, and claims that their analysis requires an interdisciplinary approach.
Recently, the digital recoloring of black-and-white film has become a standard of historical documentation. Since the documented events originally took place in color, the argument goes, recoloring the images brings them closer to reality. Using the example of the French documentary film series Apocalypse – la 2ème Guerre Mondiale, a digital re-coloring of historical black-and-white footage, the article discusses the historiographical concepts behind this kind of simulation. Is digital recoloring an authentic and vivid animation of past events (as the authors of Apocalypse claim)? Or is it rather a questionable overwriting of archival material (as art historian Georges Didi-Huberman claims)? This article discusses various arguments for and against this technology of animation and ultimately takes the side of the critics: It is undeniable that every historical reconstruction is a subsequent interpretation. But shouldn’t pictorial sources be left in their surviving visual integrity – as one would undoubtedly do with written documents? The historical archive is no tabula rasa. But changing the visual integrity of pictures is no reanimation of the “real”, but rather an erasure of historical material.
Towards a Praxeological Media Philosophy of the Digital Image
This article explores the theory and methodology of the project “Pictorial Picture Critique in Social Media. Explicit and Tacit Theorizing of the Digital Image.” In order to gain elements of a theory of the digital image from the inside perspective of digital images themselves, the aim of the project is to analyze user-generated forms of pictures that criticize other pictures on social media. This inside view is theorized through media philosophy, which is a philosophy of media by media. Assuming that media have knowledge about media, this diffuse knowledge needs to be clarified. Therefore, a praxeological approach is chosen to conceptualize this media knowledge. Both approaches are combined into a praxeological media philosophy of social media imagery from a socio-cultural perspective. Methodically, the picture practice analysis is designed to ascertain such media knowledge from the collected phenomena, which operate in the case of pictorial picture critique on two levels: knowing that aspects of a picture are criticized, and knowing how the picture is used for criticism. Finally, this approach is exemplified by a case study on Insta Repeat, which criticizes the practice of curating in social media.
My project “Behind the Digital Image: Public Photographs on Community Platforms and Twitter as Repositories for Machine Learning and Journalistic Publications” investigates the specificities of social media and photo-sharing platforms as public image repositories, daily media practices and legal practices, and considers ethical questions relating to the digital image as both a research tool and a research object. I pursue two sub-projects, both of which are relevant to understanding the commodification and monetization of vernacular digital images. Nuclear investigations of these projects refer to the relationship of amateur photographers, also referred to as citizen photojournalists, para photojournalists or accidental journalists, and professional stakeholders within the global image market. Since the digital world is quickly changing, field work is needed to understand processes and procedures as they happen. Therefore, I use multidimensional methods, including media ethnography; digital methods; qualitative approaches, such as in-depths interviews and participatory observation, and social media analytic tools. This paper presents an overview of the proposed project and sheds light on both the preliminary results and possible areas of future research.
This paper provides an overview of the DFG-funded research project Curating Digital Images: Ethnographic Perspectives on the Affordances of Digital Images in Museum and Heritage Contexts, part of the DFG Priority Program The Digital Image. First, we outline the project’s theoretical grounding in affordance theories and its attention to practices of curating digital images before providing two ethnographic examples from our project’s main areas of work. These examples show how lay users shape their encounters with museum objects by employing digital image technologies and social media, creating new relationships between museums and everyday life. Next, we describe a new methodological approach that brings together ethnography, eye-tracking technology, and information science to study visual perception and practices of looking in digital curation. In our outlook, we indicate five key affordances of digital images for curatorial practices that we consider over the course of our project.
The production and conception of architecture are not only shaped by the technical-constructive aspect but also by their visual representation. Since the 1980s, with the advent of digital technologies for the design and visual representation of architecture (computer-aided design), far-reaching changes have occurred, resulting in fundamentally new possibilities for linking technical design and visual reproduction (computer rendering to virtual photography). This cooperative project undertakes an investigation of these essentially process-related relationships outlined here in design and visualization during the transition phase from analogue to digital planning and display format methods from 1980 to the present. In exemplary studies on the use and application of the new tools and their visual products (images), the aim is to determine how the ‘digital image’ has changed the concept and production of architecture from the perspective of art history and media criticism on the one hand, and the production aesthetic point of view of architectural and architectural image production on the other.
The digital turn seems to correlate with a crisis in representation: digitalization widens the gap between phenomenological experience and the socio-economic logic that determines it, rendering certain areas, fields or aspects of the world invisible. Crucially, this logic – according to Mary L. Gray, author of Ghost Work – entails the restructuring, and arguably the dismantling, of formal employment, producing its own set of novel social relations. Addressing the question of the hidden labor underpinning the digital economy could be described as an exercise in making it visible. But work is not the only social category whose tangibility, or lack thereof, revolves around a specific regime of visibility. The category ‘art’ in Western modernity could be construed as designating the alienation of artistic labor from other forms of labor. Because creativity is seen as the opposite of work, the dividing line between work and non-work correlates with the division between art and non-art, and it is thus impossible to fundamentally alter the former without implicating the latter.
From the mid-1990s, works of browser art emerged as a particular variant of net art or speculative software, developing alternatives to conventional internet browsers and rendering the content of web pages in a different way. Since we see them as productive image-machines, we consider both the phenomenology of their audio-visual output and their operational code level. We use an example to show why it is helpful, or even necessary, to take a closer look at programmed art works – and thus paradoxically to adopt a ‘distant reading’. There are many ways of creating a seemingly identical surface effect, though this may have been caused by completely different artistic gestures. Where should we look for the evidence? We agree with Florian Cramer that the code is a crucial site for the inventive engagement of their producers and is instructive in this regard. Furthermore, we are interested in capturing the dynamics of a piece of software during its execution. For this purpose, art history’s vast methodological tradition is to be enriched with software visualization tools, while the latter are endowed with art history related reasoning. Lev Manovich, who developed the ‘multi-scale view’ for film, along with Shane Denson and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann, who transferred it to games, paved the intellectual path for our approach.
Schemata – 3D Classification Methods and Archaeological Identification Criteria
Both in the field of applied computer science and in disciplines dealing with material artefacts, three-dimensional objects with complex shapes are inadequately classified. Archaeologists are confronted with the problem that resemblance in shape can be recognized, but is difficult to adequately describe in words. Furthermore, archaeology has yet to make sufficient use of automated 3D shape recognition to differentiate the formal relationship of similar objects. A computer, however, has no problem recognizing identically shaped objects, though it has yet to learn our human perception and understanding of similarity. The goal of this project is therefore to develop procedures for automatically generating corpora using 3D pattern recognition, as well as to reflect on the associated schematizations and how they can be applied in the computer and visual sciences. This involves developing methods of object mining in 3D data. In close cooperation between computer science and archaeology, this experimental process leads to a substantial analysis of the concept of pattern recognition as a branch of the humanities. Based on 200 terracottas of the late 4th and 3rd centuries BC, which despite their similarity differ in various details, a classification system will be elaborated using digital methods and taking into account the complexity of the artefacts.
Japanese Handscrolls and Digital Explorations
Japanese illuminated narrative handscrolls (emaki, literally “painting-scroll”) are composed of a complex materiality. Consisting of alternating script passages and paintings that are unrolled from right to left, handscrolls are of an oblong, horizontal materiality that might cover up to dozens of meters. Building on previous pivotal reflections on the digital state of affairs that has spurred new perspectives in the history of European art, this project investigates the specific problems and challenges in re-/presenting the specific materiality of Japanese handscrolls. Of concern are not only book publications and museum spaces, but also website interfaces and computer screens. At the center of investigation are both East Asian, here specifically Japanese, materiality and practices of viewing, and hermeneutics. By scrutinizing existing digital projects on Japanese handscrolls, this research focuses on the following two areas of inquiry: a) critical reflection of the mediating power of the digital image, and b) the exploration of new modes of digital representation of Japanese handscrolls. The latter focuses on three fields of inquiry: materiality, practice, and locality.
This article explores the artist’s relationship with Nature and her experience of Nature as a form of digital “consumption”. The author analyzes the limit that divides what can be qualified as “natural” or “artificial” life. Taking into consideration the artistic practice of the author, where she considers that curating a set of data, training a neural network and exploring the results of the model produced can be understood as a form of meditation around a subject. Finally, it exposes how artificial life can be an experimental interface, for within the digital we can find countless ways to create experiences and interactions. It is also possible to create digital life forms that can be understood as autonomous actors. It can be a place where we can explore a potentially countless amount of alternative narratives that in turn will perhaps allow us to see our physical world in a slightly different light.
In the field of automated image recognition, computer vision or artificial ‘intelligence,’ the ImageNet data collection plays a central role as a training dataset. For the research project Training The Archive, which aims to make digital humanities methods available for the curating of art, the extent to which ImageNet influences the software prototype The Curator’s Machine is discussed. The Curator’s Machine is designed to facilitate the discovery of relationships and connections between artworks for curators. The text explains how ImageNet, anchored in contemporary image worlds, acts on contemporary and historical artworks by 1) examining the absence of the classification ‘art’ in ImageNet, 2) questioning ImageNet’s lack of historicity, and 3) discussing the relationship between texture and outline in ImageNet-based automated image recognition. This research is important for the genealogical, art historical, and coding related usage of ImageNet in the fields of curating, art history, art studies and digital humanities.
This article is making an advocacy for including Digital Literacy into the traditional Art History curriculum and explains how it can be defined and what Digital Literacy could entail for the BA and MA curriculum.
Aldo Rossi composed the famous collage known as Analogous City for the Venice Biennale in 1976. This text presents a visual study of the collage through both physical and digital means: a mobile app works in conjunction with a reprint of the Analogous City in the format of a city map. Forty years after its creation, the collage’s original elements are finally identified and collected, and the mechanisms of composition are disclosed thanks to Fabio Reinhart’s contribution. The map of the Analogous City is analyzed in both historical and museum viewpoints, focusing on the reflections that emerged when exhibiting in Maastricht, Milan, Lausanne, Bergamo, and Rome. Although the map was designed as an interactive installation for these exhibitions, it has turned out to be also an educational tool useful outside museums. If Aldo Rossi created an artwork to think about the reconstruction of the city, likewise, the map of the Analogous City helps to rethink museums by designing their objects in a way they can leave the exhibition for a second life in the city.
The “uncanny” and the “uncanny valley” are concepts that address the experience of fascination and fear one experiences upon confronting an entity whose status as living or dead, human or machine, real or unreal, is indeterminate. Visual culture holds important clues about the meanings of the uncanny in modern, postmodern, and posthuman thinking. This essay traces the role of these concepts in art history, focusing especially on the period following 1970, when roboticist Masahiro Mori used the phrase “uncanny valley” to describe the profound discomfort triggered by near-perfect human likeness. Since that time, digital technologies have raised the stakes around aesthetic and philosophical issues of resemblance, realism, and illusion, demanding new ways of thinking about encounters between viewers and uncanny art objects, whether in real or virtual space.
The digitization in art museums promises extended access to the objects of the collection both for scientific purposes and for an interested public, and this preferably online—independent of location and at any time. Here it is not enough to simply limit the search in databases to narrowly defined keywords. Rather, specific interfaces and visualizations should allow the user to explore the digital inventory as well as to ‘stroll’ through the online collection. Artificial intelligence can support the systematic and structured processing of the mass of data in the museum. Machine learning can reveal connections and links between artworks, which previously became accessible to the curator only incompletely or with difficulty. The text presents a first prototype on the basis of which the research project “Training the Archive” intends to investigate the machine-aided, explorative (re)discovery of connections within the museum's collection.
Copyright (c) 2020 Author retains ownership of all rights under copyright in all versions of the written article. Journal retains ownership of the layout and design of the DAHJ version of the article. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper introduces a visualization technique designed to uncover iconographic patterns prevalent within a collection while at the same time allowing close viewing of these particular details. Challenging an institutionalized understanding of overview and detail as inherently opposed, the intention of this research is to develop a visualization method that accounts for the iconographic abundance of a collection and encourages its casual exploration. Expanding digitization efforts have led to a growing number of rich cultural heritage datasets that are successively being published online. At the same time scholars are exploring the potential of computational methods to expand the scale and scope of art history. In this context, data visualization is often equated with a distanced perspective diminishing the intricate and intriguing details of individual artifacts. In collaboration with a museum of applied and decorative arts, we have devised a novel interface concept for the exploration of image collections such as historical glass plate negatives. Inspired by photographic plates on a light table, the resulting Close-up Cloud translates the art historical method of close viewing into the digital by combining it with a dynamic representation of quantitative iconographic patterns across an entire image collection.
Copyright (c) 2020 International Journal for Digital Art History https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A Short History of Self-Representation in Digital Art
This article examines the lesser-known history of artistic self-representation in digital art, from the beginning of computer art to the present day. The genre has thematic as well as formal diversity: it is a product of artists working with electronic devices such as video synthesizers or digitizers, webcams, digital image and video editing tools, the internet, avatars, and social media platforms. Artistic self-representation in computer-based and digital art has been an underrepresented topic in art history and must be more closely studied in order to be integrated into the art historical canon. This article aims to give an overview of artistic self-representation in digital art from early computer art until today.
Alternative Narratives and Aesthetics in South African Digital Art
A small group of academics and artists have critically engaged with a digital arts practice in South Africa. It is a growing practice, developing and orienting voices and discourse for many artists, curators and spaces of practice. This article explores this digital arts practice through an engagement with the medium and post-Internet/contra-Internet, historically contextualising the field that has emerged in contemporary artistic practice over the past ten years in South Africa. To add more context specific platforms and spaces (traditional/formal, nontraditional/informal, and a combination thereof) and key exhibitions such as Refiguring Space, Post-Digital 2019/2020 special edition, and artists CUSS Group and NTU will be discussed to provide insight into the emerging digital arts practice in South Africa.
Quantitative historical art markets research’s position at the crossroads between economics and art history poses serious methodological and theoretical challenges to two distinct groups of scholars while also embracing an aggregate vision of art that often employs digital tools. In this paper, we analyze two bodies of literature—art market research within art history and art market research within cultural economics—to assess their respective approaches and methodological distance. Our research highlights a set of desirable components for an innovative, interdisciplinary approach that speaks to both of these scholars using examples of recent publications that show strengths in these areas, stressing the importance of standardizing, diversifying, and sharing data among art market researchers; arguing for minimal standards for statistical analysis, to better consider and reflect the realities of art markets and related data; and providing suggestions for improving communication between disciplines, with collaboration being a clear option for achieving these goals. Based on these suggestions, this paper encourages the development of a hybrid discipline that overcomes the dichotomy between art history and cultural economics and make the most of digital tools’ potential for data gathering and analysis.
Curatorial activities provide (infra)structure and meaning to artworks through the selection and combination of different pieces and their public display. Therefore the way context is added shapes people’s perspective towards art. (Post-) digital art and online exhibitions come with specific constraints concerning curation and have a potential to overcome the hierarchies between curators, artists and visitors. In discussing selected digital exhibition formats from the 1990s until today, the article illustrates how the genre has evolved in response to technological changes and concepts of democratization as well as user involvement. Looking at the online exhibition “UN/NATURAL SURROGATES” (2019) the article opens up a perspective towards meta-curating that allows to conceive (online) exhibitions.
The last twenty has seen our reliance on digital technology for the practice of art history grow alongside the emergence of what is called the digital humanities. Yet the discourse around digital humanities has thus far failed to articulate, explicitly or consistently, the true stakes of technologies’ influence on the humanities, much less art history. This article therefore seeks to reframe the debate. It argues that we should focus not on the digital or the computer, but instead on the but instead on the dynamic interrelationship between the institutions and domains responsible for the management of art historical information and those of the production of art historical knowledge. More specifically, it examines how recent technological developments are shifting priorities and processes within such institutions and thus shaping and reshaping art-historical practice.
Review of Maria Dondero's 'Language of Images: The Forms and the Forces'
Maria Dondero’s recent publication, The Language of Images: The Forms and the Forces, extends arguments formulated within the tradition of visual semiotics to develop focused discussion of three concepts: the materiality of the substrate of images, the force of enunciation in visual analysis, and the metavisual as an approach to aggregate images and corpora.
Claudia Hart’s work range in media: architecture, painting/illustration, installation, eventually moving on to study animation – leading her to 3D animation art. Theory seems to be both the starting point and the end point of all of her artistic endeavours. Here, Hart, sits down with Tina Sauerlaender to discuss her work, career and how we are experiencing a crisis of truth.
The multifaceted history of digital art has also entailed an evolution of understanding the complex relationships between the material and immaterial in the digital medium. This text traces the histories of digital objects and systems from the 1960s to the so-called ‘post-digital’ era, which finds its artistic expression in works shaped by digital technologies and networks, yet taking the material form of objects such as paintings, sculptures, or photographs. The term neomateriality is used here to capture an objecthood that reflects back the data of humans and the environment, or reveals the way in which digital processes perceive and shape our world. Digital materialities are considered in relation to network cultures and politics, as well as art institutions.
In recent years, immersive media have opened up new possibilities for the preservation of cultural heritage. Using Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Virtuality (AV), and Mixed Reality (MxR), cultural organizations around the globe are now transporting audiences to endangered world heritage sites and generating 3D representations of those sites in the audience’s physical environment. Largely untapped, however, is the unique potential of immersive media to preserve the historical experience of these spaces – that is, how people moved through them and assigned them meaning, where they went and why, and what they saw, felt, and heard – which can be as integral to a community’s cultural heritage as its material objects. The following article explores this use of immersive technology through an account of the author’s digital art history and cultural preservation project, Virtual Venice. Renewing the connection between present-day Venice and its rich urban past, the VR/360-video resource enables remote audiences to simulate the historical experience of the city while reaffirming its place in contemporary Venetian life.
Moldmate Identification in Pre-19th-Century European Paper using Quantitative Analysis of Watermarks, Chain Line Intervals, and Laid Line Density
Handmade laid paper has the important quality that every sheet of paper formed on the same papermaking mold retains a nearly identical imprint of the mold’s wire structure. These “moldmates” are identified by analyzing the recorded wire features, which are visible using transmitted light. When visual analysis is not sufficient to distinguish moldmates, three features of the mold’s wire mesh can be quantitatively analyzed using image processing techniques: watermark shape and placement, chain line intervals, and laid line density, for which a new method of analysis is introduced here. Using signal processing procedures, the frequency of the laid lines across a sheet of paper was found to fluctuate in a pattern unique to that mold. These quantitative methods were tested on a sample set of blank sheets from a 1536 edition of De re militari by Vegetius; computational analysis using any one of the three features was able to distinguish between four molds used in the group of papers. These results demonstrate that any of these techniques can be chosen as appropriate to determine moldmates from within a set of laid paper, regardless of size or the inclusion of a full watermark.
Online Exhibitions and Online Publications
As art museums undergo a digital transformation, institutions rethink physical exhibitions and print publications to create online resources which expand or replicate their traditional functions. Collection websites, online exhibitions, online publications, exhibition websites, and online exhibition catalogues coexist with interactive features which cannot be easily categorized in the previous typologies, the exhibition and the publication. Moreover, often these different types of online resources share characteristics and functions. This article intends to define two of the most relevant online resources typologies in art museums, the online exhibition and the online publication. The aim of it is to discuss and understand the importance of rethinking traditional typologies in the digital age. If typologies are necessary is because they help us to advance previous models. Both the definition and discussion are built upon the perspectives of art museums practitioners and a scholarly audience collected through interviews. The viewpoints of the two collectives help us understand existing conventions, preferences, and needs with regards to online exhibitions and publications in art museums.
Summary of the Roundtable “Setting up a DH Curriculum or Certificate” at the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America (Toronto, March 19, 2019)
This summary is a short overview of a roundtable discussion that took place at the Renaissance Society of America on the topic of the structure and organization of a Digital Humanities curriculum. I invited two representatives of European and two of US curricula, which were split up respectively into one for Digital Art History and one for general Digital Humanities: Leif Isaksen (Professor of Digital Humanities, Exeter), Peter Bell (Junior professor for Digital Humanities, with a focus on Digital Art History, Erlangen-Nürnberg), Hannah Jacobs (Digital Humanities Specialist in the Wired! Lab for Digital Art & Visual Culture, Duke University), and Ashley Sanders Garcia (Vice Chair of the Digital Humanities Program, UCLA). Both of the European cases are recent implementations of new curricula, whereas the US-American had established courses. While established studies do exist in Europe, as for example at the University of London, they are still quite rare.
Iconographic Visualization in Python, or ivpy, is a software module, written in the Python programming language, that provides a set of functions for organizing iconographic representations of data, including images and glyphs. The module also provides methods for extracting visual features from images; generating and hand-tuning clusters of data points; and embedding high-dimensional data in 2D coordinate spaces. It is designed for use inside computational notebooks, so that users working with data needn't leave the notebook environment in order to generate visualizations. The software is designed primarily for those researchers working with large image datasets in fields where human visual expertise cannot be replaced with or superseded by machine vision, such as art history and media studies.
Copyright (c) 2019 Author retains ownership of all rights under copyright in all versions of the written article. Journal retains ownership of the layout and design of the DAHJ version of the article. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
"Piazza Virtuale" was a ground-breaking art project that took place in 1992 during documenta 9. For one hundered days the artists group Van Gogh TV broadcast daily on the public cable television station 3Sat. It was seen by millions. The group tested models of what audiovisual media could look like if the public were involved in their design – a utopian concept that began to become reality with the advent of the WorldWideWeb from 1994 onwards. In addition to media artists and activists from all over Europe and Japan, the public was also able to participate in the program online, by telephone and fax, and help shape it. The result was a temporary "virtual community" that can be regarded as the predecessor of many contemporary net communities. A number of the phenomena that shape net culture today could already be observed in nuce at "Piazza virtuale": from chats to shitstorms, from smart mobs to cybersex, from collective creation to live video streaming. In this essay, we will give an overview of the project and outline the division of labor between the two project partners. This will be followed by an introduction into the theoretical framework of our research, before we describe in detail the archival approach and research methods that we have employed so far.
Today, AR apps for museums, archives, and cultural heritage sites enjoy increasing popularity among visitors and institutions alike. While such apps make a significant impact on our engagement with cultural memory and narratives, these AR projects are usually discussed either in isolation or as a part of a larger consideration of the contemporary culture of digital heritage. This paper exceeds the individual analysis of AR projects and examines such cultural heritage apps in relation to one another to map their existing forms and understand them as a creative tool as well as a mode of cultural production. I adjust Rosalind Krauss’ scheme of the Expanded Field (1979) in order to map the different forms of AR’s temporal paradigm. In doing this, I demonstrate how these in-situ, synchronized mobile interactions illuminate specific social and cultural conditions and spatial politics through the mixing of virtual and actual pasts and futures. I further discuss how my scheme can be used as a practical tool in the development of future projects, and how it is useful in mapping and thinking through some of the essential issues that underlie many AR projects, such as digital memory, narratives’ centralization, and the linearity of history.
This paper creates a conceptual frame and explanatory point of reference for the collection of papers presented at the exploratory workshop “Data Science for Digital Art History: Tackling Big Data Challenges, Algorithms, and Systems” organized at the KDD 2018 Conference in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery held in London in August 2018. The goal of the workshop was to probe the field and to build a constructive interdisciplinary dialogue between two research areas: Data Science and Art History. The workshop’s chairs and the authors of this paper share the conviction that Data Science can enrich art studies while analysis of visual data can have a positive impact on Data Science. Thus, the research initiative tried to critically reflect on the interdisciplinary collaboration between diverse research communities and its epistemological and ontological effects.
Navigating Context, Pathways and Relationships in Museum Collections using Formal Concept Analysis
The digital medium allows visitors, curators and art historians to gain new insights into their collections through data analysis and rich, interactive visualizations. Motivated by the rise of large-scale cultural heritage collections that have emerged on the Web, we argue that Formal Concept Analysis can be used to highlight the relationships between objects and their features within digital art collections and provide a means for visitors to explore these collections via interactive, narrated pathways. Our work presents four research projects that span 10 years from 2005 - 2015 – ImageSleuth, The Virtual Museum of the Pacific, A Place for Art and a scalability study of Formal Concept Analysis as applied to a data-set from the Brooklyn Museum. Our approach is based on the idea that much of the meaning that can be interpreted from museum collections lies – at least in part – in the way that objects are related to one another. Our work examines how Formal Concept Analysis can drive explorative, narrative-based visitor experiences and reveal new insights into cultural heritage collections.
The Problem of Distance in Digital Art History
Technology is used to compress time and space but at the cost of ‘nearness’. This means it maintains a distance and disjoint between qualitative and quantitative techniques, and therefore between humanists and technology. The knowledge representations that humanists require to investigate a given subject are not the same as those mandated by technologists and database systems more concerned with scale and the efficiency of data processing and retrieval, rather than context and meaning. This perpetuates a humanist perception of information systems as either, useful but ancillary, or problematic. This paper describes an intervention that seeks to combine the qualitative with the quantitative through collaborative research, expressive structured data, and a human-centered and participatory approach to the ‘knowledge graph’. Its design is based on an understanding of the history of historical textual narrative and the benefit of approaching quantitative issues from the bottom up, or qualitatively, incorporating different levels of generalisation, perspectives (different vantage point on reality), and approaches to connections across time and space. A specialist question based on the designs of the artist, Katsushika Hokusai is used as a basis to illustrate how ‘micro’ research questions contribute, in part, to bigger questions and higher quality quantitative analysis.
The Impact of Digitization and Digital Resource Design on the Scholarly Workflow in Art History
The technological progress of the past decades has had a transformative effect on both cultural institutions and academic research. It is generally accepted that mass digitization projects led by museums, libraries and archives have allowed institutions to reach new audiences and increase the impact of their collections, while the emergence of digital libraries and other types of digital resources has opened up new opportunities for scholars in terms of accessing diverse types of information. Yet, our knowledge of the impact of these resources on the scholarly workflow beyond the stage of discovery remains limited; this paper argues for the importance of understanding user behavior and needs for building digital resources that have a positive effect on the whole scholarly workflow. By employing an ethnographic approach to the study of art historians’ habits we get a detailed view of the effect that digitization and digital resource design can have on scholars’ work, from the seeking of the information to the construction of the research argument. The complex information behavior of art historians and the challenges they often face when interacting with digital resources make them a great example to demonstrate the impact that these can have on the research process.
Queer Criticalities, Instagram, and the Ethics of Museum Display
This essay explores the ways in which queer critical theory might be productively applied to digital art history and curatorial practice. Reflecting on a recent critically-acclaimed exhibition at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), the author creates a theoretical framework of digital and aesthetic futurity that accords well with a curatorial exercise in visualizing queer affective networks on social media.
Copyright (c) 2019 International Journal for Digital Art History https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This speculative fiction narrates the experience of a virtual museum environment in the near future. The description extends current capabilities of linked data, visualization, and computational analytics while adding features of virtual and augmented reality. The essay takes a skeptical view of the increased spectacularization of cultural memory experience even as it explores the potential for enriched research, pedagogy, and public knowledge that emerging technological platforms may provide.
Uncertainty Visualization and Digital 3D Modeling in Archaeology
Uncertainty is ubiquitous in everyday life and especially domains like engineering and industry, risk management or financial markets are increasingly aware of the far-reaching impact of uncertain data. Well-established research fields like the natural sciences are ever since concerned with the intangible phenomenon of uncertainty, as well as several disciplines like geography, information visualization, or any field concerned with the past. In this context, a range of disciplinary approaches were surveyed with regard to methods and techniques developed and applied to deal with uncertainty. As a result thereof various efforts were made to consider suitable taxonomies, quantification methods and visualization strategies. Emphasize is particularly laid on archaeology, highlighting the three-dimensional digital modeling and reconstruction activities and correlated archaeological discourse of the last two decades. Important for all disciplines however is the highly complex interrelation between uncertainty and visualization for the appropriate and comprehensible representation of gained results. Therefore, a range of visualization strategies is introduced, such as non-photorealistic rendering techniques, visual cues or several means for (re)contextualization, which evolved from disciplinary discourse in recent years. Also, some general visualization problems are mentioned. The final thoughts are meant to be somehow encouraging to consciously and creatively utilize uncertainty for future work in 3D modeling/reconstruction projects.
Copyright (c) 2018 International Journal for Digital Art History https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Art History is much more than a discipline of flat, 2D images. Even digital image atlases and metapictures often surpass the limitations of arranging the large image sets on x- and y-coordinates by adding the z-axis—thus, creating a three-dimensional space in which a more complex relational network can be visualized and navigated. With the third issue, then, it is fitting to focus on the third dimension in Art History, and the digital realm that continues to mediate and transform it.
Copyright (c) 2016 International Journal for Digital Art History
Summer School on Digital Art History (DAHSS)
The Summer School on Digital Art History (DAHSS) is an ongoing joint initiative of the University of Málaga and the University of California, Berkeley.
A highly interdisciplinary field such as digital art history requires specialized skills. For sophisticated projects, a fruitful collaboration between scholars in the humanities and scientists with a technological background is crucial.
CyArk is a California-based nonprofit dedicated to digitally documenting and preserving world heritage. Since 2003, they have used photogrammetry and laserscanning to capture 3D data for over 200 sites; most recently, they have partnered with Google Arts & Culture to create an open-access platform for these sites . Here, two members of the CyArk team, John Ristevski (Chairman and CEO) and Elizabeth Lee (Vice President of Programs and Development) sit down with Justin Underhill to discuss the past and present of digital cultural heritage.
This article responds to two issues affecting the field of contemporary art history: digital technology and the so-called computational turn in the humanities. It is divided into two parts: the first connects problems with “digital art history,” an offspring of digital humanities, to neoliberal metrics; the second suggests how digital art history’s“distant reading” might nevertheless be deployed critically in the analysis of contemporary art.
The History of Art is in the midst of its own big bang. Amit Sood, the head of the Google Cultural Institute and Art Project, announced such in February 2016 at the Innovation Conference TED in Vancouver. Through its “Arts & Culture” program, Google already offers virtual tours of over one thousand museums and cultural institutions throughout the world, and also provides access to more than six million high-resolution digitized works of art (it should be noted that these figures continue to rise steeply).
Computational Imagination and Digital Art History
This essay explores the parallel rising of computer vision technology and digital art history, examining some of the current possibilities and limits of computational techniques applied to the cultural and historical studies of images. A fracture emerges: computer scientists seem to lack in the critical approach typical of the humanities, a shortfall which sometimes condemns their attempts to remain technological curiosities. For their part, humanists lack in technical knowledge that is needed to directly investigate big archives of images, with the result that art historians often must limit their attempts in the computer-aided inquires on texts or metadata databases, a task that does not imply the study of the images themselves. A future dialogue between the two areas is claimed as a necessity to foster this new branch of knowledge.
As data storage, computational processing power, and retrieval costs diminish, many traditional technologies of data-compression are becoming obsolete. This unprecedented state of data opulence, where more and more data are expected to be always more easily available at ever decreasing costs, is bringing about significant changes in contemporary computation, and fostering a revival of Artificial Intelligence technologies that were seen until recently as of limited practical use. A similar techno-cultural disruption is already conspicuously affecting architectural design. Informational models in three dimensions are replacing the basic tools of the designer’s trade since the Renaissance – scaled drawings in plans, elevations, and sections. Furthermore, Big Data and computation allow digital designers to compose and engage with the messiness of some natural processes without going through the traditional mediation of abstract and general mathematical theories and patterns. Just like computation is replacing the causal laws of modern science with the brute force of data-driven simulation and optimization, blunt information retrieval is increasingly, albeit often subliminally, replacing causality-driven, teleological historiography, and demoting all modern and traditional tools of story-building and story-telling. This major anthropological upheaval challenges our ancestral dependance on shared master-narratives of our cultures and histories.
A Role-Based Model for Successful Collaboration in Digital Art History
Sustained dialogue and collaborative work between art historians and technologists has a great deal to offer both fields of inquiry. In this paper, we propose that effective collaborations in Digital Art History, however, require more than just a humanist and a technologist to succeed. Indeed, we find that there are four different roles that need to be filled: Humanist, Technologist, Data Steward, and Catalyst. Our approach is predicated on a few foundational convictions. First, we believe that art historians and technologists occupy distinct problem spaces. As we will outline, although these realms are distinct they are not of necessity in opposition to one another. Second, we bring to the fore essential questions about the status and function of data that must be addressed by the collaborators: what sort of data are being used? What counts as effective and compelling analysis of this data? Third, we recognize that there are certain structural impediments to collaboration, such as different reward structures and motivations. Finally, we assert that each of the participants must have a deep commitment to their particular engagement with the project, which requires sustained effort and the maintenance of disciplinary respect. We firmly believe that the most effective of these projects will not be based on technological solutionism, but rather will be founded in the most humanistic of tools: empathy and respect.
3D Reconstruction Techniques as a Cultural Shift in Art History?
Digital 3D reconstruction methods have been widely applied to support research and the presentation of historical objects since the 1980s. Whereas 3D reconstruction has been incorporated into a multitude of research applications, essential methodological foundations for more widespread utilisation of digital reconstructions have yet to be developed. Against this background, the aim of this article is to consider the question as to how the methodology of 3D reconstruction alters research cultures in architectural and art history by exemplifying three problem areas, (1) research functions of 3D reconstructions and their drawback to a current research culture in art history, (2) consequences of cross-disciplinary project-based teamwork as main cooperation format within 3D reconstruction projects, and (3) problems and difficulties caused by imagery as primary media for research and communication.
Starting in 2003 the Department of Architecture of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) has conducted digital reconstructions as subject of several master’s dissertations. Over the years different topics have been the subject of study, ranging from Burgundian residences to lost religious heritage, thus addressing a range of methodological difficulties specific to dealing with historic architecture using modern technologies. As Historic Building Information Modeling (HBIM) has found its way to a broader audience over the last few years, attention must be paid to the methodology and the communication of these reconstructions towards a wider audience. Using these new technologies inevitably changes the perspective of the viewer, shifting from a distant observer to a close inspector (keeping in mind that many of the reconstructed elements were never supposed to be seen up close). Together with these new approaches new means of communication and visualization need to be realized, fitting the possibilities of the reconstructions.
heritage building information modeling (HBIM)
Copyright (c) 2015 International Journal for Digital Art History
Copyright (c) 2015 International Journal for Digital Art History https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Has human beauty always been perceived in the same manner? We used a set of 120,000 paintings from different periods to analyze human faces between the 13th and the 20th centuries in order to establish whether there has been a single canon of beauty (that would maximize reproduction probabilities) or whether this has changed over time. Our study shows that when measuring averageness, symmetry, and orientation, the representation of human faces has not remained constant and that there are substantial differences between the faces depicted between the 15th and 18th centuries when compared to those of both the 13th and 20th centuries. Especially significant is the decrease in the perceived beauty of faces in 20th-century paintings, as the freedom of artists and the openness of society fostered the representation of different types of human faces other than that of classical styles. To this article supplementary material can be found at HeiDATA Dataverse Network http://dx.doi.org/10.11588/data/10057 Figures S1-5 Tables S1-5 External Database S1. List of paintings and metadata, paintings.xlsx External Database S2. List of faces and features, faces.xlsx External Database S3. List of authors and number of paintings, authors.xlsx
With reference to the concept of distant reading in literary history, distant viewing is a valuable analogy for a quantitative approach to art history. In this case study of artistic productivity eight samples are analyzed, extracted from a digital thematic research collection about the iconography of Aphrodite/Venus from the Middle Ages to Modern Times. The result is an empirical finding of regularity never before highlighted in art history. The artistic productivity fits perfectly the distribution known as Lotka’s law of scientific productivity in bibliographic science. Issues of collecting and sampling are discussed and the meaning of this empirical finding is hinted. Suggestions for future research are made.
Taking into account the call of this journal to examine the epistemological and methodological assumptions in the field of art history on the verge of its digital turn, the aim of this essay is to contribute to the ongoing discussion by questioning the role of the framing device in the context of image appropriation and critical interpretation of visual documents. Focusing on the cognitive and structural potential of the frame, a common feature between analogue and digital art historical practice, we try to provide points of historical perspective through a selection of particular examples (Giorgio Vasari, Gustav Ludwig and Aby Warburg) and bring them closer to the notions of instrumentation and interface.
On Applying Signal Processing to Computational Art History
This paper offers a few reflections on the origins, historiography and condition of the field often referred to as Digital Art History (DAH), with references, among others, to the activities of the Computers and the History of Art group (CHArt, est. 1985) and my personal experience, spanning over 20 years, first as a postgraduate student, then doctoral researcher and eventually Lecturer in DAH. The publications and teaching activities of scholars connected to CHArt are seen as indicative of the evolution of the field internationally. Personal experience, or a reality check, is limited to higher education in the UK. The key argument here concerns the question­­able benefit of promoting DAH as a discrete discipline and detaching digital practices from the mainstream history of art and its institutions. When introduced in the late 1990s, the ‘DAH’ served to indicate a dramatic shift in the way art history could be practiced, taught, studied and communicated. The changes were brought about by widening access to computers and information technology. DAH was suggested—“perhaps a little ahead of time—as a new kind of intellectual fusion” (W. Vaughan). It is no longer necessary to argue for the wise use of computers. Digital technology has become part and parcel of teaching, learning and re­search. It is the History of Art and its more traditional research methods and critical per­spectives that are seen at risk of neglect. The theories of crisis, even ‘death’ of Art History have contributed to general anxiety over the discipline’s future. However, a discipline has “the ability and power to control and judge its borders” (R. Nelson). The discipline of Art History is richer and stronger through the fusion of digital scholarship with, not separation, from more traditional methodologies and critical canons. The need to continue with the ‘digital’ distinction is questionable.
The past five years have witnessed a growing interest amongst art historians in the potential of digital projects to impact, if not transform, the discipline. A steep rise in conferences and institutes dedicated to digital art history, along with funding opportunities and institutional support, has accelerated the rate at which art historians are now engaging with digital techniques. With this new visibility, art historians have criticized themselves for lagging behind other disciplines such as history and archaeology. This article questions the assumption that art historians have been slow to embrace digital tools and methods through a brief historical examination of projects undertaken by institutions and scholars during the infancy of art history computing: the early 1980s through the early 1990s. Using Johanna Drucker's distinction of the "digitized" and "digital" iterations of art history, this essay traces the genealogies of both categories, arguing that scholars have been more active in theorizing, practicing and creating digital methods than is often seen to be the case. Ultimately, this essay is an attempt to help define from a historical perspective what "digital art history" is and how it has been practiced.
Copyright (c) 2015 International Journal for Digital Art History .
Copyright (c) 2016 International Journal for Digital Art History https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Linking Structure, Texture and Context in a Visualization of Historical Drawings by Frederick William IV (1795-1861)
In this article we present a case study on digital representation of the art historical research and metadata brought together for a scientific collection catalogue by the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg. The resulting interface aims at linking the structure and texture of a collection of drawings by Frederick William IV of Prussia (1795–1861) with additional contextual information. The article describes the context of the larger research project and presents the resulting visualization and interaction techniques specifically designed for dynamic exploration along time and subjects.
Direct Visualization Techniques for the Analysis of Image Data
The following is a description of two novel techniques for the direct visualization of image data. Direct visualizations of image data make use of the images in their original visible format. The first technique, the slice histogram, arranges slices of images as histograms, organized by both visual and non-visual variables. The second technique, the growing entourage plot, organizes high-dimensional clusters of images on a 2D canvas by projection. Both techniques are designed for exploratory analysis of image datasets.
Experimenting with Meta Images. Artistic Approaches meet Computational Methods
Big Image Data within the Big Picture of Art History
The use of the computer in Art History is changing the approach towards our objects of research. Now, we are able to compute more images than a human can see in a lifetime. That, in turn, calls for a new definition of the role of the researcher and the tools being used. The access to large amounts of visual data stands in a tradition of conventional methods of Art History, but also augments them with quantity. This article proposes a theoretical model on which to build an understanding of the meta image with which we interactively derive our conclusions.
Social Network Centralization Dynamics in Print Production in the Low Countries, 1550-1750
The development of a professionalized, highly centralized printmaking industry in northern Europe during the mid-sixteenth century has been argued to be the inevitable result of prints' efficacy at reproducing images, and thus encouraging mass production. However, it is unclear whether such a centralized structure was truly inevitable, and if it persisted through the seventeenth century. This paper uses network analysis to infer these historical print production networks from two large databases of existing prints in order to characterize whether and how centralization of printmaking networks changed over the course of this period, and how these changes may have influenced individual printmakers.
World population and the number of cultural artifacts are growing exponentially or faster, while cultural interaction approaches the fidelity of a global nervous system. Every day hundreds of millions of images are loaded into social networks by users all over the world. As this myriad of new artifacts veils the view into the past, like city lights covering the night sky, it is easy to forget that there is more than one Starry Night, the painting by Van Gogh. Like in ecology, where saving rare species may help us in treating disease, art and architectural history can reveal insights into the past, which may hold keys to our own future. With humanism under threat, facing the challenge of understanding the structure and dynamics of art and culture, both qualitatively and quantitatively, is more crucial now than it ever was. The purpose of this article is to provide perspective in the aim of figuring out the process of art history – not art history as a discipline, but the actual history of all made things, in the spirit of George Kubler and Marcel Duchamp. In other words, this article deals with the grand challenge of developing a systematic science of art and culture, no matter what, and no matter how.
Review of the summer school for digital art history organized by the Computer Vision Group Heidelberg of the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR)
Graduate Workshop on Digital Tools for Art Historians
Art Historians who wish to engage with the potential of digital tools for research and narratives about works of art, architecture and cities often have difficulties identifying appropriate software and receiving basic training. To address this challenge, the Wired! group at Duke University began to offer workshops in 2009, and since 2012 these have been taught on site at Venice International University, which created a laboratory for this purpose. Our goal has been to assist scholars in learning basic skills not only to create maps, models, and displays that narrate research questions, but also to acquire enough knowledge to join in effective and directed partnerships with computer scientists and engineers. In 2015, the Getty Foundation covered the costs of travel and living expenses for the faculty and participants, while the Delmas Foundation has helped since 2012 with the costs of tuition.
In this paper, by extending the methodology of media archaeology to the praxis of Cultural Analytics/Media Visualization I ask how have we compared multitude of diverse images and what can we learn about the narratives that these comparisons allow? I turn to the work of Aby Warburg who attempted to organize close to two thousand images in his Mnemosyne Atlas. In comparing contemporary methods of image data visualization through cultural analytics method of remapping and the turn of the century methodology developed by Warburg under the working title of the “iconology of intervals,” I examine the shifts and continuities that have shaped informational aesthetics as well as data-driven narratives. Furthermore, in drawing parallels between contemporary Cultural Analytics/Media Visualization techniques, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas, I argue that contextual and image color data knowledge should continue to be important for digital art history. More specifically, I take the case study of Warburg’s Panel 45 in order to explore what we can learn through different visualization techniques about the role of color in the representation of violence and the promise of prosperous civil society.
Large-scale Classification of Fine-Art Paintings
In the past few years, the number of fine-art collections that are dig- itized and publicly available has been growing rapidly. With the availability of such large collections of digitized artworks comes the need to develop multime- dia systems to archive and retrieve this pool of data. Measuring the visual similar- ity between artistic items is an essential step for such multimedia systems, which can benefit more high-level multimedia tasks. In order to model this similarity between paintings, we should extract the appropriate visual features for paintings and find out the best approach to learn the similarity metric based on these fea- tures. We investigate a comprehensive list of visual features and metric learning approaches to learn an optimized similarity measure between paintings. We de- velop a machine that is able to make aesthetic-related semantic-level judgments, such as predicting a painting’s style, genre, and artist, as well as providing simi- larity measures optimized based on the knowledge available in the domain of art historical interpretation. Our experiments show the value of using this similarity measure for the aforementioned prediction tasks.
GLAM institutions all over the world are digitizing their collections. As the number of items in such a collection amounts to tens or even hundreds of thousands, providing comprehensible access and presentation becomes increasingly difficult. At the same time, a steadily growing amount of this data is openly available. This gives rise to various projects approaching the hidden treasures in these collections with computational tools. The project presented here, Gugelmann Galaxy, lets the user explore an entire collection of digitized images and their textual metadata in an immersive three-dimensional cloud, whose configuration can be rearranged according to different criteria. The project questions traditional models of categorization and curating and implements alternative approaches prototypically.