Creating Digital Art History: Library, Student and Faculty Collaboration

Introduction This chapter provides an overview of the practices, approaches and discourses that make up the diverse field of digital art history. The author first describes the general discourse around digital art history, exploring how art historians and arts information professionals have defined digital art history and positioned digital art history practices in relation to the broader field of art history. He then outlines specific tools and methods, offering examples of projects. Finally, he considers the role that art and design libraries, archives and museums can play in supporting scholars, students and the wider public in pursuing, creating and sharing digital art history projects. Art and design librarians and other arts information professionals have a critical role to play in the future of digital art history. Identifying what this role might be is especially difficult, as digital art history is a moving target, developing in relation to dynamic technologies that promise an increasing range of possibilities. However, by mapping out the past and present of the field, information professionals will be better equipped to respond strategically to technological developments and work together towards a future of strong digital art historical scholarship. The digital in art history Digital technologies undeniably occupy a prominent position in nearly all aspects of current art historical research activities, teaching and knowledge production. Although relatively few in the field self-identify as ‘digital’ art historians, essentially all art history scholars depend on digital technologies to carry out their work, including such ubiquitous tools as PowerPoint and online library catalogues. The digital image repository, though, is perhaps the most significant digital resource to date for art history scholarship. Drucker (2013) refers to this phase of building up repositories of digital resources as digitized art history, work that has included scanning analogue images and crafting metadata descriptions. This work has also laid the foundation for what Drucker distinguishes as digital art history: the application of digital methods and computational analysis to the study of artworks and other art history research materials. With this still-growing infrastructure of digital resources, art historians can use computational tools to investigate objects of art historical research to new ends.

Editorial Commentary

Art museums began using computers to help organize, catalogue, and coordinate their collections as early as the 1960s. In more recent times, art historians have consolidated the use of digital tools in the discipline within the emerging field of Digital Art History (DAH). In this historiographic study, we set out to understand DAH through an analysis of existing scholarship in the field. Our method combined both text mining and close reading of three datasets of art history journal articles published in the last decade: DAH (International Journal of Digital Art History, special issues of Visual Resources), Art History, and Art Journal. We studied the topical focus of these journals, looking at which agents, materials, and methods dominate and how they are contextualized. Based on this, we found that the subject matter and topical focus of scholarship in DAH differs significantly from scholarship in Art History or Art Journal. More specifically, the historical concerns of museums with regard to digitization still dominate DAH compared to other scholarship in the field. We argue that there are a number of historical and practical reasons for this, including early adoption of computers within museums, the need for simplicity in digitization projects, and issues of copyright. The persistence of this affiliation, in turn, raises critical questions for the future of the field of art history, including who can access art historical datasets, and how and by whom they are created.

Summary Over the past decade humanities researchers have increasingly come to embrace digital methods. Art historians, however, have often resisted engaging with these developments. In this article, we explore the driving factors behind art history's reticence toward the digital turn in the humanities. Reflecting on the historiographic trajectory of the emerging field of digital art history (DAH) versus art history more generally, we selected a sample of recent articles published between 2010-2019. We used a mixture of methods, both digital and non-digital, to uncover the prevalence for different art-historical theories in DAH versus mainstream art history. We began our study by performing a text mining analysis on the references and bibliography of articles published in DAH, Art Journal, and Art History. Once we had determined a list of frequently-cited authors, we dug deeper to see how they were discussed in the body of individual texts. In other words, we employed traditional humanities methods: close reading and interpretation. DAH is typically positioned as something completely new to the discipline. However, as this study shows, DAH is closely tied to particular pre-digital methods and theories of art history, namely formalist and iconographic methods prevalent during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century, rather than critical theory methods commonly found in more recent art-historical scholarship. Based on our analysis, we argue that DAH methods have not been embraced by art historians more generally because of fundamental differences in the theoretical underpinnings of DAH versus the broader field of art history.

While early experiments in digital and technological art began in the 1960s, degree programs that focused on it did not emerge until the 1980s. Most digital art pioneers were self-taught and created their work at research centers and universities. Emerging digital artists were primarily fine art students who supplemented their education with courses in computer science, graphics and programming. The first MFA in Computer Arts was established at the School of Visual Arts in 1986. The goal of the program was to provide an academic and studio environment in which artists would learn about the theory, history and practice of digital art. Several MFA degree programs followed and continue to be established. While museums were resistant to this type of art early on, international organizations and a small group of galleries embraced it. Museum curators who had experience and an interest in digital art were few and far between. As digital artists began to redefine the contemporary art landscape, museums and galleries began to take an interest in exhibiting this creative work. The development of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s radically changed both the museum and contemporary art world, and as well the education of artists. This chapter explores the parallel developments of digital art education; changes in how art is created, experienced and exhibited; new forms of contemporary art and the approaches modern curators are using to showcase this art.

Gifts from Our Elders: African Arts<i>and Visionary Art History</i>

In Dismantling the Patriarchy, Bit by Bit, Judith K. Brodsky makes a ground-breaking intellectual leap by connecting feminist art theory with the rise of digital art. Technology has commonly been considered the domain of white men but—unrecognized until this book—female artists, including women artists of color, have been innovators in the digital art arena as early as the late 1960s when computers first became available outside of government and university laboratories. Brodsky, an important figure in the feminist art world, looks at various forms of visual art that are quickly becoming the dominant art of the 21st century, examining the work of artists in such media as video (from pioneers Joan Jonas and Adrian Piper to Hannah Black today), websites and social networking (from Vera Frenkel to Ann Hirsch), virtual and augmented reality art (Jenny Holzer to Hyphen-Lab), and art using artificial intelligence. She also documents the work of female-identifying, queer, transgender, and Black and brown artists including Legacy Russell and Micha Cárdenas, who are not only innovators in digital art but also transforming technology itself under the impact of feminist theory. In this radical study, Brodsky argues that their work frees technology from its patriarchal context, illustrating the crucial need to transform all areas of our culture in order to achieve the goals of #MeToo, Black Lives Matter (BLM), and Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) representation, to empower female-identifying and Black and brown people, and to document their contributions to human history. This book is about how women and gender variant digital artists are transforming technology under the impact of feminist theory. It documents the history and contemporary practice of such artists in one volume for the first time and shows how they have made significant contributions to the aesthetic and practice of digital art and have altered digital technology itself. The 1960s and 1970s generation of feminist artists re-purposed traditional art disciplines seeking out new art forms to express women’s experience. In looking at the history of digital technology and art through the lens of feminism, feminist art theory played an important role in the development of digital artmaking and helped to free digital technology from the limitations imposed by its patriarchal origins and transforming it into an accessible way of apprehending the world for people everywhere. Feminism evolved in the 1960s and 1970s among mostly white, heterosexual and lesbian women to accord women parity with men. Postcolonialism, queer, and critical race theory recognized feminism as a social justice movement but transformed it to become inclusive of gender fluidity, race, power, and oppression in general. It became an intersectional movement and is used as such in this book. Although rejecting patriarchal binary definitions of gender, this book restores women digital artists to their rightful place in history, covering artists globally and from underrepresented groups, a broad range of disciplines including video, animation, design, kinetic sculpture, 3-D computer modeling, painting, installation, performance, hypertext literature, virtual and augmented reality, and public art. The artists are innovators in interdisciplinarity, working with sound as well as visual imagery, breaching the barrier between high art and popular visual culture, creating video games and working with community organizations, transforming digital technology into a more human mode of communication.

A pressing problem in archival preservation of information on electronic art, and any possible virtual conservation of such artifacts in Latin America, is the lack of strategic initiatives in the field. Unfortunately, a certain so-called ‘history of digital art’ has not been constructed in the southern continent; neither is any ‘history of digital art in Latin America’ valorized per se in the literature on contemporary art. The creation of databases and sets is inevitable as Latin America transforms into an economic power. Intelligent and user-friendly archival platforms are urgently needed. The potential of a 5G empowered mining for retrieval of dynamic contents in new media arts is immense and would further point to the aesthetic needs of the future.

Digital art is increasingly becoming engaged with contemporary art. Artists began using programming and technology to create art in the 1950s and 1960s and the revolutionary advances in digital technology have spawned new approaches to making art. Originally viewed as outsider art, digital art gained international recognition in the late 1960s and again at the turn of the century. Traditional art institutions were not as quick to embrace this creative use of technology as artists did. In the 1970s, several international organizations were created to support this art form and remain active today. Exhibitions during this period were both juried and curated. During the 1970s and 1980s, there were very few digital art curators. The change occurred during the late 1990s when museums began to take notice of and exhibit digital art. The Internet has enabled artist, scholar and art institutional websites and the establishment of extensive archives of this art form. This online presence is contributing to the integration of digital art with contemporary art. Publishers have also followed suit and there is now a good selection of books on the theory, history and practice of digital art, led by the MIT Press, Thames & Hudson, and others. As digital art continues to merge with contemporary art, the division between the two will continue to lessen. However, what is important is to rectify the art historical record to give digital art the rightful place it has earned in the contemporary art landscape.

Although the phrase "digital art" is now widely used, its history and development may be traced back to long ago. Digital art offers artists a variety of platforms on which to develop their ideas and further their artistic endeavours. The development of technology is being used by several digital artists in India to produce innovative concepts and ideas. Through the use of digital tools and technology, artists are channeling their ideas into representation. Anandamoy Banerji and Ranbir Kaleka are two well-known Indian painters whose works have been included in this study to examine the history and development of digital art. Their work showcase the wonderful amalgamation of technology with the fusion of creativity and imagination.

While images are central to the discipline of art history, surprisingly little research has been conducted on the uses of digital environments for teaching in the discipline. Over the past decade, more studies have emerged considering the egalitarian space that can be used by students and teachers in web-based applications and social media. A body of literature has begun to emerge out of a small network of scholars and educators interested in digital humanities and art history, providing examples of how new tools can be integrated into the standard slideshow and lecture format of the field. At the same time, the latest technology that proves revolutionary for the field has had very little study-virtual reality (VR). Additionally, sensory evidence for digital art history and the creation of immersive interactive and multimodal environments for knowledge production is still underexplored. As multiple educational metaverses are currently under development, understanding best practices and pedagogical use of VR has never been timelier. This study seeks to review the pedagogical use of VR in art history current in the field and introduces results from a study of the most effective ways to use these immersive experiences using Bloom’s revised taxonomy. Results confirm that the most effective method to structure VR assignments is to provide training on the technology, provide students with the necessary instructional material to introduce the concept, skill or technique to be learned, create or select an immersive experience that reinforces that topic, and conclude with a debrief or discussion about major takeaways from the experience.

With the growing interest in digital humanities, the methodology of digital art history is in some respects lagging behind the trend. Given the prospects of the new digital image analysis, computer vision, and visualization methods, a number of questions have arisen as to how exactly the new digital methods can and should be applied to art history. Furthermore, when trying to apply these digital methods to the analysis of Russian art, one encounters a whole new set of questions and challenges. In this chapter, I examine current and potential applications of digital methods to the analysis of Soviet political cartoons published in Pravda during the “Great Patriotic War,” 1941–1945, as well as the study of Russian art history more generally. I especially examine how the combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses of political cartoons enables a deeper understanding that illustrates cultural, historical, and political developments over time.

The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, has an extensive collection of time-based media art from the 1960s onwards, which has been expanded into the digital field in recent decades. The Stedelijk makes an interesting case study for this special issue on “Art Curation: Challenges in the Digital Age,” because it has had a reputable history of dealing with time-based art since the mid-1970s but presently faces the same challenges with regard to curating and collecting digital art as other museums of modern art. The Stedelijk’s history began in 1974, when the first curator for time-based art was hired, Dorine Mignot, a pioneer in this field. After Mignot’s retirement in 2006, the museum was closed for almost a decade, but under the leadership of Beatrix Ruf (2014–2017), an innovative agenda was set again for new media and digital art. In this paper, Sjoukje van der Meulen mobilizes the museum’s rich and varied history of new media and digital art to think through some of the issues, challenges and concerns raised by guest editor Francesca Franco for this special issue such as “What are the issues involved in re-contextualizing and exhibiting artworks made in the 1960s and the 1970s?” and “What are [adequate] curatorial approaches regarding digital art?”

This paper explores the potential for rigorous pedagogical scholarship to complement developments in digital art history (DAH). In addition to introducing ideas and methods that characterize scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) in higher education, we focus on two major themes: how digital tools and techniques can support robust scholarship of teaching and learning in art history (SoTL-AH) and ways that SoTL-AH can be used to evaluate and demonstrate the impact of DAH projects in the classroom and the public realm. Our goal is to encourage greater exchange between these two emerging fields that can together advance art historical study.

There are practical problems associated with documentation, preservation, access, function, context and meaning of digital art. How do we care for similar works, and which are the theoretical and methodological challenges for curating and preserving digital art? Upon an ongoing case-based investigation of current digital and media art conservation practices at leading international museums, The author investigates how conservation for digital art could benefit from interdisciplinary synergies with Digital Preservation, Art Theory, and Information Management. A longer version of this paper entitled ‘Evolution and preservation of digital art: case studies from ZKM’, was presented at the Association of Art Historians (AAH) Conference 2010, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom.