Digital Art History Research Articles

Expanding Understandings of Curatorial Practice Through Virtual Exhibition Building

This article reflects on the translation of gallery space into a virtually immersive experience in an era of remote access. Curators and scholars such as Mary Nooter Roberts, Susan Vogel, Carol Duncan, Tony Bennet, Stephen Greenblatt, Judith Mastai, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett have discussed the myriad of ways in which the experience of culturally significant objects and sites in person has been critical to the study of art and its history. Focusing on theories of curation and display, I utilize practice-based examples from six virtual reality (VR) exhibitions produced in three different institutional contexts: the International Journal of Digital Art History’s online gallery, the European Cultural Center’s Performance Art program, and the Digital Humanities program at the University of California, Los Angeles. By documenting and analyzing the extended reality (XR) methods employed and the methodological approaches to the digital curatorial work, I address some of the challenges and opportunities of presenting objects in virtual space, offering comparisons to those faced when building physical exhibitions. I also consider how digital modalities provide a distinctly different paradigm for epistemologies of art and culture that offer greater contextualized understandings and can reshape exhibition documentation and the teaching of curatorial practice and museum studies.

Neurosurrealism in the Service of Revolution: Aesthetic Features and Critical Potential of Neural Network Art

The rapid development of neural network technologies in recent years has given rise to the formation of many interdisciplinary research areas, including neural network aesthetics. The aesthetics of generative creativity today is studied not only in the context of the history of digital art, but also in comparison with the practices of other artistic trends and schools. Thus, the expression “neural surrealism”, which has become entrenched in popular discourse, undoubtedly refers to the aesthetics of classical surrealism, framed and fixed in Andre Breton’s program texts: neural network algorithms allow you to create images that seem both realistic and absurd due to unexpected combinations of objects, distorted proportions and presence of uncanny images. Although “neural surrealism” can be seen as a depoliticized and unbiased game of generated images in contrast to the surrealism of the 1920s and 30s, which was not merely an artistic movement but a radical social project, it appears that the very ability of neural networks to generate extraordinary and unpredictable images holds a certain critical potential. Using the methods of formal-stylistic and ideological-content analysis, the author of the article concludes that “neurosurrealism” in a sense continues the line of classical surrealism to undermine the automatism of perception and patterns of thinking. Generative algorithms become a kind of “exclusion production machines” that allow you to see reality from an unexpected angle. In addition, the very fact of using neural networks in art raises important questions about the nature of creativity, the limits of artificial intelligence and the future of man in the world of smart machines. Neurosurrealism problematizes well-established ideas about the originality and intentionality of artistic expression, which indicates the close connection of generative artistic practices with the aesthetics of classical surrealist creativity. The conducted research will be useful to specialists of a wide profile: media theorists, art historians, philosophers, cultural scientists, as well as developers and representatives of the creative industries.

Poses of People in Art: A Data Set for Human Pose Estimation in Digital Art History

Poses of People in Art: A Data Set for Human Pose Estimation in Digital Art History

Bald krumme Linien: generative aesthetics and the Bensian legacy

ABSTRACT The importance of German philosopher Max Bense to the history of digital art is difficult to overstate. As the dominant theoretician during the pioneering phase of computer art, Bense’s prolific writings on information aesthetics – particularly his signature theory, ‘generative aesthetics’ – reached a global audience. However, Bense’s broad project has remained largely absent from surveys of Anglo-American aesthetics, and though information aesthetics garnered intense interest in the 1960s, it was eventually deemed a failure. By re-examining Bense’s landmark exhibition of computer-generated art at the University of Stuttgart, this essay finds clues to his conflicting legacy. Made memorable through a heated exchange and walk-out of audience members, the exhibit and accompanying lecture were covered by the magazine Der Spiegel in an article titled Bald krumme Linien [Soon crooked Lines]. If we examine the beliefs and practices of those named as attendees (including Heinz Trökes, Anton Stankowski, and Herbert W. Kapitzki), we find the dissent more nuanced than previously thought. Though the dispute revealed the limits of Bense’s reductionist and anti-subjective approach to aesthetics, the episode also catalysed Bense’s enduring influence and high standing within the digital arts.

Digital Art History as Critical AI

Digital Art History as Critical AI

An archaeology of media artivism: attempting to draft the history of digital culture for social change

The emergence of media artivism over the last decades constitutes a new and relevant field of study for researchers of digital culture and social change, digital art historians and media archaeologists. Since the inception of the new millennium and the spread of electronic culture, media artivism has grown into a field of its own with distinctive organizations, artists, curators and critics devoted to engaged practices that are close to political antagonism and far from the concerns of the elitist art world. Considering the worsening environmental and political crisis around the globe, the spread and conscious use of new technologies becomes essential to update the concept of artivism, intended as a kind of action-taking art devoted to social issues. By establishing an epistemological framework along the lines of media archaeology and digital art history, the research highlights the role of media artivism in the context of recent historical and societal developments, as well as its potentially leading role for behavioral and social change. From pioneering experiences to current practices, the paper explores how a growing number of practitioners are tackling societal concerns through digital strategies and thus drawing attention to several critical topics, such as: gender issues, environmental delinquency, racial discrimination, social injustices, political corruption, abuse of power, invasive technologies and surveillance abuse. In the course of the analysis, a relevant role is given to practices based on hacktivism, public engagement and intercreative procedures that aim at highlighting, disclosing, or spreading the state of affairs which are still uncovered in traditional media and thus expanding the role of investigative art/journalism in the Postdigital Age. The case studies presented show how media artivism emerges as an autonomous field shaped by practitioners acting on the premise of a vocation on the fringe between society and the art world.

Florence 4D. Locating, Connecting and Experiencing 3D Models in the Early Modern City

3D models of historical sites tend to be presented to researchers and the wider public as isolated "objects" that can be freely manipulated through online platforms, with little consideration of their original settings or their physical qualities. The Florence 4D project proposes new ways of presenting 3D models of buildings and the artworks they contained within the early modern city of Florence through an interactive website that allows users to navigate the built environment using historic maps, a variety of historical geodatasets, and embedded 3D models linked into an underpinning database. Such an approach makes it possible to digitally reinstate connections between buildings that have often been radically transformed and their spatial context. In turn by redeploying these same 3D models onto an agile location-aware app (Hidden Florence 3D), the models can be experienceed as Augmented Reality enhancements on location in the city, as well as in connection with artworks that may have been relocated to museum collections, delivering innovative digital art history research to wider audiences.

Toward an Ethics of Place: Asian Art in/and Digital Art History

Toward an Ethics of Place: Asian Art in/and Digital Art History

Text-mining metadata: What can titles tell us of the history of modern and contemporary art?

The use of statistical text-mining to investigate the linguistic structure of textual resources has received limited attention in digital art history. In this paper the question I address is that of what text-mining titles as given in metadata can tell us about the history of modern and contemporary art. To investigate this question I constructed a dataset from the metadata for over 170,000 artworks, drawing on the online collections of 133 art museums in 30 countries. The use of topic modelling, parts-of-speech tagging and word counting allows me to identify large-scale and long-run patterns in the language used in the titles of those artworks. I set out an art historical reading of those patterns in which artistic interests signalled by the language used in titles come and go and are re-inflected, epistemic perspectives on the kinds of knowledge art can or should engender change, and artists engage with the ways that the title functions. My ‘distant’ reading is consistent with the canonical history of modern and contemporary art and cuts across the particularities of artist, period or movement which often feature in such accounts, providing a fresh perspective on that history. It also complements and extends the scholarship on the history of titles in the visual arts. The analytical framework and the dataset I have developed are not limited to answering the question addressed in this paper, and I consider some of the possibilities for future work.

The Dutch Textile Trade Project and the Development of JHNA’s Digital Art History Capabilities

What started with a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation to integrate the Dutch Textile Trade Project into the JHNA publishing platform grew into a broader digital art historical project. Strengthened by a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation to redesign and enrich the Dutch Textile Trade Project site while creating additional technical functionality for JHNA, the results benefit not only this textiles-focused issue but also future JHNA authors and readers alike.

Textile Circulation in the Dutch Global Market: A Digital Approach

From the refined silk used to make japonse rokken to the coarse cotton of laborers’ shirts, textiles have long been critical indicators of rank and status in the visual culture of the early modern Dutch Republic and its global networks. And yet, due to the complexity of the trade, the ways in which these textiles generated meaning is not easy to discern. With these concerns in mind, this essay debuts the preliminary findings of the Dutch Textile Trade Project (dutchtextiletrade.org), an ongoing, collaborative digital art history project that brings together four types of data (textual, material, visual, and quantitative) in an effort to advance the study of historic trade textiles and their social meanings.

The Façade of Neutrality: Unearthing Hidden Histories in the Montias Database with Digital Methodologies

Technological innovations and the 2020 global pandemic have increased scholarly interactions with and reliance on digital resources, leading cultural heritage institutions to prioritize initiatives that digitize and organize their collections online, aiding in their accessibility to a wider global audience. Focusing on the Montias Database of 17th Century Art Inventories, this article turns a critical eye toward digitized art-historical data that is collected, preserved, and organized by cultural heritage institutions. Using the digital art history project “Beyond ‘Exceptional’: Reassessing Women’s Participation in the Cultural Sphere of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam with Digital Social Network Analysis,” I demonstrate the potential of computational methods for mediating the biases inherent to these collections.

Digital Twins and Cultural Heritage Preservation: A Case Study of Best Practices and Reproducibility in Chiesa dei SS Apostoli e Biagio

The use of digital twin technologies to preserve cultural heritage has become increasingly common over the past two decades. Evolving from the use of virtual environments (VE) and digital reconstructions that required multiple phases of workflow and multiple software applications and various hardware to output a useable experience to the immediacy of 3D artificial intelligence (AI) generative content and the latest generation of photogrammetric scanning, non-specialists are now able to more easily create digital twins. At the same time, the destruction of cultural heritage has accelerated due to geopolitical instability, seen in examples such as the invasion of Ukraine by Russia (2022). Even with advances in user-friendly and commercially available technologies, digital art history and the digital humanities are in a race against time to train and equip enough individuals onsite to create digital twins before more irreplaceable cultural artifacts and sites are lost to natural disasters, accelerated by climate change, or through armed conflict. However, there remain no international standards for methodological reproducibility and the techniques used currently by many scholars include specialized training and knowledge. As such, this paper presents a case study that addresses reproducibility and explainability in the digital humanities through a detailed workflow of the creation of a digital twin of Chiesa dei SS Apostoli e Biagio in Florence, Italy. A model is presented that is scalable and leverages widely available, user-friendly 360 cameras and photogrammetry with LiDAR to capture cultural heritage sites with best practices on how to quickly and effectively train non-specialists to create site-specific digital twins of a variety of cultural heritage structures.

Modern Art from the Arab Region – Digitisation as a Chance? The Research and Database Project LAWHA as a Case Study

Reconstructing history is a challenging task. What does it mean exactly and how to proceed? What are the advantages of the digital approach to history? How can we differentiate between digital art history and art history with digitised material? The present paper aims to provide insights into the ongoing research project LAWHA (Lebanon’s Art World at Home and Abroad: Trajectories of Artists and Artworks In/from Lebanon Since 1943) and the knowledge structure of its database. How does the data need to be modelled to provide answers to the guiding research questions? The project departs from the presumption that the digital can create more visibility for modern art from the Arab region and ultimately broaden the art canon. Is that too positivist an approach and can the digital really be the spearhead of real-life developments? What role do keywords play in that regard?

Linked Open Images: Visual similarity for the Semantic Web

This paper presents ArtVision, a Semantic Web application that integrates computer vision APIs with the ResearchSpace platform, allowing for the matching of similar artworks and photographs across cultural heritage image collections. The field of Digital Art History stands to benefit a great deal from computer vision, as numerous projects have already made good progress in tackling issues of visual similarity, artwork classification, style detection, gesture analysis, among others. Pharos, the International Consortium of Photo Archives, is building its platform using the ResearchSpace knowledge system, an open-source semantic web platform that allows heritage institutions to publish and enrich collections as Linked Open Data through the CIDOC-CRM, and other ontologies. Using the images and artwork data of Pharos collections, this paper outlines the methodologies used to integrate visual similarity data from a number of computer vision APIs, allowing users to discover similar artworks and generate canonical URIs for each artwork.

The Replica Project: Co-Designing a Discovery Engine for Digital Art History

This article explains how the Replica project is a particular case of different professionals coming together to achieve the digitization of a historical photographic archive, intersecting complementary knowledge specific to normally unconnected communities. In particular the community of Art History researchers, brought together here in relation to their common methodologies in the practice of visual pattern research, became protagonists in the construction of a specific tool, the Morphograph, to navigate through the archive’s photos. A specific research problem, the recognition of visual patterns migrating from one work to another, became the key to developing a new technology initially intended for a specific community of users, but with such a generic character in its approach that it could easily be made available to other uninformed users as learning by doing tools. The Morphograph tool also made it possible to demonstrate how, within a community, the partial expertise of individuality needs to be related to each other and benefits enormously from the knowledge densification mechanism made possible by the sharing. The digital context easily makes it possible to create tools that are specific in terms of content but generic in form that can be communicated and shared with even diverse and uninformed communities.

Techno-Concepts for the Cultural Field: n-Dimensional Space and Its Conceptual Constellation

This paper advocates an epistemological turn in the field of digital art history and cultural heritage studies. This epistemological turn is understood as the elaboration of a new (or renewed) epistemic apparatus that allows us to understand and interpret cultural phenomena from the perspective of a different order of thought. This epistemological labor is conceived of as an «epistemological technical practice», which means integrating epistemological reflection and production into technical making and design. Within this framework of discussion, this paper introduces the idea of a techno-concept, which is defined as a co-production between the machine rationale and the human thought/imagination. As particular cases, this paper argues that the mathematical concepts of n-dimensional, vector and latent spaces constitute examples of techno-concepts that can be reappropriated and reworked for cultural analysis and interpretation. This paper offers a preliminary inquiry, in which certain epistemological propositions are exposed as open gates for further discussions.

Beyond the Fountain

“Beyond the Fountain” is a digital humanities project that creates a new entry point into the history of the Society of Independent Artists by utilizing data from its first exhibition catalog. The project seeks to align with the original democratic spirit of the show, giving each artist an equal opportunity to be discovered through an interactive map. Overall, the goal of “Beyond the Fountain” is to explore the Society of Independent Artists in a new way, with an emphasis on bringing lesser-known artists to light. This article highlights the tools and methods used for creating this map in order to encourage similar digital art history projects.[This article is a revision of a paper presented during the “New Voices in the Profession” session at the 50th annual ARLIS/NA conference held in Chicago, Illinois in April 2022.]

SketchUp and Sketchfab: Tools for Teaching with 3D

SketchUp and Sketchfab: Tools for Teaching with 3D

Problems and prospects of digital transformations in museum practice and contemporary art

The purpose of the article is to clarify the problems and prospects of digital transformations in museum practice and contemporary art. The research methodology is based on the dialectical method necessary for the implementation of art history research, a critical analysis of cultural, art history sources; methods of deduction and induction; historical, logical and method of interdisciplinary synthesis. Scientific novelty. The state of scientific development of the problem in the field of digital humanities is revealed. A modern approach to the issues of digitization of museum collections and the creation of an electronic information resource of cultural heritage and cultural values of Ukraine is considered. The main aspects of the history of digital art are determined. The latest achievements of foreign and domestic researchers in the direction of digital transformations and the introduction of digital technologies have been studied and analyzed. Conclusions. The results of the study of literary sources on this topic led to the conclusion that in the analyzed publications of many authors, insufficient attention was paid to the problems of digital transformations in museum practice and the prospects for the use of immersive technologies in contemporary art.
 Key words: Museum Fund of Ukraine, digital transformations, digitization, immersive technologies, digital art.