CHArt Conference Proceedings, volume five
2002

Abstracts

Lanfranco Aceti

Getting Laid on the Procrustean Bed: Art Practice in the Digital World, One Man Versus One Pixel

'We have to redirect our misguided focus on preserving media. Our job is not to preserve media; our job is to preserve art. For digital media, that means no more geeks in a room deciding a one-size-fits-all strategy for video, say, or Flash, but a case-by-case analysis of what is important for each work we study. In a word, we need to preserve behaviours rather than media.' (1)

For Paul Virilio the homologation derives from the concept of kinematic energy, and forces society towards 'not only the geometrization of our vision of the world, along the lines of that of the Italian Renaissance perspectivists, but also its digitization, in the reality principle whereby the automatic nature of representations means perception is standardized' (original emphasis).(2)

The standardisation of approaches generates within the art practice a mirror effect which, reflecting the fear of a society similar in shape to a totalitarian globalised corporate power, restates the necessity of a local approach against the global; of a singular eccentric individual against the social homogenisation of the masses. The practice of the fine artist appears to have the 'onus' of stressing the fact that in a totalitarian regime discrimination against the outsider is discrimination against the pixel diversity, therefore against society (my emphasis).

(1) Ippolito, Jon. Cats and Dogs, expanded version of a talk given at the Museum Computer Network conference in Cincinnati on October 26, 2001.

(2) Virilio, Paul. Open Sky, Verso, London, 2000, pg. 45.

Melina Berkenwald

Exploring the Use of Digital Technologies in Art Practice

In this paper I explore the way in which a small group of contemporary artists (that relate to the practice of painting) employs digital technologies to produce and display their work. Following the analysis and findings from the fieldwork of my doctorate I will describe how these artists first encountered the computer and why they preferred it to more traditional means. This analysis makes reference to the use of the computer as a studio and to new uses of time and space in image making according to some of the work processes enabled by the computer. I will then address practitioners' preferences regarding the exhibition of their work, which includes a discussion on the printing of the work and its online representation, the role of the traditional gallery and of the Internet. Throughout this paper I intend to illuminate matters that determine digital media as available resources in painting, and their effect in the tradition of this practice.

John Calvelli

Art History, Design, and the Digital Database

Developing a course in the history of graphic design for the Art Institute of Portland, a design school in Oregon, led me to consider a trans-disciplinary model of teaching design and art history that evaluates a disparate range of visual objects, and relies on a digital database for both course development and delivery.

I enlisted the help of my students with this task, creating a freeware application that would enable them to complete and submit weekly structured assignments which were subsequently added to the database for the course. For each assignment, they chose an image relevant to the historical period under consideration, and provided two statements, one on the meaning of the work and the other on its value, accompanied by a brief analysis and caption information. At the end of the course, each student received a small database of images, along with an application that they may use to build their own image collection. This paper will articulate the assumptions, development processes and results of this approach as a practical teaching strategy for both design and art history.

Antonio Criminisi, Martin Kemp and Andrew Zisserman

Bringing Pictorial Space to Life: Computer Techniques for the Analysis of Paintings
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This paper explores the use of computer graphics and computer vision techniques in the history of art. The focus is on analysing the geometry of perspective paintings to learn about the perspectival skills of artists and explore the evolution of linear perspective in history.

Algorithms for a systematic analysis of the two- and three-dimensional geometry of paintings are drawn from the work on "single-view reconstruction" and applied to interpreting works of art from the Italian Renaissance and later periods.

Since a perspectival painting is not a photograph of an actual subject but an artificial construction subject to imaginative manipulation and inadvertent inaccuracies, the internal consistency of its geometry must be assessed before carrying out any geometric analysis. Some simple techniques to analyse the consistency and perspectival accuracy of the geometry of a painting are discussed.

Moreover, this work presents new algorithms for generating new views of a painted scene or portions of it, analysing shapes and proportions of objects, filling in occluded areas, performing a complete three-dimensional reconstruction of a painting and a rigorous analysis of possible reconstruction ambiguities.

The validity of the techniques described here is demonstrated on a number of historical paintings and frescoes. Whenever possible, the computer-generated results are compared to those obtained by art historians through careful manual analysis.

This research represents a further attempt to build a constructive dialogue between two very different disciplines: computer science and history of art. Despite their fundamental differences, science and art can learn and be enriched by each other's procedures.

Ida Engholm

Digital Style History: The Development of Graphic Design on the Internet

Since the appearance of the phenomenon of web design in the early 1990s, numerous ways of describing, viewing and instrumentalising this new design area have developed. However, so far few attempts have been made to develop analytic and reflective approaches to web design as an aesthetic phenomenon.

The aim of this paper is to focus from an art historical perspective on the WWW as a graphic-aesthetic medium that can be examined as an object or work, and whose development can be described within the framework of design history. The main goal is to show how the study of the graphic design development of the Internet may benefit by employing a central concept from art and design theory, the concept of style, as a dynamic principle for structuring, both in the description and analysis of web design and as a point of departure for a discussion of visual aesthetics and the context dependent experiences of looking at web design.

Emilie Gordenker

Digital Collaboration: Building a Kiosk for Digital Responses

Digital Responses, an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum (May 2002 - March 2003), resulted in an unusually productive collaboration between a museum, an artist/curator, a software provider and a design company. The conception and implementation of a web-based kiosk for the exhibition followed curatorial objectives, but also gave shape and direction to the show and to the artists' projects. This paper provides a brief background to the exhibition; explains the symbiotic relationship between museum, curator and designers; and shows the final result of the collaboration.

Digital Responses presents a series of new works, each created in response to objects and spaces in the V&A, by artists who use digital media in their creative process. Gallery Systems, a company providing software and related services to museums, created the exhibition kiosk (and micro-website) with designs by Keepthinking.

Some ideas initially suggested by Gallery Systems/Keepthinking as organising principles for the kiosk - such as the themes uniting the work and an "artpath", a route through the museum, devised by the artists to flag works or ideas relevant to their works - were embraced by the artists and the curator, and ultimately had a fundamental impact on the content and display of the physical exhibition.

Michael Hammel

Welcome to the Pleasure Dome! or Will there be art in the Global Village?

In the Network Society the concept of art faces considerable challenges. First, art in the Network Society is less about contemplation than about entertainment. Second, the definition of art is challenged by the cultural diversity transmitted across the networks. A look at web-based artworks reveals that contemporary art is engaging its viewer in many different ways, and has become an ingredient in the entertainment culture of today. In many ways, the history of entertainment is the cultural history of our society. Art has always been a part of the culture of entertainment. So, when art is about pleasure, the pleasure conveyed by contemporary art is not about viewing, but about being and acting within an artistic culture. In the Network Society the question of art very clearly is a question of culture. The art historian must face the fact that art, as a bourgeois cultural concept, limits the culture of art to a very narrow context that is not natural in any way, and only shared by a few percent of the citizens of the world. Concepts of ethnographic artefacts apply to all cultural products, and not only to the foreign ones

In order to follow developments in the society the art historian must face these challenges, or stick to the standard history of art. What I argue is that in order to understand the cultural diversity in the Network Society, it is necessary to develop a radically enhanced understanding of visual culture, with a deeper sensitivity towards cultural mechanisms and cultural differences.

Mike Leggett

PathScape - Audio-Visual Indexing in a Landscape

PathScape is an interactive multimedia research project. It explores audio-visual indexing forms using a navigation approach developed with a small team of sound and visual artists together with a researcher. With investment from the Australian Film Commission at an initial stage, the project seeks to enable collections to reach a general audience, in disc, installation (interactive cinema) or online format. The indexing system can access personal and public narrative documents, (film, video, photographs, recordings etc.), the primary objective being to aid collection interpretation using sound and image, with the more conventional text-based indexing relegated to the background as a resource gathering tool. Currently partners are being sought to take the project to a level where the framework can be used as a generic and dynamically defined content delivery system.

Mary Pearce

Animating Art History: Digital Ways of Studying Colour in Abstract Art

The study of art history has been greatly enriched through the possibilities of digital media. Multimedia, particularly, offers the capacity to combine interactivity, a graphic interface, sound, animation and of organising information in a matrix of cross-references. The project to be demonstrated consists of an analytical study of the role of colour in early 20th-century abstract art, created as a multimedia presentation. The focus is on paintings from three distinct eras and includes the work of Orphist, Bauhaus and Abstract Expressionist artists as examples. In keeping with the methodology of these painters, multimedia was chosen to illustrate interrelated themes of music, calligraphy, visual poetry and issues of time and space. Hence this subject matter and period within modernism was suited to the advantages of multimedia, and the user can both grasp the technical qualities of colour as a sensual experience, and approach the analysis of paintings through interactive participation. Overall, this means of presentation has proved a fruitful way to broaden the perception of colour and can be adapted for use in art schools, gallery situations or distance learning courses. This paper outlines the rationale behind some of the presentational design decisions, select examples of the flexibility of multimedia and suggest advantages it might have for a digital art history.

Rupert Shepherd

Databases and Art History: The Material Renaissance Project

The Material Renaissance project is a collaborative three-year research project, funded by the AHRB and the Getty Grant Program, investigating costs and consumption in Italy over the period 1300 to 1650. It involves fifteen academics and postgraduate students, spread over six universities in the United Kingdom and Italy. A fundamental part of the project is the creation of a database of prices, wages and exchange rates for Italy during the period under consideration, in order to provide comparative material to support project members' own research, and eventually that of the broader art-historical community.

This paper outlines the problems entailed in the creation of such a database (ranging from the number and complexities of Italian moneys and units of measurement in the Renaissance, to the problem of ensuring that at least one copy of the database is kept as current as possible whilst researchers are working in archives collecting their data), as well as the pros and cons of the solutions adopted by the project, and an assessment of progress to date. I hope to be able to draw some lessons from the problems we have encountered about the use of databases in such research projects.

Annette A. Ward, Margaret E. Graham, K. Jonathan Riley and Nic Sheen

Enhancing an Historical Digital Art Collection: Evaluation of Content-Based Image Retrieval on Collage

Searching digital art images is increasingly challenging as collections and users grow. Text retrieval alone may be inadequate. Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) retrieves visually similar matches for a selected painting, sketch, or other image based on colour, texture, and shape. CBIR was added to the Corporation of London Guildhall Library and Art Gallery's 22,000 digital image collection, Collage. Collage is comprised of images of London from the fifteenth century to the present day and includes paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and other historical items.

Text-retrieval of Collage images is left unaltered. Instead, the optional CBIR search is conducted after an image is selected. Evaluation of CBIR on Collage is conducted through an online questionnaire. Results from 181 respondents are positive regarding the CBIR addition. Approximately 80% indicated that CBIR searching was interesting and would use it again. Nearly 75% reported that CBIR was a good method of image retrieval. Additional results provide information regarding the usefulness of CBIR, satisfaction with the results, enjoyment of the experience, and demographic characteristics of the respondents.

This paper provides detailed description of the technical application of CBIR to Collage, report comprehensive results of the eighteen-month user evaluation, and delineate the potential of CBIR for application to other art collections.

This research was funded by Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries (CMAL/RE/103).