Anna Bentkowska

Editorial

The papers in this collection were originally presented at the CHArt eighteenth annual conference held at the British Academy in London on 14th and 15th November 2002. With this conference, CHArt returned for the second consecutive year to the subject of DIGITAL ART HISTORY and explored further the transformation History of Art is undergoing through engagement with the digital media. The focus on this occasion was on the ways art history is practised in a network society.

The distinctiveness of Digital Art History is still controversial (some question its existence at all) hence the question mark in the conference title. Digital Art History is often understood as the use of electronic resources and analytical tools to support the study of art. While this is certainly a starting point, it has become apparent to those who have pursued computer-based research in the arts and art history in recent years that the use of digital methods not only enables but even requires new modes of inquiry and leads to a new definition of art history. The papers in this volume exemplify some of these new tendencies and demonstrate differences between Digital Art History and the mainstream History of Art as practised in the 1970s and 1980s. By complementing and broadening rather than renouncing the methodologies established in the past, the computer continues to develop as an increasingly powerful tool that can enhance the study, research and teaching of art. New approaches are not free from old problems and these are coupled with complexities brought about by the ever-closer interaction of the humanities with technology. The papers discuss some of these issues looking primarily at different levels of artistic and art historical practices. Despite the colloquial and brief nature of a conference presentation, some contributors try to formulate theoretical frameworks to computing practices that seem set to last, even if they are still evolving. Online art, web design and interactive communication are among the computer-based practices in art and art history that can already be approached from a historical perspective.

Art history as an academic discipline owes it establishment to the so-called Viennese School of the late 19th century. Its erudite protagonists and followers have established a number of historical methodologies, art genre classifications and stylistic chronologies with such authority that – despite postmodern attempts to refute some of these paradigms - they still continue to influence the quest for similar constants in digital culture. It is always illuminating to question contemporary digital concepts and ontologies through their relationship to ideas and conventions that precede the computer era. It is not unusual for Digital Art History to refer to Borges’s labyrinth, Benjamin’s aura and Descartes’s cogito, to name only a few examples, as concepts prefiguring digital cyberculture. This has been a tendency of some theorists of digital media, even those who insist on calling these media ‘new’. Digital phenomena and theories are being probed with familiar old criteria and this process often results in the revaluation of the established concepts. It was with this aim that Kalliopi S. Koundouri probed digital art for the validity of the ‘forgotten’ criterion of beauty in her paper presented at the CHArt 2000 conference. The digital environment has changed the position of the artist, his art and audience dramatically. This has been much debated and resulted in an abundance of literature, yet new digital work often brings fresh controversy. Dunja Kukovec returns to these issues in the context of Heath Bunting’s BorderXing Guide and the 1999 Ars Electronica Prize awarded to the Linux Operating System. Ida Engholm approaches the graphic development of the World Wide Web from the perspective of genre and style history. Michael Hammel proposes that art history should embrace rather then distance itself from dissociating criteria traditionally associated with computer games and ethnography, such as entertainment and cultural diversity. Despite a single global culture envisaged by McLuhan, we are now living in networked but fragmented and isolated communities, argues Hammel. With a strictly defined aesthetic hierarchy of the bourgeois culture no longer valid, digital culture of the net demands a new artistic sensitivity that is capable of reflecting the ways we interact with computer interfaces.

One of the issues discussed in this volume is the question of freeing art and the artist from material constraints. Lanfranco Aceti considers the extent to which the digital artist is capable of conditioning the concepts and material of his art. He discusses the work biennale.py produced for the 49th Venice Biennale by Paul Virilio and distributed in lieu of the invite. It was intended to be a harmless computer virus, yet major computer companies responded by devising anti-virus software. Biennale.py questions the relationship of art and technology and the limits, if any, to the artist’s freedom to create. Melina Berkenwald demonstrates through interviews with practising painters the trade-off between the artist’s fondness for the physicality of traditional media and the liberating experience of moving (partly or entirely) to digital media. Freed from the usual concerns about spoiling the work irreversibly or being unable to complete it, many artists have discovered the freedom and spontaneity of work anew. Such works as biennale.py pose many challenges. The art historian must switch to the terminology relevant to software design and behaviour in order to describe it; the curator can no longer resort to the security of a cased display. This transition of conventions that guide the day-to-day practice is helped by projects that mix old art with digital work. The exhibition Digital Responses held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2002/2003, showed how a group of computer artists responded to art on display in the V&A galleries and how the curators, supported by web designers responded in turn to the challenges of displaying their work. Part of a project The Integration of Computers within Fine Art Practice, this exhibition is discussed by Emilie Gordenker and Cristiano Bianchi.

Of the many different applications of the computer to formal analysis of art, the use of computer graphics to improve the understanding of space and linear perspective in Renaissance paintings and architecture seems to be the least questioned by the critics of Digital Art History. CHArt has published a number of such analyses, including that carried out by Robert Tavernor on The Flagellation of Christ by Piero della Francesco as part of the Alberti Project. Tavernor’s digital reconstruction of the pictorial space shed interesting light onto Piero’s composition and earlier, now standard studies by R. Wittkower, B.A.R. Carter and M. Lavin. The perspective of Piero’s Flagellation, alongside other paintings, is once again a subject of a new analysis by Antonio Criminisi, Martin Kemp and Andrew Zisserman. They discuss in the paper included in this collection an innovative method that does not rely on CAD three-dimensional models of paintings, typically used in earlier projects, but on computer vision algorithms used to compute geometrically accurate three-dimensional models from single perspective images.

As any academic that has been engaged in art/art history-related computer-based projects would agree, using digital technology in research and teaching is labour intensive and prone to technical, organisational and financial set backs. It is generally easier to investigate art by using more traditional methods and then typically present findings by delivering a lecture/text illustrated with select, meaningful pictures. If this is so, one may wonder why Mary Pearce has created a complex multimedia package to present the relationship of music and painting in the art of Paul Klee and other early 20th-century abstract artists? Why did Rupert Shepherd spent long weeks and months trying to tame the wild monetary systems in 16th-century Italy and impose onto them the rigidity of a database structure? Why did Annette Ward and her colleagues resort to computer vision techniques of image content retrieval in order to establish alternatives to iconographic queries on large picture archives? Why did Mike Leggett construct a multimedia database of semantic structures so his students could study the narratives of memory and other aspects of Australian heritage, and John Calvelli used a similar format for comparative analyses of visual languages of culture? The papers that follow give thoughtful answers as to the reasons for choosing a particular method. ‘Writing is the technology of the inventory’ believes Darren Tofts, quoted here by Rupert Shepherd. An inventory cannot satisfy those who are interested in complexity and ambiguity, data relationships and interaction; to those who do not want to narrow down the answers but rather open them to further, often unpredicted questioning.