Exploratory Dialogue with AI: Essay Based on AI Drift Methodology

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.

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Between Preservation and Repurposing: How to Recontextualize and Reorient Twenty-Year-Old Art-Historical Databases

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).

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Techflaneurs and Fakirs: Art on the Other Side of the Digital Innovation Divide

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. 

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Image Spam Errors in the Age of Hyperconnection

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.

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Memory, Heritage, and Art Production: The Jesús Ramos Frías Art Documentation Center and the Information System on Art Practice in San Luis Potosí

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.

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Memory and the Digital Archive of Contemporary Art: The Case of the Spanish Archive of Media 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).

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Network Analysis + Digital Art History. A Roundtable on a Collective Scholarly Experience

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.

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Featured Article: Confirm You Are A Human – Perspectives on the Uncanny Valley

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.

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Historical APPistemology: The Mapping of the Expanded Field of Cultural Heritage Augmented Reality (AR) Apps as a Creative Tool

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.

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Extending Museum Beyond Physical Space: A Data-Driven Study of Aldo Rossi's Analogous City as a Mobile Museum Object

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.

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Representing Early Modern Venice: Augmented Reality Experiences in Exhibitions

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. This article describes the AR displays within the exhibitions and presents the results of visitor interaction based on anonymous data and observation.

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"Why So Many Windows?" – How the ImageNet Image Database Influences Automated Image Recognition of Historical Images

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.

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The Expanded Painting: The Visual Culture of Painting in the Digital Age

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.

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