Beyond Hairstyle: Roman Imperial Portraits and Facial Recognition Software

By using DCNN-based methods, this article investigates the possibilities of digital identification of Roman imperial portraiture at a quantitative level, without using hairstyle. It demonstrates that there are sufficient visual markers in imperial portraits, aside from hairstyle, that allow facial recognition software to classify portraits when hairstyle is excluded.

Read More

Nestoras Papanikolopoulos, A Pioneer of Digital Art in Greece

Now that the digital image has penetrated most aspects of human activity and, consequently, of art, it is time to acknowledge the contribution of artists who opened new paths in the adoption of a practice based on interdisciplinary thinking and contributed to the creative process of the immaterial image.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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).

Read More

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. 

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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).

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More