We invite scholars, curators, and practitioners to contact us if they are interested in contributing a review of a book or exhibition that aligns with the aims of DAHJ and the broader field of digital art history. We welcome reviews of scholarly publications, exhibition catalogues, and both online and in-person exhibitions that are relevant to digital art history and related disciplines. Prospective reviewers are encouraged to reach out for a list of available titles or to propose works they are interested in reviewing. We also welcome inquiries from authors about recent or forthcoming publications and projects they would like to see reviewed.
CFP: What Do (Digital) Images Want? A Decade of Data, Power, and Visual Knowledge in Art History
The International Journal for Digital Art History (DAHJ) marks its 10th anniversary at a crucial moment when digital images are not only omnipresent in daily life, but are generated by active agents that shape our ways of seeing and knowing the world. For this milestone, we invite submissions that critically explore the desires, demands, and politics of digital images in contemporary visual culture, while questioning the very foundations of what constitutes digital art history in an age of algorithmic methods of image making and visualization.
Taking W.J.T. Mitchell's What do Pictures Want? and David Freedberg’s The Power of Images into the digital realm, this call seeks articles that interrogate the complex agency of digital images today and the power dynamics at play in their creation. We aim to investigate not only how images and data (and images as data) shape cultural narratives and power systems, but what these digital entities seem to demand from us as scholars, archivists, cultural producers, and spectators. At the same time, we seek to understand how a visual studies approach to digital images might generate alternative (digital) art histories and new ways of seeing beyond the constraints of conventional methodologies.
Walter Benjamin distinguished between the image as a visual phenomenon and the medium that carries it. However, digital images require a more complex model (Klinke): 1) The visual phenomenon – what we see on the screen. 2) The media system – the software and hardware that generate and display the image. 3) The invisible data layer – metadata, algorithmic decisions, and training datasets that determine how images are created and presented. This third layer is crucial for understanding digital images. They exist not as fixed objects but as dynamic, networked entities, processed through global cloud infrastructures and algorithmic frameworks.
We encourage contributions that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:
The epistemology of digital images: How do AI and algorithmic processing change our concept of images?
The politics of visibility: Who controls image circulation on digital platforms? How do power dynamics between images, institutions, technology, and communities manifest in the digital sphere?
Digital art history and Big (Image) Data: New digital art historical methodologies for studying contemporary visual culture.
Algorithmic aesthetics: How do machine-learning models shape and homogenize visual production?
Image infrastructures: How do cloud systems, metadata, and recommendation algorithms mediate digital images?
We particularly seek contributions from scholars who interrogate the complex relationships between technology, ethics, and the politics of digital visual cultures, including perspectives from art history, visual studies, digital humanities, and adjacent fields. We also welcome submissions from digital artists.
The call is now open and first articles are to be published in the second half of 2025. To submit articles, please register first and review the information for authors. We will be publishing articles on a rolling basis.
CFP: “Dear ChatGPT, give us a title!” Responsiveness and Responsibility in Times of AI
Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is at the forefront of art-historical research and cultural discourse: from the creation of digital images with the use of transformer models, such as Dall-E and Midjourney, to the analysis of large data sets of images with the use of neural networks. Scholarly written analysis is also shifting with the use of ChatGPT and other language models. Now is a critical time for the field of Digital Art History to reflect and respond to the uses and applications of data with these computational methods. As the International Journal for Digital Art History (DAHJ) responds to cutting-edge scholarship concerning developing technologies and tools within the fields of art history and museum studies, we open this call for papers.
While AI inquiry offers many potential avenues for rethinking art historical research, without careful consideration algorithms also risk ethical pitfalls . Though there has been fervent discussion around AI tools intersecting with art production, as well as a long history of tool development for image recognition and analysis, this call seeks to further the conversation in response to the recent influx of scholarly engagement with AI and art-historical scholarship.
Art History with AI poses a series of unanswered questions and pressing topics for our community:
Ethical considerations, including issues of bias, diversity, and cultural heritage (e.g., classification and canonical bias)
The integration of AI in art education and its potential to enhance learning and pedagogy
Considerations around copyright, context, and image creation
The ontology of (AI) Art: Is it art? How can we redefine art history with AI?
Schema and recipe: How do the expectations embedded in datasets (and AI products) reinforce (or disarticulate) in individual instances of image generation? Will the instructions for generating images accrue a new power, and will/should they be proprietary?
Modernism and automation: Is this just another late-stage entanglement between art and machines that has been going on since the advent of industrialization? To what degree is the novelty of these products related to the vast scale of their proprietary dataset? (i.e., Dall-E can do certain things because they have billions of images to mine.) What about "no-go zones" and/or censored topics, such as pornography, violence, propaganda, etc.?
The future of AI in art history and its potential to shape the discipline in new and innovative ways: How do we see art and art history through an AI lens (if at all)? How will it change and how can we be ready?
“Dear ChatGPT, give us a title!” Responsiveness and Responsibility in Times of AI” seeks to identify and explore this discourse of AI and its various relationships with the discipline of art history.
This call is in tandem with our DAHJ Gallery VR exhibition, A Kind of Alchemy: The Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. The exhibition considers the medium of AI Art and its developing tools, such as DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, along with the artists who are at the heart of this experimentation and emerging practice.
We welcome articles from art historians, curators, conservators, information scientists, artists, and writers from other related disciplines who are concerned with these topics. This open call aims to include marginalized scientific perspectives from diverse global communities.
The call is now open and first articles are to be published in the first quarter of 2023. To submit articles, please register first and review the information for authors. We will be publishing articles on a rolling basis.
[This call was co-written with ChatGPT]
Call for AI Artists
'A Kind of Alchemy': The Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence will consider the medium of AI Art and its developing tools, such as DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, along with the artists who are at the heart of this experimentation and emerging practice. Submission deadline: December 15, 2022.
Read MoreCall for Artists for “Zonas de contacto: Art History in a Global Network?”
Artwork submissions due by January 31,2020.
Read MoreCFP: The Art Museum in the New Hybridity
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, media theorists like Peter Weibel were quick to bury the body-based “society of proximity” in discourse. To him, it seemed that gigantic stadiums, concert halls, museums, and the like will be “the pharaonic tombs of the future.” That people would not simply relocate to a purely digital world was already foreshadowed by the first easing of restrictions in the summer of 2020, when an almost excessive return to the analog took place. Original artworks were more in demand than ever, and there was a hunger for encounters with other people and objects in the museum. Is the binary rhetoric of analog/ digital, conservative/progressive, and either/or, still appropriate in the post-pandemic age, or should we rather address questions of media specificity and hybridity?
One could argue that art museums were always dependent on hybridity. Still, something has changed. The forms of hybridity (mixed methods and materials, complexes of professional practice, stacks of technology and data) are being recast. Intellectually and philosophically, art curation today reflects upon its meta-modernity — confronting intersectionality, following the consequences of quantum thinking. Socially and operationally, the art museum responds to the new patterns of work and creativity generated by the pandemic, pursuing the potential of teleworking in its internal operation, re-planning the channels of communication and encounter in its external offer.
“The Art Museum in the New Hybridity” explores the convergence of analog and digital media, focusing on the art museum in the new hybridity.
Possible topics include:
New assumptions of hybridity (in provision, visitation, and operation) on which curatorship can now predicate its practice
Use of new hybridities to remix, restage, and reframe the art museum’s function and form
Shifts in operation and delivery, and the consequence for art production, display, and scholarship, including the logic of selection and interpretation of art in the modern media ecosystem
“Platformization” and the erosion of the traditional rituals for engaging with art
Forms of participation in hybrid spaces and the relationship between analog/digital and virtual/physical
Art historian, museum professional, and digital humanist Christian Huemer is the guest writer of this call. After several years at the Getty Research Institute, he is currently Director of the Belvedere Research Center in Vienna where he oversees the development of analog and digital research infrastructure — including library, archive, online collection, and research journal. A central concern of his is to enable free, open and linked access to digitized cultural heritage. Since 2019, he has been organizing an annual international conference on “The Art Museum in the Digital Age.”
The call is now open and first articles are to be published in the second half of 2021. To submit articles, please register first and review the information for authors. We will be publishing articles on a rolling basis.
CFP: Zonas de contacto: Art History in a Global Network
The special collaboration with H-ART is now closed for Zonas de Contacto. However, we are still accepting articles on the topic. Contact us with any questions.
Digital technologies have catalyzed globalization; yet, the precarity of global networks has become increasingly apparent in the face of pandemics and climate change. International collaboration often reveals deep disparities in access, infrastructure, and institutional resources. The profound (and sometimes disorienting) effect of automated computation on everyday life can only be properly understood within historical frameworks that articulate the interplay between technological mediation and the production of history. But this oft-repeated point begs the question: Who has the privilege to write these histories, and how?
These political and technological challenges provide a unique opportunity for an extended dialogue on innovation in digital art history outside the English-speaking research clusters that dominate the discourse of the field. The International Journal for Digital Art History collaborated with H-ART. Revista de historia, teoría y crítica de arte in 2021 for a special issue focused on digital art historical research in the Spanish-speaking world, broadly defined. (The Spanish version appears in H-ART; the English version in DAHJ.) This foregrounds novel approaches and digitization strategies, new models for canonicity and classification, and ongoing challenges/barriers to research and innovation.
Possible topics include:
To whom does digital art history make art history more accessible? What technological innovations will have to be implemented to address ongoing global inequities that continue to structure art history? What categories and concepts will we need to develop in the field in a post-COVID-19, globalized world?
How has digital art history adapted to research contexts that are unique to Latin American communities? What technologies and related workflows might be needed to adapt to local challenges and barriers--linguistic, sociological, and infrastructural?
Despite the widespread digitization of much cultural heritage, art historians are often hesitant to engage with (or analyze) collections of artifacts as data. How could DAH projects address broader issues of technological mediation? We are seeking projects in the Spanish-speaking world that augment the practice of in-person “close looking”.
The guest editor for this call is Nuria Rodríguez Ortega, Chair and Professor in the Art History Department at the University of Málaga and Director of the research group i-ArtHis Lab.
The featured author for this call is Sofía Crespo. Crespo is an artist whose work envisions artificial life and generative lifeforms. One of her main focuses is the way organic life uses artificial mechanisms to simulate itself and evolve. Her latest project is Artificial Remnants 2.0 (2019-2020), an ongoing exploration of artificial life using machine learning to generate virtual insects, their names, and their anatomical descriptions.
The call is now open and first articles are to be published in the second half of 2021. To submit articles, please register first and review the information for authors. We will be publishing articles on a rolling basis.
CFP: Horizons of Mixed Realities
The International Journal of Digital Art History (DAHJ) responds to cutting-edge scholarship concerning extended reality technologies. Today, mixed reality is poised to be just as transformative as analog film and photography, which radically reorganized many domains of modern life (including communication, science, politics, and art). This potential has become increasingly apparent in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, wherein virtual landscapes have begun to serve as critical contact zones for practitioners of social distancing.
Despite an increasing awareness of these technologies (or perhaps, because of it), the role of mixed reality as a tool for art history and cultural heritage poses a series of unanswered questions for our community:
Embodied VR’s ability to register phenomenologically significant aspects of visual culture that cannot be relayed by photography (immersion, motion parallax, stereopsis).
Augmented Reality displays and mobile interfacing in museum contexts.
Mixed Reality as a historical phenomenon: potential intersections with prior constructions/ discourses of spectacle and realism.
Virtual landscapes and emergent technologies in art and art history.
Mixed reality applications that empower marginalized communities or engage at-risk heritage sites.
The title of our sixth call is “Horizons of Mixed Reality.” In art, the horizon line directs the viewer’s gaze, grounding them in a specific place that notionally extends towards infinity. Horizons are also liminal spaces — thresholds through which new frontiers are discovered and navigated. This call seeks to identify and explore those spaces for art history.
Art historian, curator, and digital humanist Francesca Albrezzi is the guest editor of this call. She currently works as a Digital Research Consultant at UCLA’s Institute for Digital Research and Education. Her research interrogates modes of publishing, display, and information capture in museums and archives that illustrate a break from “traditional” models, and argues that digital modalities provide a distinctly different paradigm for epistemologies of art and culture.
The featured author for this call is Britt Salvesen. Salvesen joined LACMA in October 2009 as curator and head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and the Prints and Drawings Department. Her recent curatorial projects at LACMA include Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium (2016); Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters (2016); Alejandro G. Iñárritu: Carne y Arena, virtually present, physically invisible (VR installation, 2017–18); and 3D: Double Vision (2018).
We welcome articles from art historians, curators, conservators, information scientists, and writers from other related disciplines who are concerned with these topics. This open call aims to include marginalized scientific perspectives from different and diverse global communities.
The call is now open and first articles are to be published in the first quarter of 2021. To submit articles, please register first and review the information for authors. We will be publishing articles on a rolling basis.
CFP: History of Digital Art
The International Journal for Digital Art History (DAHJ) researches the impact of new technologies on art history. It reflects upon the possibilities and opportunities of digital tools for art historical research. In contrast, the history of digital art deals with artistic practice and its continual engagement with computational media, as well as the Internet. However, both of these fields have been shaped by the interactions between art and information science. For this reason, the artistic engagement with these tools must be considered as a crucial vector within the expanded field of Digital Art History.
For this call on the history of digital art, DAHJ asks for contributions on the following topics:
New perspectives on traditional fields of the history of digital art, like early computer art, internet art, interactive computer-based art, and other forms
Genealogies of digital art
Digital art under postinternet conditions
Digital art and social media
Art and artificial intelligence
The role of the audience/user in digital art
Exhibiting digital art online & offline
Impacts and effects of technical innovations on digital art and its distribution (webcams, smartphones, etc.)
Immersive technologies in artistic or curatorial practice
Art historian Tina Sauerländer joins DAHJ as guest editor of this call. For 10 years, she has been working as an international curator for digital art with her platform peer to space. She is currently completing a PhD, Artistic Self-Representation In The Digital Age, at the Art University in Linz, Austria, department of Interface Cultures.
Christiane Paul is the featured author of this call. She is professor in the School of Media Studies and director/chief curator at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at The New School, New York, as well as adjunct curator of digital art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Paul is the author of Digital Art (2008, 3rd edition) and editor of A Companion to Digital Art (2016).
We welcome articles from art historians, curators, conservators, information scientists, and writers from other related disciplines who are concerned with these topics. This open call aims to include marginalized scientific perspectives from different and diverse global communities.
The call is now open and first articles are to be published in the first quarter of 2020. To submit articles, please register first and review the information for authors. We will be publishing articles on a rolling basis.
CFP: Transformation of Institutions
Digital Art History is often described as a methodological addition to Art History. Moreover, it includes a profound transformation of the institutional framework: server rooms replaced the slide libraries as the former center of art historical departments, museums are concerned with digitizing their collections and making them accessible via virtual exhibitions, and conservators are facing challenges preserving digital art with its soft- and hardware.
The transition from analog to digital pictorial transcription has transformed art history and its archives in profound and unexpected ways. The objects of our study, once physically circumscribed by the walls of the slide library, are now widely available. The advent of image retrieval platforms like ArtStor and Google Image Search, not to mention countless museum databases, present new challenges and opportunities for cataloging and visualizing data. The photographic practices of museum visitors have likewise been transformed by the integration of digital photography, cell phones, and social media. Additionally, art historical publishing and pedagogy continue to be mostly constrained (in the English-speaking) world by antiquarian protocols governing copyright and image clearance.
For the upcoming call to the International Journal for Digital Art History (DAHJ) we ask for contributions on the following topics:
How are analog institutions transforming, and which digital tools steer this transformation? What practices persist, which ones are eliminated?
What nascent digital methodologies do museums and archives utilize to engage visitors, organize metadata, and document collections?
What ontological changes to reproductive artifacts accompany the structural transformations that art institutions have undergone in the past twenty years?
How might digital publishing, art-making, and experimentation challenge and change art-historical research?
What are digital opportunities to develop and document archives of underrepresented, neglected, or ephemeral traditions of image-making?
What can we learn from other institutions of other areas, with their obstacles and successes?
We welcome articles from art historians, curators, conservators, artists, information scientists, and authors from other related disciplines who are concerned with questions around this topic and work in art institutions.
The call is now open and first articles are to be published in the second half of 2018. To submit articles, please register first and review the information for authors. We will be publishing articles on a rolling basis.
CFP: Digital Space and Architecture
In the realm of Digital Art History, architecture represents a broad field in which the use of various computational methods provide extraordinary tools not only for architects but also for art historians and information scientists. Art historians use computers to reconstruct historical architecture through 3D renderings and to document listed buildings and structures using video drones to gather visual data for research and conservation. Architects, on the other hand, look back on a long history of integrating software into their day-to-day work to generate and process digital images of architecture. Computer-aided-design (CAD) has fundamentally changed architecture and its possibilities.
Not only have digital methods shaped current design thinking and aesthetics, but they have also led to a complete rethink of the theoretical foundation of architecture and what defines it. In this regard, the role of IT specialists in architectural processes has to be given more attention. For example, planning and design software allow certain innovative architectural forms but at the same time exclude other design possibilities. Hence the question arises to what extent programmers are co-authors of architecture.
Ultimately, a discussion has to unfold on how the relationship of architects and information scientists should be cultivated. What should interdisciplinary curricula look like and what is the current approach to the issue at universities around the world? Can the impact of the digital be defined as the ultimate paradigm shift in architecture, or can we trace genealogies through its history and see analogies to other developments in media culture?
These questions and others are at the forefront of the third call for papers to the International Journal for Digital Art History (DAHJ), which outlines a broad overview of new theoretical approaches in digital architecture history. We welcome articles from art historians, architects, information scientists, and authors from other related disciplines who are concerned with questions and projects around this topic. For example: historical construction research, use of gaming platforms for spatial simulation and theory, visualization software for teaching, the role of the digital image in architecture.
The call is now open and first articles are to be published in the last quarter of 2016. To submit articles, please register first and review the information for authors. We will be publishing articles on a rolling basis.
CFP: Visualizing Big Image Data
Art History is based on empirical research. We gain knowledge using visual data. Precise observation, comparison, and classification of art objects are the fundamentals of our discipline. With the rise of Digital Art History, this process has become digitized.
Digital Art History means using the computer to support researchers with their epistemic goals. The computer can process more images than a human can look at in a lifetime. Hence, visual information has to be collected and processed, made accessible, and analyzed. The analysis of Big Image Data is a great opportunity for Art History and adds new methods to the discipline.
Today, art historians are not only interpreting pictures but becoming picture-makers themselves. Large amounts of image data can only be analyzed through visualizations. These images are themselves in need of interpretation. Clearly, this falls into the domain of art history.
The second call for papers to the International Journal for Digital Art History (DAHJ) focuses on “Visualizing Big Image Data.” Data visualizations raise new questions, and we welcome articles which are discussing questions surrounding this topic. For example: How to interpret such images? How do visualizations generate new insights? How is order established by means of pictures today? What is the relation of a quantitative research to qualitative research – and what does this actually mean in art history? What data do we need to acquire in the first place? And what are the best visualization tools currently available for art historical research?
The topic of visualizations also raises questions about how the interdisciplinary exchange between art historians and computer scientists works and how it should develop in the future. To what extent are art historians dependent on computer scientists in order to generate and effectively use the possibilities of digital metapictures? Is there a case for closer collaborations and/or do art historians need to fill the gaps in their knowledge of digital technology?
The featured author for this call is Maximilian Schich. He is an Associate Professor in Arts and Technology and a founding member of the Edith O'Donnell Institute for Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas.
The call is now open and first articles are to be published in the last quarter of 2015. To submit articles, please register first and review the information for authors. We will be publishing articles on a rolling basis.
CFP: What is Digital Art History?
The Digital Age has revolutionized economy, society, and our private lives. For decades now, digitalization has also touched most branches of the humanities. With the rising importance of the so-called Digital Humanities, Art History is about to change significantly. Since the slide library is irreversibly replaced by image databases, the fact that our media have turned digital opens up new possibilities. Academic books and journals are increasingly accessed and published via the internet. Data-driven approaches enable us to visualize large datasets and big image data. Computer vision, gamification, and citizen science spur new epistemic approaches.
Many such approaches are currently evolving in the international sphere of Art History. Those ideas and projects are in need of a platform of interchange and discourse that is linked to Digital Humanities, but regards the special interests and needs of Art History as a historical image science that intersects with Information Science. Thus, the International Journal for Digital Art History (DAHJ) gives authors in this field the opportunity to reach a wider audience, spark a discussion on the future of our discipline, and generate an international and interdisciplinary network of scholars and practitioners.
This is a call for manuscripts. It focuses on the definition of “Digital Art History” in relation to “non-digital,” information science, and general Digital Humanities. It encompasses the range of the field and its vector into the future. It also highlights exceptional projects and features book reviews.
The featured author for this call is Lev Manovich. He is Professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Software Studies Initiative that works on the analysis and visualization of big cultural data.
The call is now open and first articles are to be published in the first half of 2015. To submit articles, please register first and review the information for authors. We will be publishing articles on a rolling basis.