Table Of ContentCulture, Technology and the Image
Culture, Technology
and the Image
Techniques of Engaging with
Visual Culture
Edited by Jeremy Pilcher
Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA
First published in the UK in 2020 by
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Jeremy Pilcher
1. Current research methodologies of scholars in the visual arts:
Toward an emerging model in image and text retrieval for the domain 10
Catherine Larkin
Part I: Data Generation 25
2. From photogrammetry to Big Data: A case study of their possibilities
for digital art history 26
Pedro Luengo
3. Imaging technologies applied to questions of authorship 38
Nicholas Eastaugh
Part II: Knowledge Presentation and Visualization 51
4. Time machines 52
Stephen Boyd Davis
5. Vorsprung durch Technik: Multi-display learning spaces and
art-historical method 71
Brett Bligh and Katharina Lorenz
Part III: Virtual Museology 87
6. Virtual museum: The concept and transformation 88
Anna Bentkowska-Kafel
7. A field guide for analyzing the curation of online social networks of arts 109
Almila Akdag Salah
8. The hyperimage: Toward a theory of expanded photography 120
Alfredo Cramerotti
CULTURE, TECHNOLOGY AND THE IMAGE
Conclusion: Technology | technique | transformation 134
Jeremy Pilcher
Notes on contributors 138
Index 143
vi
Acknowledgements
A substantial debt of gratitude is owed to the organization, Computers and the
History of Art (CHArt), without which this book would not have been possible.
The chapters by Catherine Larkin, Stephen Boyd Davis, Brett Bligh and Katharina
Lorenz, as well as those of Anna Bentkowksa-Kafel and Almila Akdag Salah are
all based on papers that were first presented at conferences organised by CHArt.
My thanks for the help and generosity in making it possible to bring together all
of the contributions included in this publication. The imagination, foresight and
inclusivity of the conferences and publications by CHArt since its inception in
1985 have been the source and inspiration for Culture, Technology and the Image:
Techniques of Engaging with Visual Culture.
vii
Introduction
Jeremy Pilcher
This book engages with the impact of the pervasive spread of digital networked
technologies on the way images are archived, circulated and understood. It follows
on from a series by the organization Computers and the History of Art (CHArt). In
2005, Will Vaughan, one of CHArt’s founding members, identified a ‘revolution that
affects all our activities and not one that simply leads to the establishment of a new
discipline to set alongside others’ (2005: 2). Among developments in social media
at the time was the creation of YouTube. Other events that have had wide-ranging
transformative effects from around the same period were the launch of Facebook
and the formation of the company, Google. Anna Bentkowska-Kafel has proposed
that, from within art history, there has been a tendency to understand the impact of
digital technologies as creating a distinct discipline (2015: 59). To the extent this is
true it leads to the impacts of technological changes being underestimated. Discipli-
nary cores are not immune from such developments. Engaging with the changes by
proposing, for example, the emergence of digital art history could be seen as part of
a ‘formulaic assimilation of various “new art histories” that have largely expanded
the ground of existing canons and orthodoxies rather than offering substantive
alternatives to the status quo’ (Preziosi 2009: 489). By contrast, the approach that
inspired the inception of this volume sees technological developments, which affect
the ways that images are disseminated and analyzed, as bringing about fundamental
changes to the humanities that engage with the visual sphere.
The core of the work gathered together in this volume was originally presented
at conferences organized by CHArt to discuss the interaction between the study
and practice of art and developments in information and communication technol-
ogies. It has been complemented by a selection of additional invited chapters that
reflect an engagement with culture in terms of that which, ‘contains an impulse
toward action: it is what is “done and practiced” (Busche 2000: 70 cited in Krämer
and Bredekamp 2013: 21). The focus is on the impact technologies have on the
creation of knowledge and its communication through reciprocal relationships
1
CULTURE, TECHNOLOGY AND THE IMAGE
between visual culture and the networked computer, as understood broadly to
include a variety of interfaces (Krämer and Bredekamp 2013: 24). The growing
quantity of data, including so-called ‘big’ and ‘open’ data sets, which are increas-
ingly accessible on the Internet, has implications that may not simply be accounted
for in terms of the quicker and more transparent transfer and presentation of infor-
mation. There has been, and will continue to be, a change in the way sense is –
and can be – made of the visual. As Lev Manovich has asked, with the availability
of quantitative and computational techniques, ‘why should we use computers to
classify cultural artifacts into a small number of categories? Why not instead use
computational methods to question the categories we already have, generate new
ones, or create new cultural maps that relate cultural artifacts in original ways?’
(2015: 24). The ongoing adoption of new methods and approaches is involved in
opening possibilities for, and then bringing about, changes in the conditions by
which knowledge comes into existence about art, images and culture.
At the same time, it is clear that the rhythms of unfolding technological config-
urations and disciplinary transformations are not synchronized. There are frictions
that slow the adoption of new tools and the formation of different techniques in
knowledge making. The methodological possibilities implied by the networked
computer, such as the ability to study the large amounts of data that can now
be obtained and analyzed, are not yet fully integrated into the visual humanities
(Manovich 2015: 14). These types of asynchronies are illustrated by Catherine
Larkin’s chapter, ‘Current research methodologies of scholars in the visual arts’,
which opens this book. Larkin discusses her study on the information-seeking
behavior, values and beliefs of scholars in the visual arts. She addresses questions
about whether research in the visual arts has been altered by digital technologies
and, if so, how? This involved Larkin examining the specifics of research practices
typically generically associated with art historians such as, for example, the pref-
erence of working with original works of art rather than technologically gener-
ated substitutes (Lesk 2013: 13). Her study found unevenness in the utilization of
information and image retrieval systems as visual arts scholars experience diffi-
culties in traversing digital resources. On the basis of insights derived from using
both quantitative and qualitative methods, Larkin was able to propose a model
of information-seeking behaviors and processes within the discipline that may be
used to understand research traditions which, with technological developments,
are now in transition.
In the chapter that follows, Pedro Luengo starts by observing that despite the
availability of new technologies, and the potential these have for a discipline such
as art history, they have not been adopted to a significant extent. In ‘From photo-
grammetry to Big Data’, he describes the deployment of the techniques of light
analysis, 3D modeling from photography (or photogrammetry) and the application
2
