Collaborations

Tokyo University

At the University of Tokyo, under the supervision of Prof. Hiromi Matsui and with the support of Prof. Torahiko Terada, a team is helping us enrich our databases with 19th-20th c. Japanese illustrated journals and exhibition catalogues. Prof. Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel will travel to Japan in the winter of 2026 to consult archives with them, in order to better understand how Japanese avant-garde artists developed a highly distinctive way of engaging with Surrealism — reinterpreting, through their own aesthetic lens, the black-and-white reproductions they could access via globally circulating magazines.

 

Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Genève

Since 2023, the Visual Contagions project takes part in the dynamic partnership established between the Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève (MAH) and the Université of Geneva (Unige). The collaboration aims to foster digital innovation in cultural heritage. The University of Geneva engages students and researchers in digital humanities projects centered on MAH’s digitized collections. Regular academic events are hosted at the MAH, such as the Visual Contagions annual international conferences Image Deluge & Globalization (2024) and Color in Motion (2025).

 

Information Design Lab, UNIRS (San Marino)

As part of the Master's program in Interaction & Experience Design, the Information Design Lab – coordinated by Giorgio Uboldi (Data Visualization) and Marco Luitprandi (Information Experience) – introduces students to data visualization and the design of immersive experiences using complex datasets.

In the 2024 edition, students worked with four visual datasets from the Visual Contagions project. Through a two-phase process, students first designed digital interfaces to explore and interpret the archives' images and metadata, then developed interactive spatial installations. The collaboration with Visual Contagions provided an opportunity to reflect on the circulation of images and the contemporary role of archives in design practice.

Student projects are available by clicking here. 

 

HEAD Genève ; Beaux-Arts de Paris

AI, Image Overload, and Art History
The Visual Contagions project also explores the overwhelming flood of images in the digital age and the role of artificial intelligence in art-historical research. As part of this reflection, a seminar on digital images was held over four years — two in partnership with the Beaux-Arts de Paris (Prof. Marie-José Burki), and two with HEAD – Genève (Prof. David Zerbib).
Each collaboration culminated in one or more exhibitions and public events, including:
* Circulation of Images – Uni Dufour
* B-AI-Yeux – on generative AI and art history (Uni Mail)
* AIAIA – on AI and its materiality (A-Duplex)
These events offered a space for critical dialogue between researchers, artists, and students on the visual and technological transformations shaping our world.

 

PhotoMatrix Project, Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences

The PhotoMatrix project focuses on photomechanical reproductions of artworks published in art magazines from 1900 to 1950 in Czechoslovakia, France and Germany. Combining qualitative analysis of archival sources (publishers, photo agencies, photographers, printers, etc.) with quantitative methods from digital art history, the project explores how these images shaped the way art was accessed, experienced and narrated. It uses the Explore database as both a research resource and a source of material for developing new digital tools designed to process photomechanical reproductions and reconstruct the multi-layered media chain involved in their production – from artwork to photograph to printing-block. The PhotoMatrix team also relies on Explore’s image-matching feature in some of their qualitative studies, using it to identify reproductions and follow their trajectories over time and space. The themes of image production, circulation and reception were central to the international conference Art within Reach: Photomechanical Reproductions of Artworks from Print to Digital, organized by PhotoMatrix in Prague in 2023, and will be further developed in a forthcoming edited volume.

 

Project Selling Pictures. Pictorial Economy and Commoditization 1820-2020, Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm

The project Selling Pictures. Pictorial Economy and Commoditization 1820-2020 traces the genealogy of contemporary “AI-generated” image hype back through 200 years of promoting technologies for the production, reproduction, and circulation of pictures on a mass scale. Its overall aim is to understand the historical role of pictures, not simply as commodities, but as agents of commerce: Pictures that do the work of selling. Focusing on emerging picture techniques in the 1820s,1920s, and 2020s, this study mines the combined histories of printing, photography, and advertising. By identifying iconographic and discursive patterns in pictures of pictorial mass reproduction (metapictures), and comparing and combining picture theories expressed in advertising copy and trade journalism (vernacular picture theories) with canonical picture theories, the project will establish a new analytical vocabulary, that will clarify and expand understandings of how and why pictures do so much of the work of selling in modern and contemporary societies. Project is run by professor Anna Näslund (Institute for Futures Studies) and Nina Lager Vestberg (NTNU) 2025-2027.