All Condemned to the Digital? Changing Notions of Evidence in Art History

 12-04-2024 14:15 - 15:45 GMT+1 || Join us on Zoom|| Back to the programme

Digital Art History is Dead!
Long Live Digital Art History!

Author:

Emily Pugh - Getty Research Institute

Abstract

For the 2024 Artl@s /Visual Contagions Conversation Series on Digital Art History, I propose to reframe the debate regarding DAH, shifting focus away from the diKerences between “traditional” and digital art history and instead considering where the two overlap. Specifically, I will discuss the question of evidence in the era of digital technology, examining how the increasing prevalence of, even reliance on machine-readable forms of information in art history has implications for scholarly practice within the entire discipline.

My twenty-minute presentation will consist of three parts. First, I will argue that the current framing of discussions about DAH serves primarily to deepen the perception that DAH exists apart from “traditional” art history, obscuring the stakes the increasing technologization of our discipline has for all historians of art and architectural history. Next, I will model an alternative line of inquiry based on the exploration of a key point of intersection between art history and DAH: digital forms of evidence. OKering specific examples drawn from collections at the Getty Research Institute—such as digital positive images created from analog negatives in the Ed Ruscha Streets of Los Angeles collection and digital design files from the Frank Gehry Papers— I will articulate the ways digital information technologies challenge or complicate existing notions of art-historical, archival evidence. I will further explore how changing notions of evidence are shaping art-historical inquiry of various forms, in multiple ways.

Finally, building on these archival examples, I will oKer a definition of DAH that is premised on an integration of DAH within the mainstream of art history. I argue that the idea that DAH stands in opposition to art history results in part from an understanding of DAH based on the use of a computer. Many proponents of DAH, that is, characterize the field in terms of the use of “digital tools and methods” or “computational approaches.” Yet, there is no way to practice art history in the twenty-first century outside of data and computation. Because the presence of these factors cannot alone define it, I propose an alternative understanding of DAH based not only on critical and ethical engagement with technology and data, but also on the establishment of technical and intellectual frameworks for the integration of technology within contemporary scholarly practice that are adopted broadly, across the discipline.

By highlighting the shared concerns between DAH and the mainstream of art history, I hope to contribute to the Artl@s series’ overall goal of “foster[ing] collaborations and a heightened mutual understanding of the outcomes between the realms of art history and Digital Art History.”

Bio

Emily Pugh received her PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, where she focused on postwar architecture as well as digital humanities. Since 2014, Pugh has served as a Principal Research Specialist at the Getty Research Institute, overseeing the GRI’s Digital Art History program. In this role, she has overseen the research activities for projects including Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles and Understanding the Architectural Model, which explores the relevance of 3D imaging technology for providing access to the GRI’s collection of architectural models. Her expertise within digital art history centers on the digital media of art history and its related infrastructures, which encompasses the digitization of physical materials, 3D scanning, computer vision, as well as collections metadata and its related workflows and processes. Her work on architecture and digital art history has been published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Space and Culture, the International Journal of Digital Art History, photographies, and Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023. She has received funding for her research from the Center for Architecture Theory Criticism History at the University of Queensland, the Center for Digital Humanities Research at Australian National University, and the Foundation for Landscape Studies. In 2022–23, she served as the Rudolf Arnheim Visiting Professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Artworks and Pixels:
What Counts as Evidence
in Digital Art History?

Author:

Christopher Nygren — University of Pittsburgh

Bio

Dr. Christopher Nygren is associate professor of early modern art in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. His 2020 book, Titian’s Icons: Charisma, Tradition, and Devotion in the Italian Renaissance, published by Penn State University Press, re-examined one of the leading lights of Italian Renaissance painting to reveal the lasting impact of Christian icons on Titian’s career. Between 2017 and 2019 he served as PI for The Morelli Machine, an NSF funded project that tested the hypothesis that the nexus of style and authorship can be interrogated computationally.