We are pleased to announce that the International Summer School on Digital Art History (DAHSS), a joint initiative of the University of Málaga and the University of Berkeley, with the collaboration of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, will celebrate the fifth edition from September 1st to 5th (2020).

Due to the covid-19 situation, this year the Summer School will be all online. The DAHSS team is convinced that we have an unprecedented opportunity to explore new ways of working together in a real global scenario and at the same time preserve interpersonal exchange.

The application period is now open (until July 26th, 2020). Please, visit: http://historiadelartemalaga.uma.es/dahss20/applications/

2020 Theme: Ephemera in Digital Art History

The #BlackLivesMatter movement and the rapid spread of global demonstrations around the world are producing a considerable amount of cultural manifestations that, due to their own nature, are ephemeral. Nevertheless, their impact is permanent as they change the course of human consciousness. This circumstance compels us to reflect about how and why to preserve –whether this is possible- these ephemeral cultural productions and how to produce digital outputs that allow us to comprehend these cultural manifestations, their transformative impact, and their full complexity. Cultural productions are complex systems with multiple dimensions, layers and trajectories. Computational techniques and digital media give us tools, methods and analytical strategies to deal with this kind of multifaceted nature phenomena that, moreover, continuously reconfigure as they are disseminated and appropriated by different communities. DAHSS2020 aspires to delve into the notion of ephemera and their complexity proposing to participants to work together in a common project from different perspectives.

The course has a theoretical-practical orientation: theoretical exchange and critical discussions will be combined with practical sessions (lab-based sessions) through which participants will work collaboratively. The results will be publicly presented on the last day of the course.

The course is organized around four tracks.

Track A: Data and the Arts. In Track A, lead by Greg Niemeyer (UC Berkeley), you will explore what role data can play in the arts, from the ancient Nilometer to information-age networks, artificial intelligence, and actionable data. Instead of seeing data as technical, you will learn about information technology as a cultural, social and political production.
What new artforms arise from information technology and how can art history appreciate them? How can art address the cultural deficit in information technology? In this practice-oriented track, you will learn how to make a data model, how to write code, and how to manifest data aesthetically in image and sound. No coding is experience required. You will teach and use Processing for your week long project, and you will go home with a completed media art project online. Your experience will serve as a basis for computational literacy, which will empower you to analyze data and code as the primary materials of media art.

Track B: Data Science. Data–well used, managed and analyzed–is of great value for the understanding of art history and its impact on society. Real-time data is an opportunity to engage the public with cultural heritage, identify bias and foster diversity. In this track, led by Harald Klinke (LMU Munich), we will look into open data sources, learn the fundamentals of cultural data analysis and make use of cloud services. No prior knowledge is necessary.

Track C: Digital Photography: Detecting and Visualizing Forgery using Image Processing and AR. Digital photographs are the dominant medium of the twenty-first century. Yet, the indexical quality of the photograph--the trace of an encounter between an illuminated surface and an image sensor--is increasingly compromised by technologies capable of generating fraudulent or misleading images. The artifice of these pictures is often undetectable to the naked eye. This track, led by Justin Underhill (Visualization Lab for Digital Art History, UC Berkeley), will introduce students to some of the tools used to analyze forgery and image manipulation (such as the tools used in Photoshop, Facetune, etc). We will attempt to visualize these results in an AR gallery that allows users to observe these tools in realtime on their smartphones.

Track D: Computer Vision. Track D, led by Leonardo Impett (Bibliotheca Hertziana), will investigate applications of computer vision to questions in the history of art – and more generally in visual studies. Images are what distinguishes digital art history from ‘digital humanities on art history’, and we will look at the long history of the computer analysis of images from the late 1980s to today. We’ll learn to use some basic image processing tools (scikit-image) and more sophisticated computer vision algorithms (tensorflow) to search within, organize, or learn about big sets of images. With millions of images of cultural heritage digitised from e.g. Bildindex, Wikimedia, and the PHAROS consortium, we will build systems that deal with genuinely big image datasets (>10,000). If you have digital image datasets from your own work/research, please bring them!

Plenary Sessions
No matter what track you pick, you will also see what students do in other tracks in our daily plenary session. In the plenary sessions, notable alumni of the DAHSS program will also share feedback and observations about how DAHSS helped them in their work.

Schedule
To accommodate the most possible time zones, the plenary sessions will be conducted daily at 21:00 CEST. Track sessions will be at 17:00 CEST, although other options could be considered according to the time zones of participants en each track.

Intended audience: postgraduate students, academic researchers, independent scholars and professionals related to the following disciplines: Art History and Visual Studies, Fine Arts, Graphic Design, Computer Sciences, Media and New Media Studies and Museum Studies.

Fee: 100€
Places: 30
Enrollment expenses of 4 participants from Latin America will be covered by the organization.

For more information, please visit: http://historiadelartemalaga.uma.es/dahss20/