Zonas de Contacto: Art History in a Global Network?

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 will be collaborating with H-ART. Revista de historia, teoría y crítica de arte for an issue focused on digital art historical research in the Spanish-speaking world, broadly defined. This special issue will foreground novel approaches and digitization strategies, new models for canonicity and classification, and ongoing challenges/barriers to research and innovation.

Possible topics to be addressed 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 issue will be 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. Manuscripts may be submitted in either Spanish, Portuguese, and English, but if accepted, they must be submitted in their final version in Spanish. The Spanish version will appear in H-ART; the English version, in DAHJ.

The featured author will be Sofía Crespo. Sofía 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.

Manuscripts may be submitted in either Spanish, Portuguese, and English, but if accepted, they must be submitted in their final version in Spanish. The Spanish version will appear in H-ART; the English version, in DAHJ. The call is now open and articles will be published in the second semester of 2021. To submit articles, please register first at https://dahj.org/.

Deadline for the reception of manuscripts is January 31, 2021.

For more information please visit “Information for Authors” on our website https://dahj.org/authors.
Para la versión en español de esta convocatoria vea la página de H-ART aquí (https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/callforpapers/hart).