ANN 09.06.2021

VI Summer School on Digital Art History: Digital Exhibitions

online, 30.08.–04.09.2021
Deadline/Anmeldeschluss: 07.07.2021

Nuria Rodríguez-Ortega, Málaga

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, the Fundación General de la Universidad de Málaga, and the HDH, will celebrate the sixth edition from August 30th to September 4th (2021).

Due to the covid-19 situation, the Summer School will be once again 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. In addition to that, the VI edition inaugurates a new track on NLP led by Yadira Lizama Mué (CulturePlex Lab).

The application period is now open (until July 7th, 2021). Please, visit: https://dahss.iarthislab.eu/2021/

2021 Theme: Digital Exhibitions
The lockdown caused by the covid-19 pandemic has brought with it a substantial increase of the so-called digital exhibitions. While digital / virtual / online exhibitions are not a new phenomenon, it is true that the pandemic conditions have placed them at the center of the curatorial activities in museums, art centers and galleries.
The rediscovery of digital / virtual / online exhibitions appears ambivalent: it is expected that this centrality will become a stimulus to promote new avenues for research and experimentation. However, we also run the risk of falling into a certain Adamism that takes us back to debates already overcome. Therefore, it is crucial to focus the attention on the concept and practice of digital/online/virtual exhibitions to reposition their problems within the framework of our post-digital and post-human present.

DAHSS2020 aspires to delve into the notion of digital exhibitions 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 five tracks.

Track A: Digital Display Spaces. Led by Greg Niemeyer (UCB), participants will work in configuring digital spaces for exhibitions on virtual platforms such as newart.city and modzilla hub. Techniques include basic modeling and animation, .fbx or .glb file format, spatial strategies for virtual engagement, data visualization and local sound synchronization in virtual spaces. Track A participants will create content and curate content produced in the other Tracks to cumulate in an online virtual exhibit about DAHSS 2021.

Track B: Data Science. In this track, led by Harald Klinke (DAHJ), you will learn how to create, analyse and visualise linked open data. We will identify preconditions, gaps and biases in collection data and discuss the transformative effects of historical knowledge generated by digital methods on society. No prior knowledge required.

Track C: 3D data, modeling, and rendering, lead by Justin Underhill (UCB). We will learn to create 3D models for art-historical purposes, and will experiment with Augmented and Virtual Reality tools for creating interactive exhibitions.

Track D: AI + Computer Vision. Track D, led by Leonardo Impett (Durham University), will investigate applications of AI/deep learning - especially computer vision - to problems in art history and visual culture. We will look at the long history of the computer analysis of images from the late 80s to today. Through the low-code visual programming environment www.imagegraph.cc, developed specifically for DAHSS, we'll learn the basics of computer vision and deep learning in Python, including multimodal text-image models. We'll also talk about how to visualise and interpret big image data in the context of Cultural Analytics, Distant Reading, and contemporary curating. If you have digital image datasets from your own work or research, please bring them along (and don't worry if not).

Track E: Natural Language Processing (NLP), led by Yadira Lizama Mué (CulturePlex Lab, Western Ontario Univesity) will explore the power of NLP to study what textual data can tell us about art on a large scale. NLP is a field of Artificial Intelligence that centers around measuring human language to make it intelligible to machines. It combines the power of linguistics and computer science to contemplate the guidelines and structure of language and make intelligent systems fit for comprehension, breaking down, and separating significance from text and speech. We'll learn a wide range of NLP topics, such as regular expressions, word tokenization, named-entity recognition, topics extraction, sentiment analysis, and text classification. We'll also gain practical experience in the use of tools such as Spacy, alongside libraries that utilize deep learning to solve common NLP problems. We will have the opportunity to explore collections of texts related to art included in H.W.Wilson's Art Full Text database, Project Muse, Wikipedia, and hundreds of media articles related to art exhibitions.

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 18:00 CEST. Track sessions will be at 16:00 CEST. However, other options could be considered according to the time zones of participants in 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: 40
The organization will cover enrollment expenses of 4 participants from Latin America

Important dates

Deadline: July 7th
Since July 14th: Notification about accepted applications
July 15th – 31st: Registration phase
August 30th: Start of Summer School
September 4th: Closure of the Summer School

Quellennachweis:
ANN: VI Summer School on Digital Art History: Digital Exhibitions. In: ArtHist.net, 09.06.2021. Letzter Zugriff 29.03.2024. <https://arthist.net/archive/34329>.

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