The International Journal for Digital Art History
The peer-reviewed, open-access journal gathers current developments in the field of digital art history and fosters discourse on the subject from both art history and information science.
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New thematic categories are introduced in DAHJ calls for papers. Articles are published on a rolling basis.
What do (Digital) Images Want? A Decade of Data, Power, and Visual knowledge in Art History
The International Journal for Digital Art History (DAHJ) marks its 10th anniversary at a crucial moment when digital images are not only omnipresent in daily life, but are generated by active agents that shape our ways of seeing and knowing the world. For this milestone, we critically explore the desires, demands, and politics of digital images in contemporary visual culture, while questioning the very foundations of what constitutes digital art history in an age of algorithmic methods of image making and visualization.
“Dear Chat GPT, Give Us a Title!” Responsiveness and Responsibility in times of AI
Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is at the forefront of art-historical research and cultural discourse: from the creation of digital images with the use of transformer models, such as Dall-E and Midjourney, to the analysis of large data sets of images with the use of neural networks. Scholarly written analysis is also shifting with the use of ChatGPT and other language models. Now is a critical time for the field of Digital Art History to reflect and respond to the uses and applications of data with these computational methods. While AI inquiry offers many potential avenues for rethinking art historical research, without careful consideration algorithms also risk ethical pitfalls. Though there has been fervent discussion around AI tools intersecting with art production, as well as a long history of tool development for image recognition and analysis, this issue seeks to further the conversation in response to the recent influx of scholarly engagement with AI and art-historical scholarship.
This cover features original artwork by Sean Capone from the series ZOMBIE PUNX: The Weird Sisters (2022).
The Art Museum in the new Hybridity
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, media theorists like Peter Weibel were quick to bury the body-based “society of proximity” in discourse. To him, it seemed that gigantic stadiums, concert halls, museums, and the like will be “the pharaonic tombs of the future.” That people would not simply relocate to a purely digital world was already foreshadowed by the first easing of restrictions in the summer of 2020, when an almost excessive return to the analog took place. Original artworks were more in demand than ever, and there was a hunger for encounters with other people and objects in the museum. Is the binary rhetoric of analog/ digital, conservative/progressive, and either/or, still appropriate in the post-pandemic age, or should we rather address questions of media specificity and hybridity?
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. This bi-lingual issue is in collaboration with with H-ART. Revista de historia, teoría y crítica de arte to present digital art historical research from the Spanish-speaking world, broadly defined. It foregrounds novel approaches and digitization strategies, new models for canonicity and classification, and ongoing challenges/barriers to research and innovation.
For DAHJ, this cover features original artwork by Sofia Crespo from the series Neural Zoo (2018/2019).
Horizons of Mixed Realities
Digital Art History responds to cutting edge scholarship concerning extended reality technologies. Today, mixed reality is poised to be just as transformative as analog film and photography, which radically reorganized many domains of modern life (including communication, science, politics, and art). This potential has become increasingly apparent in the face of our current global pandemic, wherein virtual landscapes have begun to serve as critical contact zones for practitioners of social distancing.
History of Digital Art
Digital Art History researches the impact of new technologies on art history. It reflects upon the possibilities and opportunities of digital tools for art historical research. In contrast, the history of digital art deals with artistic practice and its continual engagement with computational media, as well as the Internet. However, both of these fields have been shaped by the interactions between art and information science. For this reason, the artistic engagement with these tools must be considered as a crucial vector within the expanded field of Digital Art History.
Transformation of InstiTutions
Digital Art History is often described as a methodological addition to Art History. Moreover, it includes a profound transformation of its institutional framework: server rooms replaced the slide libraries as the former center of art historical departments, museums are concerned with digitizing their collections and making them accessible via virtual exhibitions, and conservators facing challenges preserving digital art with its soft– and hardware.
Digital Space and Architecture
Art history is centrally concerned with a vast array of three-dimensional objects, such as sculptures, and spaces, such as architecture. Digital technologies allow the creation of virtual spaces, which in turn allow us to simulate and compare aspects of a visual culture’s three-dimensional timespace that cannot be communicated as a single, still image. This category focuses on the third dimension in art history, and the digital realm that continues to mediate and transform it.
VIsualizing Big Image data
Big Data and Big Image Data (BID) open up tantalizing new vistas to the art historian. BID as a sub-category or – better yet – an extension of Big Data affords the possibility of processing and analyzing massive amounts of visual material using computational methods. BID will provide art historians with a whole new set of analytic tools, adding new tonal range to our discipline without discarding any of the traditional art historical methods.
What is digital art history?
The Digital Age has revolutionized economy, society, and our private lives. For decades now, digitalization has also touched most branches of the humanities. With the rising importance of the so-called digital humanities, art history is about to change significantly. Thus, the International Journal for Digital Art History (DAHJ) gives authors in this field the opportunity to reach a wider audience, spark a discussion on the future of our discipline, and generate an international and interdisciplinary network of scholars and practitioners.
