A Digital Approach of Visual Semantics
Co-organizers :
Ecole
Normale supérieure, Université de Grenoble-Alpes/Laboratoire de
Recherche Historique Rhône-Alpes, Purdue College of Liberal Arts.
Chairs :
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Paula Barreiro-Lopez, Catherine Dossin.
As part of the 10th anniversary of the Artl@s project, Artl@s are organizing an international conference on the digital approach to the circulation of images and forms.
In his groundbreaking project, the Atlas Mnemosyne, Aby Warburg suggested that some shapes travel, passing times and cultures. On their way, accompanied by processes of mixture, borrowings, transfers and
More and more art historical sources are available online worldwide. This should not only excite us to reconstruct the global circulation of images and artifacts, but also use these tools to (re-) consider the mobility of images, patterns, and styles. Indeed, one of the greatest limitations of the digital approach so far is that it has not been confronted with the circulation of images (shapes, colours, layouts) in a massive way.
This international conference aims to assess the potential of digital technology in renewing our study and understanding of artistic circulations and in the collective and progressive deployment of alternative narratives which are more de-centered and more inclusive.
Presentations on all historical periods addressing the following themes are welcome.
1. Networks, (subaltern) Agents and the Politics of Visual Circulation
How
does a pattern circulate and inform the creation of new visual and
political meanings? Some visual productions (arts, graphics, poster,
cinema, TV, photography, video) have contributed to the transmission and
international diffusion of specific political, artistic and collective
memories. With the development of computer vision and deep learning on
images, today we have the means to study this circulation and better
understand how specific patterns and the political semiotics they convey
circulate and multiply. However, digital approaches have most often
focused on linking actors involved in the international circulation of
images, styles, ideas or works of art. We are interested in approaches
that will not only present the tools used for reconstructing and
analyzing these networks, but above all that will show the specific and
innovative contribution of the digital compared to analog or traditional
approaches.
2. Canals, bottlenecks, intersections: digital geography of artistic circulations
What
do digital tools contribute to our understanding of the geography of
artistic circulations? What are the bottlenecks? The intersections? The
factors of circulation and non-circulation? Their evolutions through
time? Moreover, can a digital geography of art convincingly lead us out
of the historiographical myth of centres and peripheries and of
translatio imperii? Recent studies have demonstrated that we cannot
think of the world geography of the arts as a homogeneous field
dominated by a centre. In the field of Global and Connected History,
specialists have given contextualized complex answers to the question of
globalization and global cultural geography. Can computational,
quantitative approaches support and expand their conclusions?
3. Iconology in the digital age
Digital
approaches work above all with textual data. For instance, the tools in
the Artl@s database of catalogues can already help track the
circulation of an artwork or of a motif through the analysis of artists’
names and the titles of artworks. But the starting point is still
textual. What information must be crossed to be sure that we talk about
images, and not only about their producers or their titles or their
display? The availability of huge visual databases, and the
possibilities allowed by digital analysis technologies, make it possible
to ask again the questions of the old iconology and to ask them on a
massive scale. The challenge of globalization renews the intuitions of
art historians such as Heinrich Wölfflin or Aby Warburg who, more than a
century ago, wanted to understand the logic of stylistic dissemination.
Would it be an autonomy of forms once the historical and social logics
had been relativized? Can digital methods help answer this question?
Could a pathos formula (Pathosformel) be tracked by a recursive neural
network?
Proposals should be sent before February 15, 2019 to Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (beatrice.joyeux-prunel@ens.fr): a summary of 300 words max, accompanied by a CV in English. The conference will be held in English on 13 and 14 June 2019 at the Ecole normale supérieure, 45 rue d’Ulm, Paris.
This conference is organized in the framework of the research projects Artl@s, Ecole