Category Index

The Digital Age has revolutionized economy, society, and our private lives. For decades now, digitalization has also touched most branches of the humanities. 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.

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.

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.

The transition from analog to digital pictorial transcription has transformed art history and its archives in profound and unexpected ways. The objects of our study, once physically circumscribed by the walls of the slide library, are now widely available. The advent of image retrieval platforms like ArtStor and Google Image Search, not to mention countless museum databases, present new challenges and opportunities for cataloguing and visualizing data. The photographic practices of museum visitors have likewise been transformed by the integration of digital photography, cellular phones, and social media. Additionally, art historical publishing and pedagogy continue to be mostly constrained (in the English-speaking) world by antiquarian protocols governing copyright and image clearance.

The International Journal for Digital Art History (DAHJ) 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.

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 the COVID-19 pandemic, wherein virtual landscapes have begun to serve as critical contact zones for practitioners of social distancing. 

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? 

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? 

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.

Taking W.J.T. Mitchell's What do Pictures Want? and David Freedberg’s The Power of Images into the digital realm, this category interrogates the complex agency of digital images today and the power dynamics at play in their creation. We aim to investigate not only how images and data (and images as data) shape cultural narratives and power systems, but what these digital entities seem to demand from us as scholars, archivists, cultural producers, and spectators. At the same time, we seek to understand how a visual studies approach to digital images might generate alternative (digital) art histories and new ways of seeing beyond the constraints of conventional methodologies.