Looking forward to being the co-chair with Jevi for Let’s Get Digital: UAAC 2022, October 28, 9:00 - 10:30 and 11:00 - 12:30.
Let’s Get Digital embraces the timely opportunity to critically reexamine the impacts of digital technology and the barrage of information on our perceptions of reality. Specifically, this panel is focusing on digital art, emergent platforms, and forms of creative care and curatorial strategies. In bringing together a panel of artists, scholars, and curators, we hope to collectively reflect on our present post-internet age, to borrow Byung-Chul Han’s term, ‘the age of like’, and what it means to engage with the digital realm, over half-a-century since its inception.
Part 1 looks at the transformation or augmentation of analog collections to digital forms of expression, the considerations, challenges and breakthroughs, and how the recent pandemic acted as an impetus.
keywords: digital art, virtual gallery engagement, critical theory, multi-media storytelling
The Curatorial Conundrum: Collecting and Care of Unique Digital Material
Kat Lewis, University of Washington Libraries Special Collections
Keeping and providing access to historical records has been the unabashed goal of special collections, archival and print material alike, since at least the 18th century. Although definitively converse to leather bound codicies and pristine gray archival boxes, librarians and archivists have found themselves accepting, collecting, and curating born digital material. And who could resist the temptation? Artists, writers, and academics are producing creative, innovative work worthy of critical examination for generations to come. In addition, these ephemeral digital fragments are the material and records we are leaving for the future. Cue the conundrum: digital media is the most fragile media to date, so how should we allocate already scarce resources to collecting knowing it is challenging to display, consult, and the format will be obsolete in mere decades? The emergence and ubiquity of digital record and art is forcing librarians and archivists to reconsider our standard procedures for collecting and care. Digital and multimedia objects are asking us to question our knowledge structures and cultural memory. My paper will examine how several unique objects answer these questions and inform the future of library and archival stewardship. Through the comparison of one-of-a-kind dream journals by Genie Shenk, the ephemeral, complex narratives of the 1990s hypertexts, and the multi-media work of Rick Myers, the paper will find there is peace in the ambiguity and instability these objects present. History and memory are subjective, use does not equal value, and there is beauty in our finitude.
keywords: digital art, hypertext, multimedia, digital preservation, curating, collecting, multi-media art, cultural memory
Kat Lewis is the Assistant Book Arts and Rare Books Curator at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her research interests include print history and circulation, modern book arts, textual studies, and digital humanities. She received her MSc. in Book History and Material Culture from the University of Edinburgh in 2019 and was a project librarian at the Signet Library and Eton College before joining UW Libraries in 2020.
HANDS-ON: Subverting Museum's untouchability through digital
Laura Vigo, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Lindsay Corbett, McGill University
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, one of the oldest institutional collections in Canada, holds more than 44,000 artworks dating from the Neolithic times to today, from all corners of the world. The Asian art collection, in particular, was mostly built through important private donations during the first half of the 20th century. As such, it reflects the tastes and prerogatives of a small group of local collectors who gazed at Asia from afar, mostly purchasing and “consuming” exotica, whose small size and relative market value allowed for rapid consumption and fast circulation through a consolidate network of self-taught dealers and conoisseurs. For these early collectors, Japanese art (and culture) was thus conflated through small sculptures carved in the round, handled with care and manipulated for their texture, relative size and peculiar surface decoration. In their hands, these tiny vestiges represented the essence of a distant Japan and helped bringing it home. But the tactile experience, which brought this exotic world into our collection, is hard to replicate in a museum’s context where objects are often kept untouched and encased.
A recent digital initiative at the MMFA seeks, on one side, to mimic the lost pleasure of tactility, on the other, to address the physical limitations surrounding the display of miniature objects in a museum and subvert the canonical museum hierarchy by rendering visible the often-invisible. The development of a web-progressive application integrating responsive technologies, such as three-dimensional photogrammetry and touch, allows for viewers to engage with small-scale items in closer detail and even “handle” them. This paper will examine the first iteration of a larger project, concentrating on our collection of Japanese netsuke, small ivory sculptures originally used as cord-stoppers (toggles) during the Edo period. It will explore how the use of responsive interfaces sheds light on netsuke’s important qualities such as their tactility, materiality, and fine craftsmanship.
keywords: digital art, virtual gallery engagement, critical theory, multi-media storytelling
Laura Vigo is curator of Arts of Asia at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), where she has been involved in implementing the newly opened Gallery for Sikh art (2022) as well as the permanent galleries for the Arts of One World (2019). She co-curated the exhibition Connections: Our Artistic Diversity Dialogues with Our Collections in 2018. Vigo has a Ph.D. in Chinese Archaeology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London (UK). She recently published articles in the professional magazines Arts of Asia, L’Objet d’Art and KunstTexte in tandem to her work on various MMFA publications. She is currently an invited Professor in critical art history at Université de Montréal. Her current research interests include digital mediation, exoticism, objects circulation and trans-location, historiography and provenance research.
Lindsay Corbett is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, where she specializes in Byzantine art and architecture. Her dissertation investigates new material forms for the icon in the late Byzantine period. Lindsay is currently working on a digital initiative project at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where she also worked as a research fellow on the Arts of One World exhibition. Lindsay’s research and museum projects have been supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec, the SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, the Medieval Academy of America, and A. G. Leventis Foundation Scholarship.
Re-Imagining Presence in a Pandemic: Exhibitionary Spaces and the Digital
Julian Jason Haladyn, OCAD University
“The noisy city is silent, the schools are closed, the theatres closed. No students around, no tourists. Travel agencies are cancelling entire regions from the map.” In this description of February 28 from his “Diary of the psycho-deflation,” the contemporary Italian theorist Bifo outlines the unnerving quietness of life in Italy during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. His account is reminiscent of many such narratives of absence, in which spaces around the world are emptied of their previous human activities. Museums and galleries were a special case of absence, not properly being “necessary” yet their emptiness, the lack of physical access, was particularly significant because presence is vitally connected to function within the space of the gallery. This paper examines the ways digital spaces and technologies were used to address this cultural absence. Considering a series of strategies by galleries and museums, which include increased digitization of collections, the creation of ‘viewing rooms’ and the application of ‘telepresence’ devices, the goal of this presentation is to address the role of the digital in re-imagining exhibitionary spaces at a time when presence was not possible.
keywords: museum, galleries, exhibition, space, digital
Julian Jason Haladyn is an art historian, cultural theorist and Assistant Professor at OCAD University in Toronto. His writings on art and theory have appeared in numerous publications. He is the author of several books, including The Hypothetical (2020), Duchamp, Aesthetics, and Capitalism (2019), Aganetha Dyck: The Power of the Small (2017), Boredom and Art: Passions of the Will To Boredom (2014) and Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés (2010). In addition, he is co-editor of Community of Images: Strategies of Appropriation in Canadian Art, 1977-1990 (with Janice Gurney 2022) and the Boredom Studies Reader (with Michael E. Gardiner 2016).
Part 2 examines and draws on examples of the use of digital platforms as a means to share, advocate, connect, and communicate art, ideas, and creative practices.
keywords: digital art, virtual gallery and museum engagement, infrastructure and impact, care and curation, story-telling
Traditional art, online: collection or documentation or communication?
Shelley Kopp, University of Western Ontario
My presentation looks at the migration of traditional painting to digital spaces like websites and social media platforms. This shift, while all around us and taken for granted, moves art into unexpected places. The pandemic had museums turning to the photos of their collections to create online exhibitions. The transitory and inherently ephemeral nature of the digital medium works against the traditional state of the physical museum. Where the institution imparts sensations of permanence, longevity, and authority, the internet tends to convey notions of obsolescence and temporality.
This is especially acute when one thinks of where the images of art show up. Social media, especially the image-driven platform, Instagram, is the choice for museums to display their digitized photos of art. Instagram is a constantly flowing stream of images in which a work from a museum’s collection may pop up amongst posted photos of lunch, dog tricks, dancing couples, and fashion tips. The carefully curated institutional exhibition in which a group of experts poured hours of expertise and effort are, instead, given over to a constantly changing barrage of images. Professional curation within the museum disappears online in pursuit of a quality of seen-ness; of “likes”. The museum becomes a fleeting presence in the stream of images going by, a flow that, for the viewer, may or may not even bring to mind the museum’s collection.
I look at the shift from the original artwork that spoke of an artist, themes, eras, connections to movements, religions, and a patron’s power; to the photograph of the artwork, which usually represents the archives, providing documentation of the original artwork. Finally, when that photograph is uploaded, it becomes “communication”, according to Nathan Jurgenson. I examine how the digitization process moves the art piece from collection to documentation to communication.
keywords: digitized art, museum, social media, reproduction
I am in the final year of the Ph.D. program in Art and Visual Culture at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) in London, Canada, under the supervision of Prof. John G. Hatch. My area of research focuses on the movement of traditional artwork to digital media and the concerns and advantages of these forms of representation. I am the former editor of the Visual Arts graduate students' journal, tba: journal of art, media, & visual culture, as well as the founding associate editor. I joined the editorial team of the Embassy Cultural House arts collective in fall 2020 and designed and edited the exhibition catalogue for Hiding in Plain Sight. I was also part of the editorial team for the Embassy Cultural House tabloid re-issue in December 2021. In April 2022 I became a member of the Board of Museum London.
Let all voices be heard. Tania Bruguera’s #YoTambienExijo and Digital Spectatorship
Felicia F. Leu, Université du Québec à Montréal
“As a Cuban, today I demand […].“ This expression, repeatably asserted in an open letter by the artist and activist Tania Bruguera became the backbone of her piece #YoTambienExijo (I also demand). The artist addressed her human rights demands to Raúl Castro, Barack Obama, and Pope Francis in response to the announcement of the reestablishment of US-Cuban relations in December 2014. She proposed to “open the microphones [to] let all voices be heard” by restaging her performance Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (2009) in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución, a piece which had once granted the public one minute of free speech on a podium at Centro Wilfredo Lam. Following the letter’s online publication with the hashtag #YoTambienExijo, a “volunteer civic platform” of the same name emerged, which was joined by three thousand people in six days on Facebook. Using #YoTambienExijo, the project spread through social media, triggering both local and global public participation in the digital and in the real space. Yet, in the Plaza, the microphones were never opened; in a state opposed to freedom of expression, the artist was detained and her passport was confiscated. This case study conceptualizes the spectators as (digital) storytellers navigating in a complex multi-part project that merged digital, real and imaginary spaces. Building on various perspectives of spectatorship, relationality and transmedia storytelling in art history, performance studies, communication and media science, this paper provides insights into the digital space as a driving force behind the piece. It aims to do this by tracing the participatory dynamics of the virtual communication networks as artivistic tools. The work’s (digital) reach on a local and global scale will be critically explored by taking into account Bruguera’s visibility as a renowned artist in the international contemporary art system and Cuba’s limited internet access as “the island of the disconnected” (Yoani Sánchez).
keywords: digital participation, transmedia storytelling, performance art, artivism
Felicia F. Leu currently works on her PhD in the Department of Art History at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), supported by a FRQ doctoral merit scholarship for foreign students. She studied Psychology and Art History in Munich, Vienna and Paris. Linking the two disciplines, her primary research interest lies in the reception mechanisms of contemporary performance and in the potential transformative effects of art on its audience. Her work is also nourished by exhibition practice; she curated her first exhibition in 2020 and interned internationally in curatorial teams at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Haus der Kunst in Munich.
archiveThing: testing an artist-focused metadata schema to build digital community space for sharing contemporary art practices
Barbara Rauch, OCAD University
Michelle Gay, York University
archiveThing prototype was developed with the assistance from the Canada Council. The project designers had been researching the value and potential of an artist-led online archive platform as a social space to share work through the digital realm. Over the course of a year, we met as a core development team to determine the functionalities on the public facing site, to design and test the extensive dashboard, designed specifically by artists and for artists to create portfolio works connected directly to a specific metadata schema.
As a research production and design team we have been thinking about artist-led archives for years. As physical gallery and exhibition spaces/opportunities decline, our concept of an artist-focused platform using metadata and tagging becomes a method and social space to engage with contemporary art practices. It is a place to share the deep complexities of works beyond the typical online experience.
Our metadata schema is extensive and can be used by artists to include extensive aspects of their practice—much like conversations had in studio visits. Artists can create portfolios with images, video, and narratives about the processes of making, thinking, testing, sketching and gradually build up stories through our metadata drawers. A tag system allows site visitors to sort and display by topic, type of work, materiality, or from other artist-selected tags. Curators and visitors can surface new connections across various practices that would not have been obvious, and artists find connections to other practitioners who work in similar conceptual or material realms.
We will present the working prototype of archiveThing, with a few case studies, and end by offering further reflections about community building and this social space. We will discuss our findings that intersect with topics of online engagement, labour, and connectivity.
keywords: artist-focused archive and metadata scheme, online and asynchronous community building
Michelle Gay: An interdisciplinarian for decades, Michelle combines an MFA from NSCAD and an M.I in information science from UToronto. Currently she is doing doctoral studies at the Environmental and Urban Change faculty at York University exploring feminist utopic spatial practices, commoning, and other art practices which intersect with urban theory and the production of social spaces.
Barbara Rauch is an associate professor at OCAD University. Her practice-led investigation is a material speculation in discussion with sustainable technologies, informed by critical posthumanist theories. She holds a PhD from the University of the Arts London with a focus on consciousness studies and virtual environments with an attempt to map affect theories and emotion studies.
The Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC) provides a national voice for its membership, composed of university and college faculty, independent scholars, and other art professionals in the fields of art, art history, and visual culture. The 2022 UAAC-AAUC Conference will be hosted by the University of Toronto.