On digital technology & our seminar

Digital technology has the potential to make visible to all art historians and to their audiences, as well as to all museum audiences, what until now has been experienced only by a few dedicated curators and dealers. Details from high-resolution photography, rotational images, digitally produced diagrams, graphic designs, mapping projects, films of furniture in motion, 3D virtual modeling, and films of objects in use, all allow a new kind of visual evidence.

As the details of fabrication, the insides, the undersides, the secret compartments, the motion of objects, the locations of bodies in space, and the volumes of space become visible, they reveal the intimacy with which things were experienced. The fabrication of things by artisans, their management by servants, and the social performances enacted through them by the wealthy, are all conjured by their digitally enhanced visibility.

New image technologies challenge art historians to make the form of our arguments match our method. Can we perform the materiality of things, people’s experience of things, and the passage of the immaterial through the material? Is a phenomenology of use incomplete unless it’s exposition takes a materialist form? Do things demand to be both described and demonstrated?

Our seminar project hopes to provide answers to these questions.