The Art Historical Image in the Digital Age

Mass digitization and the global circulation of source materials via the internet has meant that an ever-increasing portion of the images and information scholars of art and architectural history encounter takes the form of data. As a result, our research is based increasingly on data-based forms of evidence, and our scholarship is circulated both as and in digital formats. What are the implications of these trends for disciplinary practice? What do art historians and those working in cultural heritage need to know about technologies like machine learning or 3D imaging?

In this presentation, Dr. Emily Pugh will explore these questions, drawing on examples from research projects she oversees at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles: “Photography Unbound,” a project analyzing a corpus of 30,000 nineteenth-century photographs; and “Understanding the Architectural Model: Research Applications for 3D Imaging.”

The lecture is organised by the Australian Institute of Art History.

About the speaker

Emily Pugh is a Principal Research Specialist at the Getty Research Institute, where she oversees the GRI’s Digital Art History Program. She is active as a specialist in digital art history and as a historian of postwar architecture. Her expertise within digital art history centers on the digital media of art history and its related infrastructures, which encompasses the digitization of physical materials, 3D scanning, computer vision, as well as collections metadata and its related workflows and processes. Her 2014 monograph, Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin, examines architecture and urban development in East and West Berlin during the time of the Berlin Wall. Pugh’s work in architecture and digital art history has been supported by the Center for Architecture Theory Criticism History at the University of Queensland, the European Architectural History Network, and the Humboldt University in Berlin where she served as the 2022–23 Rudolf Arnheim Visiting Professor.

Enquiries

Please send your enquiries to Director of the AIAH Prof Anne Dunlop via anne.dunlop@unimelb.edu.au.

If you have any support requirements in order to participate fully, please contact us via scc-events@unimelb.edu.au.

Image credit: High-resolution photogrammetric 3D scan of the American Center in Paris Model, ca. 1988-1994, Frank O. Gehry and Associates, architect. Getty Digital, digital capture and 3D render. Frank O. Gehry papers, Getty Research Institute, 2017.M.66. © Frank O. Gehry