We are sorry to
have to announce that Professor Will Vaughan has stepped down as Chair of
CHArt. CHArt would not be CHArt without Will's foresight, expertise, enthusiasm
and charm so on behalf of all CHArt supporters we would like to thank him for
all that he has contributed over the last eighteen years. The good news is that
Will has agreed to remain on the CHArt Committee .
We are delighted
to welcome Dr Charlie Gere as the new Chairman. Charlie is the course Director
of the Digital Art History MA at Birkbeck College, London. His current research
includes directing an AHRB-funded research project looking at the history of
British Cybernetic and Computer Art from the beginnings to 1980. He is also
undertaking research into the relation between the avant garde and the speed of
technological evolution from the early nineteenth century up to the present day
Elected at the CHArt Annual General Meeting in November 2002, Charlie's vision
for CHArt's future is to build on its strengths and reputation and its
longstanding links with academia, and with the museum and gallery sector, while
also looking at how it can accommodate the increasing general interest in
digital art, culture and theory.
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Planning CHArt's
nineteenth annual conference has begun. The title of the conference
is:
CONVERGENT
PRACTICES: NEW APPROACHES TO ART AND VISUAL CULTURE
The call for papers has just been circulated. This year the
conference will be held at Birkbeck College, London. The proceedings of the
2001 CHArt Conference, DIGITAL ART HISTORY. A SUBJECT IN
TRANSITION, are now available on www.chart.ac.uk. All CHArt members are able
to access these.
If you are a
member or author and have not received our recent notification of the current
password please email h.gardiner@bbk.ac.uk (members) or
anna.bentkowska@courtauld.ac.uk (authors). The proceedings of the 2002 CHArt
Conference are being edited at present and will be made available in November
2003. |
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While the
intention of the CHArt Online Newsletter is to keep you informed about current
and forthcoming projects and events we would also like to reflect on CHArt's
past activities. Since its establishment eighteen years ago CHArt has grown
from a small group of London-based computer enthusiasts to an international
academic organisation. The longest standing members will remember CHArt's
beginnings with nostalgia. Some of you may remember the first issue of the
CHArt Newsletter - with an interesting rendering of a Rembrandt print, on its
front cover. The newsletter was first published in autumn 1985. The editors
were Dave Guppy, Will Vaughan and Charles Ford. The Newsletter was " bunged
into the Euclid system and drawn squeaky clean from the Diablo printer".
Apart from
organisational and practical issues, the Newsletter included a supplement by
Will Vaughan in which he described a specific computing application, the
Mondrian Maker and provided the Visual Basic code it employed. The Mondrian
Maker was designed to produce images resembling in their colours and
proportions paintings created by Mondrian during his 'classic' period in the
1920s and early 1930s. These pictures combine simplicity of construction with
extreme sophistication of effect and can be used to demonstrate something of
the computer's potential as a stimulus for exploring objects with high
aesthetic claims. The computer program that created these images read a series
of spatial and tonal measurements which were stored in a data file and used
these as instructions to construct a graphic image on the screen. One of the
reasons for writing the programme was to test how little information needed to
be assembled to record certain types of imagery. (This description adapted from
Will Vaughan's article in CHArt Newsletter, 1985, 1). There are many questions
that we may ask today about the role of such early applications of computers to
the history of art. From today's perspective a computer analysis of Mondrian's
paintings, carried out on a slow computer, may seem from a technological point
of view, 'a laughable industry' (to borrow from Keppler's judgement of an
earlier research). However, we should never dismiss earlier research on the
grounds of inferior technology. The early endeavours by computing-able art
historians required vision that can be hardly matched by today's projects for
which the risk of the unknown is so much less of a factor. The early projects
like the Mondrian Maker stimulated interdisciplinary approaches to the history
of art and paved the way to the use of novel tools and a new look at its
subject, the visual arts. |
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Many of you will
not be aware of the struggles to create an appropriate acronym for CHArt! Here
is a selection of some of the more choice suggestions (as published in the
reprint of the first issue of the CHArt Newsletter) under the delightful title:
Irreverence and Pomposity: a case study in the group dynamics of
signifier choice
OR
What shall we call
ourselves?
CHA-CHA -
Computers in History of Art - Computers for History of Art
GUCHA -
Group for Users of Computers in History of Art
HAGGIS - History of
Art Group for Information Systems.
CHART (not CHArt) was one of the
strongest contenders; it stood then for Computers and History of Art in
Research and Teaching.
Further tongue-in-cheek suggestions
included:
HALITOSIS - Historians of Art, Learning, Information
Technology On a Shoestring
HASBEEN - History of Art and the Silicon
Beast
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Report on the 2002 CHArt Conference:
DIGITAL ART HISTORY? EXPLORING PRACTICE IN A NETWORK
SOCIETY
The 2002 CHArt
conference had a mildly valedictory air. After nearly twenty years Will Vaughan
is stepping down as Chair of CHArt, which meant that this was his last
conference in that role. This made the question mark in the conference title
particularly apt. It suggested a certain questioning spirit about the future of
the topic to which CHArt has been devoted for nearly two decades. Professor Tim
Benton of the Open University rose ably to the challenge of this query, despite
a late arrival courtesy of a tube service entirely paralysed by the fireman's
strike. Tim was able to transcend the difficulties of contemporary Britain to
present an even more dystopian vision of future digital art history. Like all
good science fiction Tim's imaginary prognosis was really a portrait of a
present fixated on the apparent benefits of technology and of market forces to
the detriment of depth and quality. After this apocalyptic and futurological
start the conference settled down to the more mundane issues of current
practice and theory. In the first session John Calvelli of the Art Institute of
Portland gave a fascinating account of a database system he has developed to
teach design , while Andrew Hershberger of Bowling Green University, Ohio,
talked about teaching photography online with OhioLINK, a networked archive and
resource. In the next session Emilie Gordenker presented a kiosk for the V
& A designed by her previous employers, Gallery Systems and Mary Pearce
demonstrated her multimedia resource about colour and abstraction. What was
noticeable about all these projects was how well designed and presented they
were. This suggests both that the tools for digital media are getting more
sophisticated and that the knowledge of how to design for such media is
improving.
The afternoon of
the first day was oriented towards art practice and theory. Lanfranco Aceti of
Central St Martins School of Art was amusing about the potential uses of
digital media for art practice, while Melina Berkenwald of Westminster
University presented a more sober and more positive view on the same topic,
taken from her comprehensive empirical research with practitioners. Michael
Hammel of Aarhus in Denmark rounded off the afternoon with a comprehensive
exegesis of some of the important theoretical issues.
In the evening
conference delegates continued their discussions in more informal manner in the
ICA Bar and Chinatown. The next day started with Mike Leggett from Sydney
talking about and showing a video of his fascinating PathScape project for
giving interactive access to the history of the New South Wales coastline. In a
marked contrast in both topic and approach Rupert Shepherd discussed and gently
but critically analysed Sussex University's Material Renaissance Project
database of prices in Renaissance Italy. Even the most economically literate
delegates were probably reeling after the explanations about the intricacies of
the nomenclature of weights and floating exchange rates between city states, as
well as the obvious complexities of rendering such material into database form.
Next Polly Christie of the Visual Arts Database Service introduced the National
Fine Art Education Digital Collection, a worthy and interesting initiative to
make available in digital form examples of fine art practice. Before lunch
Annette Ward, talking on behalf of a team from the University of Northumbria at
Newcastle and from iBase, described work evaluating Content-Based Image
Retrieval systems. Whether the results made the case for CBIR more convincing
remains open to question. In the afternoon Ida Engholm of the IT University of
Copenhagen and Dunja Kukovec of the University of Ljubljana both discussed
aspects of digital practice. Ida looked at graphic design on the Web, while
Dunja discussed the aesthetics of new media. After the coffee break Martin Kemp
of the Department of the History of Art at the University of Oxford and Antonio
Criminisi of Microsoft Corporation USA showed the results of their
technologically fascinating work in making computer representations of
three-dimensional spaces in painting. Finally Simon Rodwell of the Open
University showed some of their recent work in developing DVDs for higher
education and made a convincing pitch for the use of such media.
What was striking
was that, alongside papers about teaching, curation and technological
applications for which CHArt is well known, were contributions concerning
artistic practice, critical theory and digital design history. Also striking
was that, as always at the CHArt Conference, the quality of the presentations
and the work discussed was extremely good. This suggests that, question marks
aside, digital art history is a topic of growing importance, especially in the
network society the conference's subtitle alluded to, and therefore that
CHArt's mission to explore and discuss the issues involved remains as vital as
when it was founded.
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