Fine arts

The Future of Art History: Roundtable

Dan Klemonski Digitization, Fine arts, Interviews, Library and Information Science, Transformations , , , , , , ,

by Jennifer Curran,

Originally Posted December 16th, 2007

Introduction: David Green

Principal, Knowledge Culture
Three art historians were invited to think about how their discipline, and their teaching and research within that discipline, might evolve with access to a rich cyberinfrastructure.

Participants were encouraged to think through what might happen to their practice of art history if:
–they had easy access to high-quality, copyright-cleared material in all media;
–they could share research and teaching with whomever they wanted;
–they had unrestricted access to instructional technologists who could assist with technical problems, inspire with teaching ideas and suggest resources they might not otherwise have known about.

What would they do with this freedom and largesse? What kinds of new levels of research would  be possible (either solo or in collaborative teams); what new kinds of questions might they be able to answer; how would they most want to distribute the results of their scholarship; who would the audience be; and would there be a new dynamic relationship with students in and out of the classroom?

Panelist 1: Guy Hedreen, Professor of Art History, Williams College
On The Next Generation of Digital Images Available to Art Historians

Panelist 2: Dana Leibsohn, Associate Professor of Art, Smith College
On the Technologies of Art History

Panelist 3: Amelia Carr, Associate Professor of Art History, Allegheny College
Overcoming the Practice of Visual Scarcity

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College Museums in a Networked Era–Two Propositions

Dan Klemonski Digitization, Transformations , , , , , ,

by John Weber, Skidmore College

John Weber is the Dayton Director of the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, an interdisciplinary museum opened in 2000 to create links between contemporary art and other disciplines as part of the teaching effort at Skidmore. As director of the museum, he supervises the Tang’s staff and oversees exhibitions, programs, collections, and the Tang website, as well as curating and writing for museum publications. Weber is also a member of the Skidmore faculty and teaches in the art history program. Before coming to Skidmore in 2004, he was the curator of education and public programs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1993 to 2004, where he spearheaded the design of the Koret Education Center and founded the museum’s interactive educational technologies program. From 1987 to 1993 Weber served as curator of contemporary art at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon.

Originally Published December 16th, 2007

To begin, let’s take it as a given that the “cyberinfrastructure” we are writing about in this edition ofAcademic Commons is both paradigmatically in place, and yet in some respects technologically immature. The internet and the intertwined web of related technologies that support wired and wireless communication and data storage have already altered our ways of dealing with all manner of textual and audiovisual experience, data, modes of communication, and information searching and retrieval. Higher education is responding, but at a glacial pace, particularly in examining new notions of publishing beyond those which have existed since the printed page. Technologies such as streaming and wireless video remain crude, but digital projectors that handle still image data and video are advancing rapidly, and the gap between still and video cameras continues to close. Soon I suspect there will simply be cameras that shoot in whatever mode one chooses (rather than “camcorders” and “digital cameras”), available in a variety of consumer and professional versions and price points. Already, high definition projectors and HD video are a reality, but they have yet to permeate the market. They will soon, with a jump in image quality that will astonish viewers used to current recording and projection quality.

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