F.2 Let's Get Digital, Part 2
Fri Oct 28 / 11:00 – 12:30 / rm 179, University College
chairs /
- Elyse Longair, Queen's University
- Jevonne Peters, Western University
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 focuses 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.
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
F.2.1 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.
F.2.2 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.
F.2.3 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.
