This article examines the emergence of luminous environments in mid-twentieth-century art through the intertwined histories of Gyula Kosice, Lucio Fontana, and the transnational networks that later formed New Tendencies. Rejecting a linear genealogy from European modernism to Latin America, it argues for Buenos Aires as a generative node where artificial illumination, experimental publishing, and photographic mediation shaped new models of perceptual and spatial experience. Drawing on catalogues, photomontages, manifestos, installation photography, exhibition reviews, and digital archives, the article treats documentation as a constitutive medium that shaped how ephemeral luminous works were produced, circulated, and historicized. Kosice's neon structures, hydrospatial proposals, and early Mad & iacute; publications are contextualized within the electrified urban landscape and experimental print culture of midcentury Buenos Aires. Fontana's Spatialism is reinterpreted through his Argentine connections, emphasizing how debates on invention, perception, and technological modernity informed his environmental experiments with neon and ultraviolet light.
Debates in digital art history have moved on since 'Reframing Art: Opening Up Art Dealers' Archives to Multi-disciplinary Research' was published five years ago. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) of course has entered the game, but digital art historians and digital humanists are now thinking more broadly about what 'digitisation' means. This short personal reflection/commentary argues that this concept has become more complex in the last 25 years or more. Rather than simply making analogue content available online, today's digitisation projects now involve myriad processes of interpretation, human intervention and input - far more so than when digitisation technologies first emerged at scale in the early 2000s. If the debate on digital art history is to move forward, the definitions of, and assumptions about, digitisation, what it is, and what it is for, need to be updated.
Why have viewers not seen the blood staining the underwear of one of the most famous modern paintings of a teenage girl? This essay undertakes an historiographical analysis, uses close visual analysis, and explicates a meticulous social and visual history to explain viewers' apparent blindness while looking at Balthus's Th & eacute;r & egrave;se Dreaming (1938), which depicts a teen girl reclining on a bench; her raised-leg pose causes her skirt and slip to slide up her leg, revealing what published critics agree is her white underwear. However, a dark red stain spreads across and soils it. The stain's elision from art history can be explained in part by critics sexualizing Th & eacute;r & egrave;se Blanchard and the widespread discomfort with menstruating females generally, and the near impossibility of seeing a menstruating female as sexually alluring, specifically. This unprecedented reading of the famous painting argues that Blanchard becomes sexually unavailable, calmly displays an unacceptable lack of control over her body, and resists expectations of appropriate feminine behavior. When discourse around menstruation has reached a contemporary zenith, surely all can finally see this red stain.
This essay revisits the themes of an earlier essay on the peripheralization of materiality in art-historical practice and adds insights to it based upon disciplinary and cultural developments since 2019. Primary among these is the advent of artificial intelligence image-generating applications, which challenge the materiality of artworks in entirely new ways. This essay proposes that such mechanisms mask art's materiality within and behind seductively sleek illusions that hide the true materiality of art. It also uses the repatriation of art objects to propose that art's materiality still matters.
From the early 1950s onwards, socialist states of east-central Europe developed programmes of artistic collaboration with states in Latin America, Asia and Africa. The ostensible purpose was to promote networks of anti-colonial solidarity. These undertakings have attracted increasing attention amongst art historians, because they allegedly transform the understanding of modernism in east-central Europe, and challenge existing historiographic hierarchies and geographies. Focusing on the case study of Czechoslovakia and its relation to Mexico, this article suggests, instead, that the rhetoric of solidarity was often contradicted by stances that ranged from indifference to even tacit support for racial and colonial attitudes. The article consequently raises wider questions to do with the approach to be adopted for such initiatives of global exchange; how do we view them, and to what extent should the growing narrative of global socialism be subject to critical revision?
Digitization and the value attached to it have been challenged by the advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years. As museums and cultural heritage institutions begin to embrace a wider range of uses for AI tools, urgent questions have arisen around the role of the curator in arts and culture. What happens to the positioning of the curator as a figure of discernment and creativity when faced with automation through generative AI? This article investigates the discourse around digitization and the turn toward AI technologies, particularly in the field of digital art history. There is a growing split between those in digital art history who are interested in the application of AI in digital collections versus those focused on critique and analysis of AI tools themselves. In the past, curatorial use of AI has revolved around methods of categorization and ordering for digitized collections in museums and cultural heritage institutions. More recently, however, curatorial implementation of generative AI also involves creative remixing of digital collections and exhibition-making. The role of the curator, therefore, is shifting in the post-AI landscape.
After Adi Drimer (b. 1969) survived the Hamas terrorist attack on her kibbutz on October 7, she created a powerful piece by transcribing every message exchanged in her community's WhatsApp group during the first hour and a half of the assault. This article explores the remarkable reception of her work, analyzing its role in Israeli art discourse, and the complex processes of meaning-making behind it. Notably, this deeply personal and spontaneous creation, driven by a therapeutic need rather than artistic ambition, quickly gained prominence in Israeli discourse as a defining artistic expression of the moment, achieving "public canonization." The article highlights a significant disconnect between the immediate, widespread public and media response and the initial reluctance of major art institutions to showcase this type of real-time documentation. By analyzing the work, its reception, and its ongoing impact, I propose a model for examining trauma-focused art in the wake of global catastrophes. Focusing on human experiences of shock, loss, and the urgent need for a personal language of trauma, I emphasize the value of immediate artistic response as a powerful alternative to state propaganda or delayed reflective art. I argue that prompt artistic action is a fundamental human necessity that provides an essential first step toward healing, demonstrating that when state or institutional responses fail to offer meaning, spontaneous and urgent art can effectively bridge the personal and communal in processing catastrophic loss.
This study investigates how the library information infrastructure steers not only the access, searchability and retrievability of the images it preserves but also, on a more profound level, how images are understood as sources of information. Using the National Library of Sweden as a case study it first outlines how images are handled and conceptualized - as single pictures, as illustrations secondary to text, or as visual data, repositories of iconographic visual content. Second, through close analysis of five types of images common in library collections in general, it examines how they are classified, demarcated and made accessible. As this study shows, both analogue and digital information infrastructures in the library are, on a very profound level, tailored for text. Such unuttered, even unconscious, text-centrism has the effect that images as sources of information are made literally and figuratively invisible.
Providing a product with characteristics of beauty and creative innovation is one of the aims of any contemporary industry to meet the needs of customers and satisfy their aesthetic and functional requirements. To study the production process and the realisation of creative products with aesthetically pleasing attributes, we created an environment that allows the construction of simple textured polygons (triangles, squares, rhombuses and pentagons) through a software application. To overcome traditional ways of assessing creative products, a Birkhoff aesthetic measure, Euclidean distance and entropy measure have been developed and applied to a sample of smart products, manufactured in the implemented environment, to analyse their aesthetic, creative and order-complexity-chaos features, respectively. The results provided us with measurable quantities of the required qualities for the sample and for each distinct product, combining the metrics to visualise the creative products in 2D and 3D spaces. Further mathematical methods, such as the point process and density probability map applied on the same sample, allowed us to move from a statistical space to probabilistic landscapes, with enhanced forecasting capability on creative features for all future products. Industrial applications are expected in the production and evaluation of products from a creative point of view.
The sexual revolution in Britain introduced sex education in schools, with sex-education films produced by the BBC and private companies for television emerging as a new genre aimed at high school and college students. Parallel to these films, a variety of popular media provided young audiences with informal sex education, offering alternative channels through which sexual knowledge could be acquired beyond institutional settings. These included fictional films, magazines, and illustrated books featuring sexually suggestive or didactic content, alongside more explicit pornographic material. This article examines the agendas of the school sex education films from a visual, contextual, and cultural-historical perspective. It explores how they reflected the dominant conservative biomedical and preventative approaches by translating them into cinematic means. Drawing on stylistic conventions from wildlife documentaries about reproduction and moral melodramas, these films echoed traditional gender roles and heterosexual monogamy, portraying sexual pleasure as a male prerogative and motherhood as girls' inevitable destiny, and placing sole blame on girls for unintended pregnancies. By analysing their visual and multimodal rhetoric, the article reveals how these films worked to maintain gendered sexual norms at a time that is commonly associated with their unravelling.
This essay focuses on the medium of the stereograph in the work of Alfred A. Hart, a prolific but overlooked photographer who documented the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad in the United States from 1865 to 1869 in nearly 400 stereographs. While a great number of studies on Hart's contemporaries have focused on frontier photography in its two-dimensional presentation, far fewer have expressly considered these photographs in three dimensions. By examining the work of Hart, I argue that the stereograph introduced a new pictorial practice in photography developed around the mechanism of binocular vision. By producing the illusion of depth optically, rather than linearly, stereoscopic illusionism redirected compositional emphasis away from the vanishing point and, instead, to features of the foreground and margins of the image. In this essay, I consider the way Hart deployed these compositional strategies in his photographs of the railroad and the construction of its tunnels. The specifically stereoscopic configuration of pictorial space, I argue, encouraged formal experimentation in photography that rejected traditional landscape depiction in favour of pronounced optical effects. Rather than imagine the West as a picturesque ideal, Hart's stereographs presented it, instead, as an optical curiosity that was strange and unfamiliar.
This article examines how Canberra's museums engage with biodiversity, contemporary art, and political discourse through curatorial choices and exhibition design that shape cultural and ecological narratives. It adopts a framework informed by visual philology - understood as the close reading of display approaches as interpretive and meaning-making acts - to investigate how institutional stories are constructed and conveyed. Focusing on the National Museum of Australia (NMA), the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), and the Canberra Museum and Gallery (CMAG), the study analyzes how curators employ spatial arrangements, object placement, and temporal sequencing to articulate relationships between nature, culture, and identity. Drawing from interdisciplinary methods in art history, curatorial studies, and the environmental humanities, it explores how museums mediate Indigenous concepts such as Country and Land, framing them not merely as symbolic or aesthetic elements, but as political signifiers of sovereignty and resilience. Rather than treating artworks solely as images, the article considers how exhibition practices operate across material, spatial, and textual registers - making curatorial choices central to institutional knowledge production. It also reflects on how the juxtaposition of colonial and contemporary works can either reinforce or complicate linear narratives of progress. By engaging with display practices, archival materials, and exhibition design, the article positions Canberra's museums as critical spaces where disciplinary boundaries are blurred, Indigenous and Western epistemologies intersect, and institutional authority is made visible. These dynamics are not only represented - they are enacted through the spatial and temporal structuring of exhibitions, shaping public understanding of ecological relationships and collective memory.
As an early theorist of cyberfeminism - a discourse coalescing in the late 1980s and early 1990s around feminist reexaminations of information and communication technologies - Canadian artist Nancy Paterson's practice took shape within and against the commercialization of the internet, a situation she addressed explicitly in her scholarly work in information policy studies toward the end of her life. This paper analyzes her 1990s networked installation Stock Market Skirt as shaped by Paterson's understanding of the political commitments and possibilities of cyberfeminism, set against an archetypical image of the "cyberfemme": seductive, uncanny, and doll-like, though technologically adept and adaptable. Stock Market Skirt links the movements of a motorized dress with real-time stock data mined from financial websites, critiquing feminism's altered relationship to contemporary capitalism. The work manifests a feminized "flexible personality," an image of neoliberalism's decentralization of power from the state to the network, presenting it as the flip side of cyberfeminism's attempt to liberate subjectivity from static conceptions of identity. In this way, Stock Market Skirt connects flows of capital with attributes of gender performance, prefiguring algorithmic, image-based reinforcement of contemporary gender ideals, effects of the tech industry's efficiency in linking behavioral data to ad targeting.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the talented British photographers Dora and Agnes Bulwer travelled to sites of historical significance throughout Italy. Their photographs reveal their fascination with the Italian countryside, its people, and the remains of Italy's past. As members of the British and American Archaeological Society of Rome and friends of leading archaeologists Rodolfo Lanciani and Thomas Ashby, the sisters photographed landscapes, towns, archaeological remains, and historic monuments. Many of these sites have since been irrevocably transformed, primarily due to development in post-unitarian Italy. As such, the photographs are now significant cultural, environmental, and archaeological heritage records. This article investigates the working relationship between Ashby, Lanciani, and the Bulwer sisters (particularly Dora), and demonstrates the high regard these prominent archaeologists had for the sisters and their photographs. It argues that Dora and Agnes intended to create visual documentary records of Italy's urban, rural, and archaeological landscapes, and highlights the vital photographic fieldwork conducted by women in Italy during the Victorian era. The article addresses the fact that, despite Dora and Agnes' important visual contribution to archaeological and cultural landscape studies in post-unitarian Italy, their photographs have been largely, and unjustly, underexplored by subsequent archaeologists and cultural landscape historians.
This research examines a set of pre-existing digital models of the Barcelona Pavilion, acknowledging their geometric variations. Through a multi-stage homogenisation process, the models are systematically aligned, revealing persistent interpretive differences despite increasing geometric conformity. The study aims to challenge the primacy of geometric accuracy, arguing that architecturally significant knowledge can be derived from analysing variations within a set of ostensibly inaccurate models. This exploratory approach aims to highlight digital models of existing buildings as interpretive representations with latent value beyond mere transcriptions of built reality.
Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 My translation. See the original in Michele Smargiassi, “Il selfie di Salgado: ‘Non sarò l'ultimo fotografo’.” La Repubblica (2023, 31 March). https://www.repubblica.it/venerdi/2023/03/31/news/sebastiao_salgado_fotografo_mostra_milano_foresta_amazzonica-394025881/ (accessed May 3, 2023).2 Letzte Generation (Last Generation) was established in Germany in 2021 and has become known in Europe for its controversial forms of protest, such as road blockades and symbolic attacks (without permanent damage) against popular artworks and historical buildings. Moreover, together with Ende Gelände, Extinction Rebellion, and Fridays for Future, among other activist groups, Last Generation protested against expanding an open lignite mine in the German village of Lützerath in January 2023.3 For a recent study on the entanglement of photography and global extractive capitalism, see Siobhan Angus’s research and her forthcoming book Camera Geologica (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024).4 Jennifer Tucker’s ongoing project “Dangerous Exposures: Photography, Waste and the Chemical Revolution in Victorian Britain” similarly argues for the use of early photography as evidence in environmental science and pollution reform.Additional informationNotes on contributorsNoemi QuagliatiNOEMI QUAGLIATI, PhD, is a lecturer in history of art and photography at the Amerika-Institut of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and a visiting postdoctoral scholar at Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. Noemi is also a member of the Research Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Deutsches Museum, where she has collaborated on modernizing the museum’s historical aviation section by investigating the topic of aerial photography. noemi.quagliati@lmu.de
The article proposes a three-tier model for the analysis of cultural dynamics of the visual arts field, based on data extracted from cultural periodicals and art criticism. Originally developed on the case study of the visual arts scene in Croatia at the turn of the millennium, the model is flexible and can be applied to analyse the complexity of the art field in different (trans)national spaces and time periods. The article outlines the theoretical foundations of the model, developed at the intersection of (digital) art history, sociology of art, social network analysis and relational sociology, and gives a detailed description of the criteria that were used to define the network boundaries in the original research. The three-tier model foregrounds some of the central actors of the art field, such as cultural periodicals, art critics, artists and cultural institutions, who are approached using both quantitative and qualitative methods. It conceptualizes cultural periodicals and art critics that form part of their networks as sharing aesthetic and ideological values, and as producing specific cultural narratives within the structure of the scene. The analytic potential of the model is focused on determining the cohesiveness of different social circles present in an art scene, on identifying the changing cultural trends and narratives that permeate the field, and on revealing the contribution of different social circles to these network and cultural structures.
