Since the early days of the field, art and architectural historians have relied on image-based reproductions of our primary source material to do our work. And yet, Photography and digitization—the two main image-reproduction technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—do not duplicate their subjects uncritically. They have actively shaped our disciplines in sometimes overt, sometimes covert, ways. That said, photography and digitization are also different technologies from one another, and their use has been implemented fitfully and heterogeneously over time within the field. Art and architectural historians have thus not only become familiar with the process of embedding technologies into the humanities, we have also gathered hard-won, field-wide experience with the impact that their presence and obsolescence can have on our research processes over time. The story is not always one of success. We have often chosen to elide, ignore, or take for granted the ways that the socio-technical environments of these remediations have transformed the daily operations and rituals of our discipline. Because of this time-tested relationship, I wish to argue that art and architectural history offers the Digital Humanities approximately 115 years of experience with being attuned (or not attuned) to the impact of relying on technologically-mediated representations of the phenomenal world to perform humanities research. This type of scholarship, that is, one not directly reliant on primary sources but instead on remediations of those sources, is the fundamental, originary condition of the Digital Humanities.

See below for a Sutori recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Langmead during her talk.

This presentation will explore the unique ethical, creative, and epistemological potentials of explicitly placing art or design in a subservient role to other disciplinary agendas in research-based inquiry. Historical and contemporary examples from within and without the presenter’s experiences will animate this overview and dialogue on intentional asymmetry in arts-integrative collaborative relationships.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Hamilton during his talk.

This talk describes the discovery and significance of Etude (1967), a previously unknown work by media artist Nam June Paik identified by the author in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s recently-acquired Paik archive. Composed at Bell Labs, in collaboration with engineers, and written in an early version of FORTRAN, Etude stands as one of the earliest works of digital art—although it is not entirely clear whether Etude was, in fact, the “computer opera” that Paik mentions elsewhere in his writings, or another artwork altogether. By exploring Etude’s uncertain status, as well as the piece’s more conceptual indeterminacies—between image and code, analog and digital, and film and music—this paper demonstrates how such indefinite artifacts allow for a rethinking of the nature of the archive, cinema’s digital past, and film’s place in computational media.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Zinman during his talk.