Visual Arts

What Is at Stake at the Interface? Agents of Mediation in Digital Curation
In considering the evolving role of digital curation this chapter questions the level of access provided by museum interfaces that replicate gallery spaces through 3D rendered environments and geo-location maps. Although online collections and content might give greater access to content and material by replicating these spaces without context and clarification we arguably risk reiterating the problematic histories of these spaces and the colonial projects of the collections within them. This observation informs a critical consideration of the stakes of replicating examples of historical collections with colonial histories online and examines how digital curation might enable agency and engagement through qualitative access enabled by interfacial technologies.

RE:Inventing the Museum: Co-Creation in Digital Space
The digitisation of museum collections since the1990s while aimed at preservation has alsopresented opportunities for audience engagementand outreach. Putting digital objects ‘online’ is often assumed to make museums more accessible however digital collections often replicate the conceptual and spatial organisation of museums relying on prior knowledge and assumed perspectives in ways that can prohibit access. This chapter discusses the use of co-creative methods of digital production aimed at increasing the physical and digital accessibility of the museum. Discussing a project developed with the Young V&A artists young people and youth workers we highlight the potential for using arts-led methods and web-based tools to collectively reimagine the digital museum experience. The collaborative process and digital technologies employed further informed the reinvention of the physical site through the active involvement of the young participants and long-lasting collaborations between the museum and the youth organisations.

Global Digital Museum Narratives: Representation, Authorship, and Audiences
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of online platforms transforming how we communicate and share stories globally. Museums forced to close during this period shifted their activities online making digital resources and exhibitions more relevant to everyone. Research has shown a significant shift towards digital initiatives in museums during the pandemic but also has questioned their preparedness and the degree of innovation of their digital initiatives. Concurrently the pandemic resurfaced social and geopolitical inequalities exemplified by the global response to George Floyd's murder and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. These events raise important questions about the role of museums and their online presence in addressing societal challenges. What stories are museums presenting? Where do these stories originate and from what perspectives are they told? Who are their intended audiences? This chapter adopts digital narratology—a theory that studies digital narratives and storytelling—to interrogate the effectiveness of museums digital resources to truly support social justice.

Zombie Canon: Art Datasets, Generative AI, and the Reanimation of the Western Canon of Art
Art images are regularly used in computer vision research and generative AI applications. Each art dataset presents a particular point of view that both defines and delimits what art is and this point of view often happens to closely align with the traditional western canon of art. In this chapter I define art data in the context of machine learning and then analyze the history and make-up of one popular online art image collection-turned-dataset WikiArt. I then turn to a discussion of an implied dataset of the popular text-to-image generator DALL-E 2. I argue that art datasets reanimate the western concept of style by instrumentalizing it in such a manner. This zombie canon of art is then deployed in the world in ways that may go unnoticed infecting not only how we see art but how it is defined and reproduced.

Critical Digital Art History
Interface and Data Politics in the Post-Digital Era
Digital Art History has often aligned itself with the practical concerns of digital technology and the responsibilities of art institutions and associated institutional roles such as collection managers information specialists curators and conservators. This emphasis on practicalities and implementation while undeniably important has often meant that there is little room for critical examination of the broader implications of digital technology and computational methodologies in art history.
This anthology seeks to address the dearth of critical reflection by approaching the use of digital technology in art history from a theoretical perspective and critically assessing specific case study examples. This book also considers the political dimensions associated with the large-scale digitization and the application of digital tools within museums and collection management.
A long-standing concern of the field—and also a major focal point of this book—is museum and collecting practices in the digital era. While there is a certain degree of continuity in the field there are some important shifts and changes too. One of the key changes is the widespread uptake of artificial intelligence tools and an increased attention to both the broader historical and societal aspects of the use of digital tools within museums and collection management.

Dissens and Sensibility
Why Art Matters
An introduction to pedagogy of dissensus.
A pedagogy of dissensus is informed by the dissensual characteristics of art. The book includes both theoretical foundations and examples of how the theory is unfolded in different contexts ranging from educational practice to arts-based research. Motivated by the author’s long-held interest in the role of art in society in general and education in particular it is a vital new contribution to arts-based approaches to education.
Referencing philosophers and theorists such as Jacques Rancière Gert Biesta Dennis Atkinson and Helga Eng Lisbet Skregelid demonstrates why art matters because of its ability to create necessary disturbance and resistance in education. In this book she argues that art has something to offer education because it challenges existing norms has no definitive answers and contributes to new ways of seeing both oneself others and one’s surroundings. Placing art at the center and enabling dissensus in education can contribute as a contrast to the dominating policy led by economic ambition and competition.

Heart to Heart: Baseera Khan in Conversation with Yasmine K. Kasem
A excerpt from a long form conversation between artists Baseera Khan and Yasmine K. Kasem about Baseera's inspiration and concept behind their poster “Muslim = America”. In this conversation Khan and Kasem discuss their experiences as American muslims the aftermath of 9/11 the lead up before and contextualizing islamophobia through Edward Said's writings.

Sa'dia Rehman's Queer Cartographies: Convivial Opacities
The work of queer Muslim visual artist Sa'dia Rehman (she/they) animates a queer call for no borders. These queer cartographic logics are clear in projects like Mihrab (2019) and The Land of Promise (2020). Through queer aesthetic strategies such as conviviality and opacity Rehman gathers traces as a brown visual commons that cultivates unforeseen affiliations. Their works of art are portals into queer theory committed to dismantling borders to prompting social re-ordering and to ungovernability. As a result she frustrates regulatory logics undergirding visuality announcing the possibility of another kind of visuality altogether.