Digital meets Culture

The masterpieces of the famous Flemish painter collected in an extraordinary example of digital Art.

Closer to Van Eyck: when high digital technology meets heritage

The past 14th January, KIK-IRPA, the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, presented “Further works by Jan Van Eyck”, the new version of “Closer to Van Eyck”, the online portal entirely dedicated to the prestigious painter of the 15th century.
The new version contains 200 new images of 10 additional works including the famous Arnolfini portrait and the Turin-Milan Hours. In addition, the high resolution image viewer is improved with new functions and better touch screen support.
The gallery is now available in open access for consultation, study, analysis and research and the images can be re used for educational and academic studies.
The masterpieces have been submitted to cutting-edge digitization techniques, thus collected in a single documentation of ultra-high-resolution scientific imagery available in open access.
All this was made possible by the implementation of the VERONA (Van Eyck Research in OpeN Access) project, lunched by the The Centre for the Study of the Flemish Primitives at KIK-IRPA in order to study the creative process of Jan van Eyck (c. 1390-1441) and the different hands involved in the paintings of his workshop by using the same scientific imaging techniques.
Main goal of the VERONA project are:
• to accomplish and stimulate new research on the painter Jan van Eyck
• to examine and document all the works with the same scientific imaging techniques: macrophotography (normal light, raking light, infrared and ultraviolet fluorescence), infrared reflectography and in some cases radiography.
• to add all this documentation to the website ‘Closer to Van Eyck’.
The documentation methods were enriched through a partnership with the University of Antwerp, whose researchers carried out innovative XRF scanning on works of art by Van Eyck in Belgian collections.
The digital portal will be a reference for comparative research on the work of Van Eyck. Researchers will be able to study for the first time the differences and similarities in the artist’s technique on the basis of the same comparative material.

VERONA incorporates the core mission of the KIK-IRPA: the inventory, scientific research, conservation and promotion of the artistic and cultural heritage of Belgium and in 2019 the project won the European Heritage Award / Europa Nostra Award in the category Research.

The Jan van Eyck digital gallery is an example of the extraordinary results that can be reached by the use of state-of-the-art equipment for the preservation and maintenance of the European cultural heritage but it is also a successful outcome of an active and dynamic collaboration between the museums of all Europe, which made possible to gather all the masterpieces of the prestigious painter in a unique virtual space available in open access to everybody with an interest in investigate and study this remarkable collection.

Visit the Van Eyck digital gallery

Save the dates! February 6-7, Brussels; February 20-21 Berlin

Sparkling February for Photoconsortium! We are all invited to join the final appointments of We Are#EuropeForCulture and Kaleidoscope projects!

Photoconsortium, REACH project Associate Partner, in the framework of its activity for the promotion of citizen engagement in culture and preservation of societal memory, is happy to share with the REACH community these glowing events which represent the final milestones of two main projects carried on by the consortium:
–PAST | PRESENT, participatory exhibition that will be hold in Brussels and will conclude the series of pop-up exhibition realized in the framework of the WeAre#EuropeForCulture project
–“New strategies for user engagement and digital heritage”, the final conference of the Fifties in Europe Kaleidoscope project, organized by SPK – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, REACH Partner.
Both event are excellent opportunity for learn about the value of digital cultural heritage for citizens, the history of the fifties and in the same time, to celebrate the richness of the European cultural heritage, its diversity and to empower citizens in a more participative approach to cultural heritage.
Read more about PAST | PRESENT final exhibition at: https://www.photoconsortium.net/europeforculture/final-event/
Read more about kaleidoscope final conference at: https://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/article/fifties-in-europe-kaleidoscope-final-conference/

A new cultural tourism

sargetia: 3D Reconstruction and augmented reality applied to history and archeology

sargetia.ro offers the possibility to visit and learn about Romanian cultural sites and historical monuments by the use of 3D technology and Virtual Reality.
The platform is part of a wide promotional campaign set up by virtual museums aiming to lunch a new type of cultural tourism characterized by the use of tablets and smartphones in place of manuals, guides and brochures.
Through the use of WebGL technology which is platform independent, Sargetia offers a 3D restoration of the Dacian fortresses, belonging to the UNESCO heritage : Băniţa, Blidaru, Căpâlna, Feţele Albe, Piatra Roşie and Sarmizegetusa Regia.
It also offers the possibility to discover the most famous statues of ancient Greece which are shown in the greatest world’s museums by a virtual visit to the “Statue Island”.
The “3D Reconstruction” process of scientific recovery is able to restore each building in its own scale representation in accordance with archaeologists’ plans.
A database from the Dacian and Roman Civilization Museum (MCDR) Deva was used to implement the program and the photos that appear are arbitrarily taken from the museum site.
Because the use of Android tablet and phone is widespread and affordable, sargetia chose to adapt the programme to this technology, even in front of a lower quality than the one granted by Microsoft technology.
The visitor is able to virtually move into areas built by man or nature and destroyed over time. In the same while he is taught about their past and history: indeed, for each important point, the system instantly delivers complete information, additional video and audio, helping to understand the exposed material and the selected environments.
He can directs the guide with a joystick and a “Quit” button and visit any place without prearranged routes; he can also enter into buildings or temples because they are all built in 3D and are not replaced by movies like it happens for games.
The use of the augmented reality applied to history and archeology is an effective way for increasing knowledge of the history and discover an ancient world that cannot be described by words. Visitors get in confidence with the environment and architecture of ancient times and they are no longer a mere viewer but actively participates in the action.
Visit sargetia.ro webpage

A winter school, a hub for students and early career artists working in the field of digital sound and image

Re/SpaceS: Regenerating Spaces through Sound

The call for applications to take part in the winter school “Re/SpaceS: Regenerating Spaces through Sound” is still open. The event is open to graduate students, artists, musicians, and videomaker. The opportunity to be selected for one of our reduced fee for the 10 best applications is also still open.

The new deadline is 20 January 2019.

The Re/Spaces winter school will be a hub for students and early career artists working in the field of digital sound and image, to gather reflections and practical suggestions about the development of site-specific and location-based installation and audiovisual works. The aim of the school is to help young creative people to develop their skills in working within a small team of peers, update them on the latest tools in sound and image elaboration, provide historical and theoretical background in the disciplines of contemporary music history, audiovisual analysis, visual communication and storytelling, digital process of audio and video files.

The event will consist of two teaching weeks, from 24 March to 3 April 2020, and it will consist of theoretical lessons and workshops throughout the day. During the winter school week, meetings will be organized with an artist who will offer new insights oh the project.

The aim of the school will be the realization of a short audiovisual product and possibly a site-specific installation to be presented at the end of the winter school, focused and inspired by the buildings and spaces of the University. The idea is to subject these spaces to a sort of creative re-imagination, showing how art can be used to transfigure, re-imagine and even to suggest how the present can be transformed and looks like. Together with an artist-in-residence that will mentor the students in this process, the winter school will bring their participants to become a driver for the future developments of space, and to bring new values to an existing location by re-imagining them through the gaze of the artistic transformation.

All the information for the application can be found at: https://re-spaces.unipv.it/call-for-applicant/.

The winter school is a joint program between two Departments of the University of Pavia (Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage and Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture – DICAr), with the collaboration of University of Turin’s CIRMA (http://www.cirma.unito.it/) and two artistic collectives: Medea Electronique (Greece – http://medeaelectronique.com/) and Kontejner (http://www.kontejner.org).

Beijing (China), 20 February - 29 March 2020

CAFAM Techne Triennial

CAFA Art Museum (CAFAM) is delighted to announce the opening of the inaugural edition of the CAFAM Techne Triennial, which takes place in Beijing from Feb 20 through March 29, 2020, and is curated by ZHANG Ga, CAFAM Consulting Curator and CAFA Distinguished Professor.

The triennial will feature more than 130 artists and collectives throughout the museum’s enormous space, the first part of the exhibition Topologies of the Real will bring together modernist icons such as John Cage and Marcel Duchamp as well as contemporaries like Hito Steyerl and Alex Da Corte.

The second part of exhibition Art in Motion: Masterpieces with and through Media, CAFAM will team up with ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany, together these exhibitions will present a comprehensive survey of global media art from the nineteenth century to present.

Participating artists include:

Topologies of the Real

Cory Arcangel, Micol Assaël, Tauba Auerbach, Ralf Baecker, Judith Barry, Joseph Beuys, Robert Breer, Chris Burden, Jim Campbell, Peter Campus, Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr, Alex Da Corte & Jayson Musson, Bruce Conner, Douglas Davis, DENG Yuejun, Marcel Duchamp & John Cage, Anna Dumitriu & Alex May, Valie Export, FENG Mengbo/冯梦波, Thomas Feuerstein, John Gerrard, Dan Graham, Laurent Grasso, Hans Haacke, HeHe (Heiko Hansen & Helen Evans), Jenny Holzer, HU Jieming/胡介鸣, Joan Jonas, JODI: Joan Heemskerk & Dirk Paesmans, Mike Kelley, Jon Kessler, Shigeko Kubota, Lynn Hershman Leeson, George Legrady, Olia Lialina, LIN Ke/林科, LIU Xiaodong/刘小东, Eva & Franco Mattes, Lawrence Malstaf, Haroon Mirza, Tatsuo Miyajima, Carsten Nicolai, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, W. Bradford Paley, Philippe Parreno, Paul Pfeiffer, Fito Segrera, SHEN Xin/沈莘, Michael Snow, Wolfgang Staehle, Hito Steyerl, Stan Vanderbeek, Steina & Woody Vasulka, Addie Wagenknecht, WANG Gongxin王功新, WANG Yuyang/王郁洋, Peter Weibel, WGBH, Robert Wilson, Vivian XU, XU Wenkai/徐⽂恺, YAN Lei/颜磊, ZHANG Peili/张培⼒, ZHOU Xiaohu/周啸虎, Marina Zurkow

Art in Motion: Masterpieces with and through media

Bertolt Brecht, Vladimir Bonačić, Lucien Bull, Luis Buñuel, Mary Ellen Bute, Thaddeus Cahill, Waldemar Cordeiro, Larry Cuba, Salvador Dali, Georges Demenÿ, Marcel Duchamp, Charles Eames, Ray Eames, Harold Eugene Edgerton, Masaki Fujihata, Kiyoshi Furukawa, Ivan Ladislav Galeta, Arthur Ganson, Frank Gillette, Jean-Luc Godard, Mona Hatoum, Susan Hiller, Dieter Jung, Eduardo Kac, Yoichiro Kawaguchi , Michael Klier, Billy Klüver, Kenneth C. Knowlton, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Lynn Hershman Leeson, David Link, Manu Luksch, Len Lye, Ernst Mach, Étienne-Jules Marey, Julie Martin, Wolfgang Münch, László Moholy-Nagy, Nam June Paik, Sergio Prego, Man Ray, Martin Reinhart, Józef Robakowski, Ulrike Rosenbach, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Ira Schneider, Nicolas Schöffer, Carlota Fay Schoolman, Buky Schwartz , Lillian Schwartz, Richard Serra, Paul Sermon, Claude Shannon, Jeffrey Shaw, Léon Theremin, Thomas Tode, Stan VanDerBeek, Peter Weibel, Virgil Widrich, Katsuhiro Yamagucchi.

Website and exhibition page: https://www.cafamuseum.org/en/exhibit/newsdetail/2535

Lyon (France), 25-28 August 2020

TPDL 2020 International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries

TPDL and all related events are transformed in a virtual gathering.

Digital libraries and repositories store, manage, represent and disseminate rich and heterogeneous data that are often of enormous cultural, scientific, educational, artistic, and social value. Serving as digital ecosystems for empowering researchers and practitioners they provide unparalleled opportunities for novel knowledge extraction and discovery. New applications rise novel challenges that can only be addressed in an interdisciplinary community of researchers and practioners from various disciplines such as Digital Humanities, Information Sciences and others. TPDL 2020 attempts to facilitate establishing connections and convergences between these communities that could benefit from (and contribute to) the ecosystems offered by digital libraries and repositories. To become especially useful to the diverse research and practitioner communities, digital libraries need to consider special needs and requirements for effective data utilization, management and exploitation.

TPDL 2020 will be co-located with

– 24th European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems

– 16th EDA days on Business Intelligence & Big Data

—————————————————————————-

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Proposals are welcome in the following categories:

Full papers presenting original work (14 pages incl. references, LNCS format)
Short papers presenting original work (8 pages incl. references, LNCS format)
Posters and Demos (4 pages incl. references, LNCS format)
Panels (1 page, short informal description)
Tutorials and Hands-on sessions (1 page, short informal description)
Doctoral Consortium papers
Workshops

The proceedings will be published by Springer-Verlag in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS, ISSN 0302-9743) series.

Websites:

http://eric.univ-lyon2.fr/tpdl2020/

http://eric.univ-lyon2.fr/adbis-tpdl-eda-2020/satellite-events/workshops/

Corfu (Greece), 25-27 September 2020

SEEDA-CECNSM 2020

The 5th South-East Europe Design Automation, Computer Engineering, Computer Networks and Social Media Conference (SEEDA-CECNSM 2020), in its 5th year, will provide an insight into the unique world stemming from the interaction between the fields of computer engineering, networks and Design Automation.

SEEDA-CECNSM 2020 will provide an international technical forum for experts from the engineering industry and academia to exchange ideas, innovations, and present results of on-going research in the most state-of-the-art areas.

After four successful conferences starting from Kastoria (2016, 2017, 2018), and then Piraeus (2019), the SEEDA-CECNSM conference series has been consolidated as a reference event in order to discuss about the newest advances in the field.

SEEDA-CECNSM 2020 will be technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society and all papers will be indexed by IEEE Xplore.

Website: http://hilab.di.ionio.gr/seeda2020/

Calls for papers and special sessions are currently open.

CALL FOR SPECIAL SESSION PROPOSALS – Deadline: *February 28, 2020*

http://hilab.di.ionio.gr/seeda2020/index.php/special-sessions/

The SEEDA-CECNSM 2020 technical program will highlight a series of Special Sessions to complement the regular program with new or emerging topics of particular interest to topics of SEEDA-CECNSM community.

Inquiries Special Session Chair at the following address: Themistoklis Exarchos <exarchos@ionio.gr>.

CALL FOR PAPERS – Deadline: *April 24, 2020*

http://hilab.di.ionio.gr/seeda2020/index.php/conference/call-for-papers/

Topics of interest include various categories, such as but not limited to:

Design Automation (DA)
Computer networks and Communications
Social media and E-technologies
Social networks

More details on the topics are available here: http://hilab.di.ionio.gr/seeda2020/index.php/submissions/

* GENERAL CHAIRS:
Phivos Mylonas, Ionian University
Michael Dossis, University of Western Macedonia
Christos Douligeris, University of Piraeus

* CONTACT: hilab (at) ionio.gr

a call for filmmakers to inform the 10th anniversary edition of the renowned festival

Edinburgh Short Film Festival now open for entry!

The 10th Anniversary edition of the ESFF opens for applications, and will show up with more short film screenings in Edinburgh, including International Film Festival showcases, trophies, cash prizes and awards!

We’re also excited to be programming showcases of our best films for our 2020 partners:

Adriatic Film Festival
Stop Motion Montreal
Firenze FilmCorti
Sardinia Film Festival
Balkans Beyond Borders Film Festival
and Manipulate Theatre & Animation Festival!

Max Length 25 minutes, international films welcomed, all genres eligible.

Deadline 3 february 2020.

Open for entries online:

https://www.edinburghshortfilmfestival.com/call-for-entries-filmmakers/

Dallas (USA), 10 November 2019 - 22 March 2020

Exhibition in Dallas “speechless: different by design”

Steven and William Ladd, Scroll Space (2019), from DMA website

Explore the many ways in which we connect to the world around us through our senses in speechless: different by design, an exhibition of multisensory, interactive, and immersive experiences for visitors of all backgrounds and abilities. Created in collaboration with designers, scholars, and scientists, speechless presents unique opportunities for discovering new perspectives through communications beyond speech and words.
Co-organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and the High Museum of Art, speechless: different by design showcases site-specific installations and new commissions by six leading and emerging international designers and design teams—Ini Archibong, Matt Checkowski, Misha Kahn, Steven and William Ladd, Laurie Haycock Makela, and Yuri Suzuki. Their new works will create participatory environments in which senses are merged or substituted for one another—for instance, sound will become visible and language will become tactile—so that visitors can engage with their surroundings in new and unconventional ways.

Website: https://dma.org/speechless

Matt Checkowski, Glyph (2019), from DMA website

About the DMA Dallas Museum of Art
Established in 1903, the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) is among the 10 largest art museums in the country and is distinguished by its commitment to research, innovation and public engagement. At the heart of the Museum and its programs is its global collection, which encompasses more than 24,000 works and spans 5,000 years of history, representing a full range of world cultures. Located in the nation’s largest arts district, the Museum acts as a catalyst for community creativity, engaging people of all ages and backgrounds with a diverse spectrum of programming, from exhibitions and lectures to concerts, literary events, and dramatic and dance presentations.