Digital meets Culture

exhibition "ecstasy" will be on show from 26th November in the platform PARALLEL

Online exhibition of digital sculptures by Hande Sekerciler at JD Malat Gallery

JD Malat Gallery is proud to present ecstasy, a solo exhibition by leading Turkish sculptor Hande Sekerciler.

From the 26th of November until the 1st of January, ecstasy will bring together a selection of three-dimensional digital sculptures to explore the theme of the human ‘self’ as well as present a new mode of engagement with contemporary sculpture.
This new series of three-dimensional digital sculptures will be presented on JD Malat Gallery’s online exhibition platform, PARALLEL: https://jdmalat.com/parallel/

By situating Sekerciler’s sculptures in a virtual exhibition space, JD Malat Gallery seeks to highlight the progressive nature of Sekerciler’s practice and aims to underline her role as a protagonist in the field of contemporary sculpture and digital art.

Hande’s selected works on JD Malat Gallery: https://jdmalat.com/artists/hande-sekerciler/

While Sekerciler’s sculptures share similarities with Hellenistic and Renaissance sculpture, such as the nude form, as well as smoothed and patinated surfaces, Sekerciler does not focus on the notion of the ‘ideal’ that was extensively explored during these periods. The figures in ecstasy reject clothing and even hair to give little insight into a specific identity. This rejection of identifiable materials and form serve to free the sculptural figures from gendered and societal labels, urging the viewer to contemplate the body’s existence as independent from societal structures. Through a method of what Sekerciler calls, ‘purification’, ecstasy presents figures at ‘peace with their sexuality and orientation who embrace their existence’. Thus, this new body of work presents an important axis for reflection of the human ‘self’ in a contemporary age.

The figures in ecstasy represent Sekerciler’s search for ways of incorporating digital technology into traditional arts. To create the digital sculptures, Sekerciler undertakes a complex process that involves creating sketches on an ipad and turning this into three-dimensional models by using the sculpting software ZBrush. Sekerciler then uses Substance Painter to achieve different digital surface textures, such as ‘virtual patina’. These digital models become a step in Sekerciler’s process of creating bronze sculptures in real life. Using the digital models for reference, Sekerciler develops wax models which are then used to prepare high temperature resistant molds for casting bronze. After a process of pouring, cooling and ‘levelling’, the bronze sculptures are then completed with a unique chemical patina, developed by Sekerciler herself.

The digital sculptures in ecstasy have come to life through Sekerciler’s collaboration with GarageAtlas, a creative XR Studio that has been instrumental in developing the virtual exhibition space. The decision to only showcase the digital sculptures in a virtual exhibition space, rather than the bronze sculptures in an IRL exhibition demonstrates the artistic merit of the digital preparatory process and highlights the progressive and technologically advanced nature of Sekerciler’s practice.

By displaying digital sculptures exclusively in an online exhibition space, ecstasy presents a new avenue for contemplating the modes of engagement with sculpture. For centuries sculpture has been viewed in real life as part of architecture, as an art object in museums and galleries or as an object of worship. Against the backdrop of the current pandemic and with in-person engagement becoming increasingly difficult, Sekerciler seeks to develop digital sculpture and online viewing experiences in an effort to engage her international audience no matter where they are. In doing so, ecstasy challenges traditional methods of viewing sculpture and in turn highlights the inclusive nature of virtual viewing experiences. Therefore, ecstasy presents a new trajectory in the historiography of sculpture, technology and the digital arts.

ecstasy resonates with the contemporary age and highlights the innovative nature of Sekerciler’s work, demonstrating why her work continues to fascinate a global audience. Sekerciler has exhibited internationally in notable collections, which include Elgiz Museum, Istanbul, Turkey, and the Artist Causa Gallery, Thessaloniki, Greece. She was also awarded artist residencies including Artist Alliance International, New York, Unlimited, New York and 18th Street, Los Angeles. As co-founder of Piskel New Media Residency, in collaboration with Turkiye Bilisim Vakfi, and as director and curator of Augmented Istanbul, Sekerciler continues to use her expertise in new technologies and sculpture to develop new platforms of engagement.

JD Malat Art Gallery – website: https://jdmalat.com/

online, 3-5 December 2020

[Webinar] Art, AI and Everything Else

For over two decades, Art Center Nabi in Seoul has been committed to exploring the role of the arts and new technologies to gain new insight in human possibilities and addressing social problems. Nabi has invited artists to develop projects that use technology to overcome social divisions, counter to racial violence, debunk stereotypes, as well as nurture emotional connectedness, cultural engagement, political participation. In general, it has promoted the role of the arts in enhancing social solidarity and operated on the assumption that it can improve the quality of life.

In celebration of two decades of practice Nabi will host a series of web-based seminars.

3 web-based symposia spread over 3 days 3 – 5 December 2020

More info and registration link: http://www.nabi.or.kr/en/page/board_view.php?brd_idx=1084&brd_id=project

Session 1.
Art, Technology and the Cosmos
3 Dec 2020 (Thu) 18:00 ~ 19:30 (KST) / 10:00 ~ 11:30 (CET)

A pan-demic is a good time to evoke the pan-demos. Mobility has become a central feature of contemporary society. Art has been used as an advocate for flow, interaction and exchange, as well as a way of opposing disruption, exploitation and inequality. In this first seminar we throw open the scale of enquiry and experimentation. Art is a technology, and Cosmos is the space-time of everything. However, an ancient definition of cosmos refers to the activity of making a space-time attractive for the Other. The recent developments in contemporary art have been directed towards removing political boundaries and enhancing sociality. When schedules, plans, and models for organizing our ‘liquid life’ are on pause, space-time becomes an object of anxiety. This first session will be surveying the history of technology and how it brings us to the point that we find ourselves. We will zoom out to the widest questions and zoom in to specific examples from recent contemporary practices in art and technology. We will explore the possibilities for critique, and the possibility for art to stimulate sociality and solidarity in an era of masks and the fear of contagion that too easily becomes fear of community. How will artists conduct face-to-face encounters and operate skin-to-skin exchanges? Is a virtual public sphere and life on Zoom enough?

Session 2.
The poverty of philosophy after AI
4 Dec 2020 (Fri) 18:00 ~ 19:30 (KST) / 10:00 ~ 11:30 (CET)

In 2008 Chris Anderson declared that the data deluge had brought about the end of theory. The speed of computation had not only marginalised but eliminated a model of thinking that involved qualitative evaluation. How do we reimagine the role of thinking in action? Is there action without thinking? Has thinking been superseded by technologies of capture, storage and processing? AI and algorithms have been internalised as a normal feature of everyday life. Their banality eludes our attention while summoning deep anxieties. Do we have a vocabulary and conceptual understanding that can keep pace with this change? In this seminar we explore the disjunction between technological advances, modes of thought and models of governance. We question the belatedness of philosophy’s grasp on technology and the consequences of the differential speeds, places and temporalities where technology, thought and politics operate.

Session 3.
Humanizing the Machine/ Mechanizing the Human
5 Dec 2020 (Sat) 14:00 ~ 15:30 (KST) / 06:00 ~ 07:30 (CET)

Tools have always been part of how we define human ‘nature’. Our everyday use can make them feel like parts of our bodies. In habitual use there is constant feedback between us and them. With time and use the border between body and tool dissolves. Now tools also appear as models, but all models, for good or ill, fail us. The dominant understanding of AI flips between two models: either we maintain mastery over the tool, or the technology acquires sufficient agency to consume its master. This seminar goes beyond this dominant paradigm to consider a more fundamental question: what is the intelligence in technology? How do we align our social values and human desires with the dynamism of tools that also remake ‘us’ in the process of using them? If we go beyond the dichotomy between AI as engine of utopia and AI as corporate and exploitative logic, can we also imagine a form of AI that has no utility, one that is not designed according to a service function? Would this perspective allow us to consider ecological modes of intelligence not confined to the human mind, but distributed across and constituted by urban, natural and technological environments?

enabling better collaboration between Universities and Cultural Heritage Institutions to test participative approaches engaging citizens

CitizenHeritage, citizen science and participation in cultural heritage

CitizenHeritage, funded within the Erasmus+ programme of European Commission, takes the Citizen Science approach to the world of cultural heritage, where the digital realm creates new opportunities to reach out to broader audiences and facilitate community building.

The project encourages Citizen Science in cultural heritage through the application of crowdsourcing and co-creation tools leveraging open digital collections of European heritage. CitizenHeritage includes three universities (KU Leuven, National Technical University of Athens and Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam), two Europeana domain aggregators (Photoconsortium and European Fashion Heritage Association) and one specialized SME (Web2Learn).

image courtesy Digital Humanities Lab – University of Basel

The project will deliver a full cycle of Citizen Science activities across two years (2021-2023), that will allow citizens to contribute both on a short and middle to long-term period to participate in higher education and scientific open access outputs. The activities will be coordinated by the universities through their scientific networks and integrated with the university training of students.

These events are planned online for 2021 but hopefully in physical venues later, if that will be possible according to the development of covid-19 situation in Europe. The events are realized in collaboration with a network of European partners, and comprise:

workshops to enable citizen participation and citizen science activities with digital cultural heritage collections
seminars and outreach events to disseminate the project’s methodology, resources, tools and results and enable further replication and uptake by others, thus multiplying the project’s impactto a larger community of stakeholders

Discover more about the project and events: https://www.citizenheritage.eu/

Sign up to the CitizenHeritage newletter to stay in contact: https://www.citizenheritage.eu/contact/

call to action for experts and culture lovers to add descriptive tags to digital collections about Chinese heritage in Europeana

PAGODE’s crowdsourcing campaign: “Scenes and People from China”

PAGODE is a project about Chinese heritage in Europeana. The Europeana portal gives access to about 60 million digital cultural heritage items of all sort, from thousands of cultural heritage institutions throughout Europe. Rich and descriptive information to be associated to the images is vital for making this digital cultural heritage meaningful and searchable by users.

In addition to offering in Europeana a wealth of new cultural content, digitized at the highest level of quality, witnessing the links between Europe and Cina caross century, PAGODE has the objective to improve the information available on Europeana from other Chinese-related collections. To do this, the project recently launched a crowdsourcing campaign that allows researchers, students and culture lovers join the effort of annotating and curating photographic materials about Chinese culture that are currently published in Europeana.

PAGODE’s crowdsourcing campaign is accessible here:https://crowdheritage.eu/en/china

By using a very intuitive crowdsourcing platform, anyone can look at selected heritage photographs from Europeana and add descriptive tags to identify places, historic periods, pictorial styles or photographic qualities (contrast, landscape, portrait, perspective…). The annotations will then be fed back by PAGODE to Europeana to improve the information available.

The PAGODE crowdsourcing campaign is entitled “Scenes and People from China”, currently comprising two volumes of images that offer a glimpse of life in China throughout the 20th century as well as portraits featuring people with Chinese roots or ancestors.

a new thematic collection dedicated to the stories of the 20th century is published on Europeana portal, with interesting stories and digital cultural heritage content

Europeana XX: Century of Change celebrates today a great milestone!

img.: the Europeana XX Thematic Collection in Europeana.

EU funded Europeana XX: Century of Change project celebrates today the launch of a new Europeana Thematic Collection: a dedicated area in the Europeana portal to showcase special cultural heritage collections and compelling stories about the 20th century and its social, political and economical changes – as documented in photographs, videos, paintings and files, all carefully selected by the Europeana XX Editorial Team.

The project was kicked off in March with the aims of enriching Europeana with new, high quality and reusable collections to depict the histories from our recent past, and of adding new user features for better engagement with Europeana’s online collections. Among the other partners, the consortium includes five Europeana aggregators who bring into the project cultural heritage materials from all over Europe.

The beta version of the page is planned to grow and expand in the next months, as the project partners continue their work, offering more galleries, virtual exhibitions, new data, and more stories!

Europeana XX Thematic Collection: https://www.europeana.eu/en/highlights-from-the-20th-century

The project Europeana XX is co-financed by the European Union in the framework of CEF Connecting Europe Facility Programme under GA n. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2019/1932087.

16-20 November 2020

The European Cinema Night, to celebrate the richness of the European film culture

The third edition of the European Cinema Night was organized by Creative Europe MEDIA in collaboration with Europa Cinemas from 16th to 20th November.

Over 70 Europa Cinemas members across Europe are taking part in this unique outreach event which aims to bring Europe closer to citizens and celebrate together the richness of European film culture.

This year’s edition, due to the current crisis, includes both physical screenings at the cinemas, and virtual screenings via online platforms, if the cinema is currently closed.

The European Cinema Night is part of the European Commission “going local” communication campaign which aims to bringing EU policies closer to citizens’ everyday lives, showing how European policy is linked to their lives and how, by attending a locally-grounded event, they can be part of a globally-connected experience across Europe.
In this case, the ECN aims to strengthen their shared European identity rooted in their cultural diversity and values by involving and connecting cinemagoers in many cities across Europe.

At the same time it is a great opportunity to celebrate the richness and cultural diversity of European cinema and raise public awareness of how MEDIA supports Europe’s film industry and culture.

During the European Cinema Night, each cinema participating will choose and screen a European non national MEDIA-supported film, of course with free admission, and create a debate around the movie and the European Commission’s support for the film.

To have more information and know the European Cinema Night film theatres, here the link.

online event, 7-10 Decemeber 2020

CIDOC 2020 – Digital Transformation in Cultural Heritage Institutions

The CIDOC Conference 2020 in will address an important societal theme that cannot be ignored nowadays: digital transformation in cultural heritage institutions. The use of digital technology, though marginal at first, has gradually reshaped documentation practices and transformed almost all aspects of museum work, sometimes even pushing institutions to deviate from traditional conceptions of what their roles should be.

The web conference, organized by the Museum of Art and History of the City of Geneva, will take place from December 7 to 10, 2020.

Virtual participation in the conference is free of charge. However, registration is required in order to have access to the online sessions. Registration is now open.

Conference website: https://cidoc.mahgeneve.news/en/home/

The CIDC 2020 is organized by the Museum of Art and History of the City of Geneva

Inaugurated in 1910, the Museum of Art and History of the City of Geneva is one of the three largest museums in Switzerland and the only one with such a wide range of collections. The result of the union of several regional museums and donations from collectors, foundations and philanthropic citizens, the richness of its collections is further enhanced by the presence of some major works and a number of unique series, making it an institution of international standing. Paintings, sculptures, prints and historical objects bear witness to the multiple facets of the evolution of art and daily life over several millennia.

www.mah-geneve.ch
www.ville-geneve.ch/themes/culture/

Contact: CIDOC2020@ville-ge.ch

Lisbon, 22-23 April 2021

Art, Museums and Digital Cultures

The International Conference on Art, Museums and Digital Cultures will bring together different scientific and creative perspectives on the crossovers between information technologies and the arts. How are museums, curators and the artists themselves responding to the opportunities, but also the risks, of the so-called “digital transformation”?

Deadline for abstract submission: 21 December 2020

Conference website: https://museumdigitalcultures.weebly.com/

Recognising the complexity and plurality of digital cultures, the conference will discuss recent or ongoing research works in different geographies and cultural contexts.
We invite scholars, independent researchers, digital media specialists, curators and artists to submit proposals for a 15-minute in-person or online presentation, focusing on one or more of the following topics:

– Digital Art and Museums: preservation, documentation and exhibition
– Historiography of New Media Art
– Digitisation of contemporary art collections and archives
– The presence of art museums on the web: institutional representations and narratives
– Networked artistic and curatorial practices
– Derivative artworks and digital cultures
– Virtual museums and online exhibitions
– Contemporary art and digital literacy
– Politics of online mediation
– Digital technologies, accessibility and inclusion in art museums
– Algorithms and artificial intelligence in artistic and museological projects
– Architecture for digital art – museums, galleries and alternative spaces
– Hybrid realities: artistic interfaces and spatial overlapping
– Art, science and technology: new objects, new relations and new issues

How to submit a paper
Languages: English (UK spelling) or Portuguese*
First phase – abstracts for 15-minute presentations: title of the paper; abstract (350-500 words); 5 keywords; conference topic(s) to be addressed; presentation format (in-person or online); author’s affiliation; e-mail address and short biography (100-150 words).
File format: PDF, max. 3 pages or 2.00 MB
Second phase – full papers for publication: the detailed instructions will be sent directly to the authors of the proposals selected during the first phase.
All proposals must be submitted by email to: museumdigitalcultures@gmail.com

* The conference will be mostly in English and there will be no simultaneous translation into other languages. The second day’s programme may, however, include some parallel sessions in Portuguese.

Publication
The selected papers will be included in an edited e-book, to be published in 2021 by the Institute of Art History, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, in cooperation with maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon.

Organisation

maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology and Institute of Art History, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. Partner institution: Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa.

UNCHARTED published the first outputs of its investigation: 5 deliverables are now available for consultation and free download

Work package 1 of the UNCHARTED project, leaded by the University of Barcelona, is devoted to the analysis of the configuration of the values of culture.
It carries out a first analysis about how the values of culture in Europe are constructed examining the influence of a series of circumstances and key factors in shaping these values.
The research conducted so far, which involved 7 members of the UNCHARTED Consortium, have produced the following reports:

D1.1 Analysis of the influence of gender and rising diversity in the configuration of the values of culture.
The report has a double purpose. Firstly, it seeks to identify the factors that led the rising diversity and increasing gender equality in European societies in recent times. Secondly, it aims to analyze how these factors impact on the shaping of values of culture in three specific areas: institutionalized culture, cultural administrations and cultural policies, and citizen culture.

D1.2 Analysis of the influence of urbanisation and social and spatial segregation in cities in the configuration of the values of culture.
The report takes into account the major paradigm changes in the recent urban development by focusing on the social processes of gentrification, touristification and segregation, and its consequences on urban heritage preservation.

D1.3 Analysis of the influence of globalization and digitization in the configuration of the values of culture.
The report provides a review of values of culture relating to cultural administration, production and participation. The main strands of identified values are within the categories of access, engagement and identification, production/performance.

D1.4 Analysis of the influence of neo-liberalism in the configuration of the values of culture.
This deliverable reports about the results of the exploration, systematic review and analysis of the research
literature and existing data on the influence of neo-liberalism in the configuration of the values of culture.

D1.5 Analysis of the European historical and political experience in acknowledging and promoting the values of culture
The report questions the configurations in which European cultural policies attribute values to culture. It begins with a reflection on the meaning of value, then goes on to identify the numerous values identifiable in the history of cultural policies. It proposes a classification of the values and it describes the dynamics of emergence and transformation of the values attributed to culture in historical configurations.

Download the full text of each deliverable in the UNCHARTED download area
Link to the WP1 webpage

Cultural Heritage and Impact Assessment: subscribe the newsletter of the SOPHIA project

SOPHIA “Social Platform for Holistic Impact Heritage Assessment” aims to promote collective reflection within the cultural and political sector in Europe on the impact assessment and quality of interventions in European historical environment and cultural heritage at urban level.
This first edition of the SOPHIA project Newsletter provides a general overview of the mission and challenges of the social platform. It invites to reflect on the importance to assess and evaluate projects dealing with cultural heritage by adopting an holistic point of view.
It also introduces the first outputs of the projects presenting the outcomes of the first workshop, the first scientific production and new collaborations.
SOPHIA and UNCHARTED projects have recently started an active cooperation that is intended to provide more engagement and participation to both projects.
Subscribe the newsletter and stay up to date on the latest initiatives promoted by the project.
Subscribe here
Link to the Sophia newsletter here
Sophia website: www.sophiaplatform.eu/
Twitter: @sophia_platform
Facebook: Sophia Platform
Contact: info@sophiaplatform.eu