36th Congress of the Comité international d’histoire de l’art (CIHA)
Centre de Congrès – Cité internationale, Lyon
Session Paper Proposal Submission Deadline: September 15, 2023
Paper proposals are invited for the session “Virtual/Material: What Matters for Art History?” at next year’s CIHA conference in Lyon (23 – 27 June 2024). This session aims to promote conversation and collaboration between art historians working in Technical Art History and Digital Art History by focusing on questions related to the dematerialization and rematerialization of artworks.
Technical Art History valorizes material specificity, labor, and workshop practices while Digital Art History accepts that artworks and artists alike are also forms of data that may or may not take tangible form. Yet, these distinct practices share fundamental concerns. Both Technical Art History and Digital Art History ask scholars of visual culture to decide how—even whether—to distinguish the real from the ersatz, the complete from the partial. As a result, questions related to materiality become particularly relevant: how are objects represented as data? How are attributes like color, texture, or composition analyzed and represented using digital technologies? What are the consequences of artworks’ dematerializations and rematerializations via digital technologies? And what of the materiality of data itself? As the management of data, on laptops, cameras, and servers, becomes an increasing central aspect of contemporary research for repositories as well as individual scholars, what implications might this have for research and scholarship? Such questions are particularly relevant now given scholars’ increasing reliance on remote access and digitized sources.
Curators, conservators, and conservations scientists are especially encouraged to submit a proposal as are scholars working on questions of materiality and virtuality in a global context.
Proposals are due 15 September 2023 and may be submitted via the CIHA platform, which includes a full description of the session.