Named after the small red sticker that once guided scholars through legacy 35mm slides, The Red Dot is here to help you navigate the ever-evolving landscape of visual and material research. While rooted in the University of California, Santa Barbara community, our posts are open to all.
At MIRL, we engage with art history, digital humanities, and material culture through hands-on research and archival projects. Guided by our core principles—critical engagement with visual and material culture, ethical stewardship of images and data, and innovative approaches to research and pedagogy—we work at the intersection of technology and the humanities. We are especially interested in how digital tools can expand the study of images, objects, and spaces.
Here, we’ll share insights on Digital Art History and Architectural History, highlight new image and data resources, discuss copyright and ethical considerations, and spotlight events that shape our field.
The Red Dot © 2025 is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
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Today at 6:00 – Kenneth Frampton lecture
Columbia University Professor of Architecture Kenneth Frampton will be giving the 2012 Albert Frey lecture today, March 16, at 6:00 at the Loma Pelona Center. The lecture is entitled “Megaform as Urban Landscape,” and “seeks to trace the emergence of the megaform as a potential critical strategy for dealing with the de facto, space endlessness… Read more
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National Gallery of Art launches new image resource with open access policy
Public and educational access to the National Gallery of Art’s collection just got a whole lot easier – all of its images believed to be in the public domain are now available for educational use, publication, and “personal enrichment”. NGA Images contains more than 20,000 open access images, searchable and browsable through a very clean… Read more
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Ernst L. Freud: Architect to the Bourgeoisie of Weimar Germany
Update to our post from December 2011 on the recent publication by UCSB architectural historian Prof. Volker Welter, Ernst L. Freud, Architect: The Case of the Modern Bourgeois Home: A new essay in the online journal Berfrois (“Intellectual Jousting in the Republic of Letters”) elaborates with a personal angle. Read more
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Updates to Ghent Altarpiece project
We reported a while back that the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK/IRPA), Lukasweb, and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, in collaboration with the Getty Foundation, was digitizing the Ghent Altarpiece in extremely high definition. In addition to making the digital images of the finished panels available, the project has used Infrared Reflectography (IRR) and x-radiography… Read more
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340-ton boulder on its way to LACMA
The 10-day journey begins tonight for the huge boulder from a Riverside quarry destined as the centerpiece of Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass at LACMA. It is so huge it has to travel on a custom-built transporter that requires road and utility accommodations throughout the trip (it’s nearly 3 traffic lanes wide!), and must take a… Read more
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AD&A Museum’s Cliff May exhibition opens February 26
UCSB’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum has been going through an inside-and-out renovation and is ready to open its doors with Carefree California: Cliff May and the Romance of the Ranch House. The exhibition is the first major retrospective of the designer who popularized the ranch house and made it an icon of casual California… Read more