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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Interconnection: projection mapping winner of iMapp Bucharest 2016
Interconnection is the winner of both Jury’s Choice Award and People’s Choice Award at iMapp 2016 – that is, the 2016 iMapp Bucharest international Video Mapping Competition, “one of the biggest 3D video-mapping shows in the world, an international competition that brings design and contemporary art directly on the facade of approximately 22,000 square meters… Read more
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Revelations about the scope of Angkor Wat’s communities
This fascinating article in the New York Times describes how archaeologists have recently been able to shed light on the vastness and advanced level of the settlements of the Khmer empire (802 to 1431 AD). The obstacles of the thick jungle setting has made excavation very difficult, but a new technique using “lidar” (Light Detection… Read more
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NYARC Discovery: Web archives and photoarchive images at your fingertips
NYARC Discovery is a new research tool from the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum, the Frick Collection, and The Museum of Modern Art. With a single search, you can find web archives along with books, journal articles, auction catalogs, traditional archives and a host of other materials, including nearly 200,000 catalog records and over 75,000… Read more
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Art in context: installation photography on Artstor
From The Artstor Blog archive: If you read a review or article about an interesting museum exhibition you missed you can usually find images of the featured artworks. But have you ever wondered how the works were presented, where they were placed? Which pieces were shown together, and in what order? Exhibition design is central… Read more
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Structures of Landscape
The new Tippet Rise Art Center, on an 11,500-acre working ranch north of Yellowstone in the shadow of the Beartooth mountains in Fishtail, MT, was founded as a site for monumental and site specific installations. One of these installations, the ongoing project “Structures of Landscape” by ENSAMBLE STUDIO, currently features large-scale outdoor sculptures Beartooth Portal,… Read more
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New content in MDID: Italian Renaissance Art
We recently acquired a set of over 3,000 beautiful images of Italian Renaissance art from Archivision, the vendor of the high quality content architectural images (35,000!) we already have in MDID (the Image Resource Center’s image database). The images were shot at 19 museums and other sites in Rome, Florence and Naples. In addition to… Read more