The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access... more The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact
EVA London 2016 Electronic Visualisation and the Arts, 2016
The space between digital life and real life continues to fade and nowhere is this more apparent ... more The space between digital life and real life continues to fade and nowhere is this more apparent than in arts and cultural contexts. Facilitated by digital capture and curation, social media, the network, Internet, and the web, these forces combine to empower artists to be digital curators of their own work, giving voice and narration to their artistic expression. In the paper entitled Digitalism: the New Realism, the authors focus on how digital tools and technology have changed ways of doing, knowing, and being, while here we look at how today's digital landscape is changing ways of artistic expression, narration, communication, and human interaction. The growing use of digital tools and technology in the arts and culture is dramatically transforming traditional curatorial practice and by extension archival practice, so that we are moving from a gatekeeping model to an open model steeped in digital relationships across global networks and the Internet. As we immerse ourselves in the digital world, where anyone with a smartphone can be a digital curator and marshal a range of Internet services, such as Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and more specifically for example Behance (for online portfolios), artists are enabled to freely engage and interact with their audience using to their advantage crowdsourcing, "likes", chat, blogs, games and email. Emerging artists are particularly expert digitally and are able to curate their life and work directly, living naturally between physical and digital states. To demonstrate this, our study presents specific examples of how artists and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museum) institutions are adapting to new digital ways of curating collections and conveying meaning. Additionally, we show how notions of what constitutes artistic expression are evolving as art traverses digital media boundaries, especially in terms of visual and textual media. Importantly, as life in the 21st century plays out on the digital stage of the Internet, artists and GLAM institutions find themselves more than ever working at the intersection of art and information which is leading to new and innovative ways of curating contemporary art that are expressive of artistic vision and digital aesthetics, while conveying social and political meaning capable of influencing and impacting our lives.
"The Brooklyn Visual Heritage website (http://brooklynvisualheritage.org) repres... more "The Brooklyn Visual Heritage website (http://brooklynvisualheritage.org) represents a new visual resource for cultural heritage. The site was created as part of Project CHART (Cultural Heritage, Access, Research and Technology), a three-year collaborative project (2010-2013) funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) between Pratt School of Information and Library Science and three of New York’s leading cultural Institutions, the Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn Museum, and Brooklyn Public Library. This paper examines the Brooklyn Visual Heritage website from the diverse perspectives of these cultural institutions and the communities they serve, from geographic communities to those of scholars, historians, and educators, while also addressing technical aspects of user experience and the challenges of cross institutional collaboration. We consider questions of shared decision-making on website design, public access and use as well as issues regarding how the BVH collections will continue to grow, while expanding the use of social media to promote greater community participation as part of a sustainable model. "
Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA 2015), 2015
Évariste Galois (1811-1832) has been increasingly recognised as an important mathematician who de... more Évariste Galois (1811-1832) has been increasingly recognised as an important mathematician who despite his short life developed mathematical ideas that today have led to applications in computer science (such as Galois connections) and elsewhere. Some of Galois' mathematics can be visualised in interesting and even artistic ways, aided using software. In addition, a significant corpus of the historical documentation on Galois and his family (including his brother Alfred Galois, who was an artist), can now be accessed online as a growing number of institutional archives digitise their collections. This paper introduces some of the mathematics of Galois, ways in which it can be visualised, and also considers the issues and new opportunities with respect to visualising information on Galois and his family (including the connections between them). Although the story of Galois and his close relations can be seen as one of tragedy with lives cut short, from a historical viewpoint Évariste Galois' contribution to humankind has been a triumph.
When Covid-19 rushed into our lives, it sent shockwaves across the globe – suddenly we faced “loc... more When Covid-19 rushed into our lives, it sent shockwaves across the globe – suddenly we faced “lockdown” – we said goodbye to the way it was but did not understand what this brave new world of isolation and separation would mean and how it would the impact life as we knew it – our identity, relationships and freedoms we enjoyed, and wondered what daily routine post-Covid-19 would look like, while the experiences defining life itself were up for grabs. With social distancing, masks and work from home mandates, the arts and performing arts from theatres, museums, galleries and the public square were shuttered – their very existence challenged and spiralling out of control as staff were laid-off, exhibitions cancelled while concurrently creating an urgency to go online to dwell in cyberspace, the new daily destination.
We discuss possible directions that museums could take with respect to the rapidly developing dig... more We discuss possible directions that museums could take with respect to the rapidly developing digital culture in which they find themselves. Successful museums must be very adaptable to the changing nature of public expectations. Some of the important aspects to be considered have been covered in earlier chapters in this book. Here we take this knowledge and speculate how museums could adapt to survive in the digital environment that is increasingly integrated as part of the real environment, in what will rapidly become a postdigital world. The chapter summarizes the prospective directions for museums and related institutions in the context of changes in the digital landscape of the rest of society.
This chapter focuses on the work and life of digital artist Carla Gannis. Originally from North C... more This chapter focuses on the work and life of digital artist Carla Gannis. Originally from North Carolina, Gannis received a BFA from UNC Greensboro, and an MFA in painting from Boston University. In 2005 she was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Grant in Computer Arts, and since then, she lives and works in Brooklyn, where she is a professor and assistant chairperson of The Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute. Conveying her journey from painter to digital artist and storyteller, we explore the evolution of her artistic expression from painting to digital art, a story that ties broadly to the development of the digital arts field from the 1990s to present. Presented both through images of her work, and by way of a face to face unrehearsed interview, this chapter touches upon many of the highly pertinent topics impacting artists and museums in the 21st-century digital age. Among these, of special interest to museums are her observations on audiences, and how ...
As the digital revolution accelerates, one of the most significant impacts that museums are exper... more As the digital revolution accelerates, one of the most significant impacts that museums are experiencing, is how digital development is changing the very nature of work across the professions and disciplines from art and humanities to computer science and technology. Simply put—work and life are merging and becoming increasingly digital and cross-disciplinary, as they are absorbed into the digital ecosystem. Museums are recognizing that the digital shift is causing them to re-think the skills and knowledge their professional staff needs and are challenged to find effective strategies to respond to changes brought about by digital culture and related social and cultural issues, while graduate education for museum professionals is similarly challenged. As a case study, we consider Pratt Institute’s Master of Science in Museums and Digital Culture, introduced in 2015 by Giannini. Representing the first master’s degree of its kind, it offers a program set in a digital framework that encompasses the full range of museum activities and functions in contrast to the prevalent museum studies model taking a more traditional collection-centered approach. Over the past few years, the work of museum professionals behind the scenes has become increasingly carried out using digital tools and technologies, from collection management including digitization and access, to museum websites and social media, while using digital in galleries and exhibitions is an emerging area of critical focus aimed at developing digital strategies and methods for visitor engagement and experience and that expand the roles and responsibilities of museum professionals. Among digital advances, augmented and virtual reality, digital storytelling and artificial intelligence, are entering the mainstream of museum life, more fully immersing museums in the digital culture ecosystem. This chapter explores how education for museum professionals is transforming, as it responds to the need for graduates to possess digital skills and a deep knowledge and understanding of the social and cultural contexts in which museums are evolving.
Rachel Ara describes herself as a conceptual and data artist, whose work brings to light the tria... more Rachel Ara describes herself as a conceptual and data artist, whose work brings to light the trials and tribulations of women in a male dominated world. Through her art, she summons disparate elements from past to present, physical and digital, recalling histories of feminism and memories of women in an alien world. We see red neon lights and red-light districts, Florentine nuns in the shuttered silence of cloisters weaving cloth in codes. We are experiencing the artworks of Rachel Ara that conjure vivid feminist images and convey powerful messages about women’s states of being and consciousness, and consider issues of gender and sexuality, a theme that runs through her work. By comparison, the 2017 exhibition at the Tate Britain, Queer British Art, 1861–1967, put on view mostly familiar works of women by male artists, and reframed them as works by queer artists living at a time when that identity seemed camouflaged. As gender and sexual identity have come to the fore, queer art and...
This chapter features an interview two senior museum leaders with a long history in digital produ... more This chapter features an interview two senior museum leaders with a long history in digital product development and open access who discuss how their museums are evolving. A wide-ranging conversation explores the challenges and opportunities small to medium sized museums face, and what it means for leaders who emerge from ‘digital culture’ to be shaping museums. It is an important exploration, too, of the changing context in which museums now operate and how the slow shift to a “postdigital” museum cannot be abstracted from broader shifts in culture and politics.
The distinguishing characteristic of digitalism is its focus on human behavior in cultural and so... more The distinguishing characteristic of digitalism is its focus on human behavior in cultural and social contexts. When we think of the developments of computer science and “information theory” that spawned the digital revolution, the focus generally defaults to digital tools and technology, as opposed to its effects on human life and culture and how advances in computing, digital communications and technology are transforming our ways of doing, seeing, knowing, learning, living and loving, to name a few examples. The impact of digitalism is all encompassing, touching all disciplines and human pursuits. How will museums change and transform themselves to connect in authentic ways with their communities while remaining relevant in a world transformed by digital culture that is moving full speed ahead, advancing in a state of constant change and development? While museums have been cautious and relatively slow to challenge traditional ways, they are surely noticing that we are reaching a...
Museums increasingly recognize the need to address advances in digital culture which impact the e... more Museums increasingly recognize the need to address advances in digital culture which impact the expectations and needs of their audiences. Museum collections of real objects need to be presented both on their own premises and digitally online, especially as social media becomes more and more influential in people’s everyday lives. We investigate these challenges magnified by advances in digital and computational media and culture looking particularly at recent and relevant reports on changes in the ways museums interact with the public. We find that the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated many of the changes driving museum transformation. We believe that museums must be more prepared than ever to adapt to unabated technological advances set in the midst of cultural and social revolution, now intrinsic to the digital landscape in which museums are inevitably connected and participating across the global digital ecosystem where they inevitably find themselves entrenched.
The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access... more The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact
EVA London 2016 Electronic Visualisation and the Arts, 2016
The space between digital life and real life continues to fade and nowhere is this more apparent ... more The space between digital life and real life continues to fade and nowhere is this more apparent than in arts and cultural contexts. Facilitated by digital capture and curation, social media, the network, Internet, and the web, these forces combine to empower artists to be digital curators of their own work, giving voice and narration to their artistic expression. In the paper entitled Digitalism: the New Realism, the authors focus on how digital tools and technology have changed ways of doing, knowing, and being, while here we look at how today's digital landscape is changing ways of artistic expression, narration, communication, and human interaction. The growing use of digital tools and technology in the arts and culture is dramatically transforming traditional curatorial practice and by extension archival practice, so that we are moving from a gatekeeping model to an open model steeped in digital relationships across global networks and the Internet. As we immerse ourselves in the digital world, where anyone with a smartphone can be a digital curator and marshal a range of Internet services, such as Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and more specifically for example Behance (for online portfolios), artists are enabled to freely engage and interact with their audience using to their advantage crowdsourcing, "likes", chat, blogs, games and email. Emerging artists are particularly expert digitally and are able to curate their life and work directly, living naturally between physical and digital states. To demonstrate this, our study presents specific examples of how artists and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museum) institutions are adapting to new digital ways of curating collections and conveying meaning. Additionally, we show how notions of what constitutes artistic expression are evolving as art traverses digital media boundaries, especially in terms of visual and textual media. Importantly, as life in the 21st century plays out on the digital stage of the Internet, artists and GLAM institutions find themselves more than ever working at the intersection of art and information which is leading to new and innovative ways of curating contemporary art that are expressive of artistic vision and digital aesthetics, while conveying social and political meaning capable of influencing and impacting our lives.
"The Brooklyn Visual Heritage website (http://brooklynvisualheritage.org) repres... more "The Brooklyn Visual Heritage website (http://brooklynvisualheritage.org) represents a new visual resource for cultural heritage. The site was created as part of Project CHART (Cultural Heritage, Access, Research and Technology), a three-year collaborative project (2010-2013) funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) between Pratt School of Information and Library Science and three of New York’s leading cultural Institutions, the Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn Museum, and Brooklyn Public Library. This paper examines the Brooklyn Visual Heritage website from the diverse perspectives of these cultural institutions and the communities they serve, from geographic communities to those of scholars, historians, and educators, while also addressing technical aspects of user experience and the challenges of cross institutional collaboration. We consider questions of shared decision-making on website design, public access and use as well as issues regarding how the BVH collections will continue to grow, while expanding the use of social media to promote greater community participation as part of a sustainable model. "
Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA 2015), 2015
Évariste Galois (1811-1832) has been increasingly recognised as an important mathematician who de... more Évariste Galois (1811-1832) has been increasingly recognised as an important mathematician who despite his short life developed mathematical ideas that today have led to applications in computer science (such as Galois connections) and elsewhere. Some of Galois' mathematics can be visualised in interesting and even artistic ways, aided using software. In addition, a significant corpus of the historical documentation on Galois and his family (including his brother Alfred Galois, who was an artist), can now be accessed online as a growing number of institutional archives digitise their collections. This paper introduces some of the mathematics of Galois, ways in which it can be visualised, and also considers the issues and new opportunities with respect to visualising information on Galois and his family (including the connections between them). Although the story of Galois and his close relations can be seen as one of tragedy with lives cut short, from a historical viewpoint Évariste Galois' contribution to humankind has been a triumph.
When Covid-19 rushed into our lives, it sent shockwaves across the globe – suddenly we faced “loc... more When Covid-19 rushed into our lives, it sent shockwaves across the globe – suddenly we faced “lockdown” – we said goodbye to the way it was but did not understand what this brave new world of isolation and separation would mean and how it would the impact life as we knew it – our identity, relationships and freedoms we enjoyed, and wondered what daily routine post-Covid-19 would look like, while the experiences defining life itself were up for grabs. With social distancing, masks and work from home mandates, the arts and performing arts from theatres, museums, galleries and the public square were shuttered – their very existence challenged and spiralling out of control as staff were laid-off, exhibitions cancelled while concurrently creating an urgency to go online to dwell in cyberspace, the new daily destination.
We discuss possible directions that museums could take with respect to the rapidly developing dig... more We discuss possible directions that museums could take with respect to the rapidly developing digital culture in which they find themselves. Successful museums must be very adaptable to the changing nature of public expectations. Some of the important aspects to be considered have been covered in earlier chapters in this book. Here we take this knowledge and speculate how museums could adapt to survive in the digital environment that is increasingly integrated as part of the real environment, in what will rapidly become a postdigital world. The chapter summarizes the prospective directions for museums and related institutions in the context of changes in the digital landscape of the rest of society.
This chapter focuses on the work and life of digital artist Carla Gannis. Originally from North C... more This chapter focuses on the work and life of digital artist Carla Gannis. Originally from North Carolina, Gannis received a BFA from UNC Greensboro, and an MFA in painting from Boston University. In 2005 she was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Grant in Computer Arts, and since then, she lives and works in Brooklyn, where she is a professor and assistant chairperson of The Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute. Conveying her journey from painter to digital artist and storyteller, we explore the evolution of her artistic expression from painting to digital art, a story that ties broadly to the development of the digital arts field from the 1990s to present. Presented both through images of her work, and by way of a face to face unrehearsed interview, this chapter touches upon many of the highly pertinent topics impacting artists and museums in the 21st-century digital age. Among these, of special interest to museums are her observations on audiences, and how ...
As the digital revolution accelerates, one of the most significant impacts that museums are exper... more As the digital revolution accelerates, one of the most significant impacts that museums are experiencing, is how digital development is changing the very nature of work across the professions and disciplines from art and humanities to computer science and technology. Simply put—work and life are merging and becoming increasingly digital and cross-disciplinary, as they are absorbed into the digital ecosystem. Museums are recognizing that the digital shift is causing them to re-think the skills and knowledge their professional staff needs and are challenged to find effective strategies to respond to changes brought about by digital culture and related social and cultural issues, while graduate education for museum professionals is similarly challenged. As a case study, we consider Pratt Institute’s Master of Science in Museums and Digital Culture, introduced in 2015 by Giannini. Representing the first master’s degree of its kind, it offers a program set in a digital framework that encompasses the full range of museum activities and functions in contrast to the prevalent museum studies model taking a more traditional collection-centered approach. Over the past few years, the work of museum professionals behind the scenes has become increasingly carried out using digital tools and technologies, from collection management including digitization and access, to museum websites and social media, while using digital in galleries and exhibitions is an emerging area of critical focus aimed at developing digital strategies and methods for visitor engagement and experience and that expand the roles and responsibilities of museum professionals. Among digital advances, augmented and virtual reality, digital storytelling and artificial intelligence, are entering the mainstream of museum life, more fully immersing museums in the digital culture ecosystem. This chapter explores how education for museum professionals is transforming, as it responds to the need for graduates to possess digital skills and a deep knowledge and understanding of the social and cultural contexts in which museums are evolving.
Rachel Ara describes herself as a conceptual and data artist, whose work brings to light the tria... more Rachel Ara describes herself as a conceptual and data artist, whose work brings to light the trials and tribulations of women in a male dominated world. Through her art, she summons disparate elements from past to present, physical and digital, recalling histories of feminism and memories of women in an alien world. We see red neon lights and red-light districts, Florentine nuns in the shuttered silence of cloisters weaving cloth in codes. We are experiencing the artworks of Rachel Ara that conjure vivid feminist images and convey powerful messages about women’s states of being and consciousness, and consider issues of gender and sexuality, a theme that runs through her work. By comparison, the 2017 exhibition at the Tate Britain, Queer British Art, 1861–1967, put on view mostly familiar works of women by male artists, and reframed them as works by queer artists living at a time when that identity seemed camouflaged. As gender and sexual identity have come to the fore, queer art and...
This chapter features an interview two senior museum leaders with a long history in digital produ... more This chapter features an interview two senior museum leaders with a long history in digital product development and open access who discuss how their museums are evolving. A wide-ranging conversation explores the challenges and opportunities small to medium sized museums face, and what it means for leaders who emerge from ‘digital culture’ to be shaping museums. It is an important exploration, too, of the changing context in which museums now operate and how the slow shift to a “postdigital” museum cannot be abstracted from broader shifts in culture and politics.
The distinguishing characteristic of digitalism is its focus on human behavior in cultural and so... more The distinguishing characteristic of digitalism is its focus on human behavior in cultural and social contexts. When we think of the developments of computer science and “information theory” that spawned the digital revolution, the focus generally defaults to digital tools and technology, as opposed to its effects on human life and culture and how advances in computing, digital communications and technology are transforming our ways of doing, seeing, knowing, learning, living and loving, to name a few examples. The impact of digitalism is all encompassing, touching all disciplines and human pursuits. How will museums change and transform themselves to connect in authentic ways with their communities while remaining relevant in a world transformed by digital culture that is moving full speed ahead, advancing in a state of constant change and development? While museums have been cautious and relatively slow to challenge traditional ways, they are surely noticing that we are reaching a...
Museums increasingly recognize the need to address advances in digital culture which impact the e... more Museums increasingly recognize the need to address advances in digital culture which impact the expectations and needs of their audiences. Museum collections of real objects need to be presented both on their own premises and digitally online, especially as social media becomes more and more influential in people’s everyday lives. We investigate these challenges magnified by advances in digital and computational media and culture looking particularly at recent and relevant reports on changes in the ways museums interact with the public. We find that the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated many of the changes driving museum transformation. We believe that museums must be more prepared than ever to adapt to unabated technological advances set in the midst of cultural and social revolution, now intrinsic to the digital landscape in which museums are inevitably connected and participating across the global digital ecosystem where they inevitably find themselves entrenched.
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Papers by Tula Giannini