Digital Training, Creativity and Museum Communication. The New Professions for Cultural Heritage

Example of digital exhibition layouts © Cristina Barbiani
Example of digital exhibition layouts © Cristina Barbiani

key details

23 June 2022
Online on Zoom
4pm — 6pm (CET)

about

Cristina Barbiani, scientific head of the Digital Exhibit Master’s course at the IUAV University of Venice, will introduce the new possibilities of digital technology for the creation of multimedia and interactive systems, combining knowledge and technologies related to ‘computer vision’ and aimed at the creation of museum displays, for design, architecture, multimedia and performing arts.

Lecturer

Cristina Barbiani

She is an architect with a PhD in History of Architecture and the City, Science of the Arts and Restoration at the School of Advanced Studies in Venice. She holds a degree in Design and Production of Visual Arts from the IUAV University of Venice. She is the scientific head of the Master Digital Exhibit at the IUAV University of Venice. She has a transversal education between architecture and multimedia and performing arts completed by study periods at New York University and MIT in Boston.

Art as a Method of Experimental Preservation

The Ethics of Dust: Doge’s Palace as exhibited in the Arsenale, 53rd Venice Art Biennale, Jorge Otero-Pailos, 2009
Dirt, Dust and Ruins, exhibition at Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney, Jorge Otero-Pailos, 2013
The Ethics of Dust, exhibition at the Museum of Yerba Buena, San Francisco, Jorge Otero-Pailos, 2016
Distributed Monuments, latex and dust, Jorge Otero-Pailos, 2022

key details

7 October 2022
Online on Zoom / Onsite at ARCHiVe
2pm — 4pm (CET)

about

This talk discusses Jorge Otero-Pailos’ approach to art as a method of experimental preservation and argues for its relevance in imagining a future for the existing built environment centred on mutual care. Jorge Otero-Pailos draws from a series of recent works in which he employs material residues of buildings and sites – including airborne atmospheric dust, waterways, traces of sweat, and body sounds – to render their invisible meanings visible. In particular, he focuses on his Ethics of Dust series, explaining how he uses art as a method for the experimental preservation of dust, the kind the atmosphere deposits on buildings. This important historical and environmental record usually goes unrecognized. The artworks in The Ethics of Dust series isolate dust and make it tangible by transferring it from the surface of buildings onto translucent casts. Jorge Otero-Pailos also presents a selection of dust casts taken from the Doge’s Palace, Westminster Hall, and other buildings around the world, and discusses the unexpected histories that each of them unveils. He connects the dots between these punctual histories to outline a larger concept they all contribute to, namely that of atmospheric heritage.
The talk is also a presentation of Jorge Otero-Pailos’ book Historic Preservation Theory: An Anthology, Readings from the 18th to the 21st Century.

Lecturer

Jorge Otero-Pailos

Director and Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, he is an architect, artist, and theorist specializing in experimental forms of preservation. His work as an artist has been commissioned by and exhibited at major heritage sites, museums, foundations, and biennials, including Artangel’s public art commission at the UK Parliament, the Venice Art Biennial, Victoria and Albert Museum, Louis Vuitton Galerie Museum, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, SFMoMA, Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts, Frieze London, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Computational Museology: Cultural Heritage and the Digital Museum

Double Truth, Sarah Kenderdine, 2021
Jazz Luminaries, Montreux Jazz Digital Archive, Sarah Kenderdine, Andrew Quinn, Davide Santini, Kirell Benzi, 2019
Travelling Kungkarangkalpa, Sarah Kenderdine, Peter Morse, Cedric Maridet, 2017
Look Up Mumbai, Sarah Kenderdine and Jeffrey Shaw, 2015

key details

4 April 2024
Online on Zoom
3pm — 5pm (CET)

About

Computational museology is a scaffold that unites machine intelligence with data curation, ontology with visualisation, and communities of publics and practitioners with embodied participation through kinaesthetic interfaces. Computational museology empowers cultural organisations to link all forms of culture and materiality: objects, knowledge systems, representation and participation. Research at the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+) reaches beyond object-oriented curation to blend experimental curatorship with contemporary aesthetics, digital humanism and emerging technologies.

This lecture curated by Sarah Kenderdine explores key themes including interactive archives and emergent narrative, deep fakes and blockchain sovereignties, embodied knowledge systems and performative interfaces and scientific visualisation for museums in the age of experience. She will also give an overview of EPFL Pavilions exhibitions and focus the discussion on Deep Fakes: Art and Its Double.

Lecturer

Sarah Kenderdine

She researches at the forefront of interactive and immersive experiences for galleries, libraries, archives and museums. In 2017, Sarah was appointed professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland where she has built the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+). Sarah is also director and lead curator of EPFL Pavilions a new art/science initiative. In 2020 and 2022, she was named in the top 10 of the Museum Influencer List by Blooloop and in 2020 and 2021, Switzerland’s Top 100 Digital Shapers by Bilanz. In 2021, Sarah was appointed corresponding fellow of The British Academy. Her upcoming book is Deep Fakes: A Critical Lexicon of Digital Museology (2024).

On Digital Application

Adriano Olivetti e la bellezza exhibition, 2018-2019 © Cristina Barbiani
© camerAnebbia
© Klaus Obermaier
Tríptiko. A vision inspired by Hieronymus Bosch, Rino Stefano Tagliafierro, 2019

key details

6, 11, 13, 18 October 2022
Online on Zoom
4pm — 6pm (CET)

the course

The four lectures represent an illustrative sample of the many possible declinations of digital applications in the various fields of arts and culture. The intention is to show the different practices, the different creative and production processes, and the tools used behind these different types of artistic products.
The lectures range from the theme of digital installations for the valorisation of Cultural Heritage, to the creative and artistic approach aimed at narration and storytelling, passing through different forms of creativity and artistic expression, always starting from innovative tools and experimental techniques.

Programme

October 6, 2022

Navigating Art Archives

  • Matteo Cellini

Matteo Cellini, part of the CamerAnebbia collective from Milan, explains how some of the many interactive installations are produced from museum archive materials, incographic and documentary sources, and works of art from some of Italy’s most important collections. The lecture explores the techniques used to generate visual landscapes, through retouching, post production and real time rendering techniques, which can be used through touch screens and large-scale video projections.

October 11, 2022

From Classical Art to Digital Art. New forms of narration

  • Rino Stefano Tagliafierro

The lecture focuses on the presentation of a number of multimedia works – short films, commercial projects and video installations – in which a story is told through the use of digitally processed works of classical figurative art. All stages of production, from the conception of the project to the final realisation, are then addressed and explored.

October 13, 2022

New tools, new ideas. Interactivity between the Digital and the Physical

  • Klaus Obermaier

The appointment with artist Klaus Obermaier is dedicated to investigating how digital tools can be used as an exploratory medium for artistic research, and how new technologies can generate forms of interactivity that somehow relate the physical dimension of the body to the digital dimension of artistic creation.

October 18, 2022

Digital exhibits. Multimedia and interactive devices for Cultural Heritage

  • Cristina Barbiani

Cristina Barbiani, scientific head of the Master Digital Exhibit at the Iuav University of Venice, explores in this lesson the different technologies behind multimedia and interactive installations, which allow, through a work of visual ‘translation’, to narrate and return scientific investigations, historical research data and results of archaeological surveys, through some realised examples.

Lecturers

Cristina Barbiani

She is an architect with a PhD in History of Architecture and the City, Science of the Arts and Restoration at the School of Advanced Studies in Venice. She holds a degree in Design and Production of Visual Arts from the IUAV University of Venice. She is the scientific head of the Master Digital Exhibit at the IUAV University of Venice. She has a transversal education between architecture and multimedia and performing arts completed by study periods at New York University and MIT in Boston.

Matteo Tora Cellini

Born in Florence and raised in Brussels, after graduating in design at the Milan Polytechnic and a metrise in Sculpture at La Cambre, he trained at Studio Azzurro. There he met Marco Barsottini and Lorenzo Sarti, with whom he founded camerAnebbia in 2014, investigating the relationship between art, science and new technologies. This research leads to the creation of immersive and interactive interventions that live in the spaces of numerous cultural institutions including Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Gallerie d’Italia, Mudec, Muse.

Stefano Rino Tagliaferro

Born in 1980, he lives and works in Milan. He graduated from ISIA d’Urbino and IED-European Institute of Design in Milan. Over the years he has had experience as art director, visual artist, graphic designer, animator and 2D composer to realize video art, commercials, short films, fashion videos, videomapping, videoprojections and videoinstallations for exhibitions, museums and special events. In 2013 he cofounded KARMACHINA, a studio of visual design. He has taken part in several contemporary art exhibitions in New York, Paris, Sapporo, Moscow, Berlin, Milan receiving international awards in many festivals.

Klaus Obermaier

Since more than three decades interdisciplinary artist, director and composer, he creates innovative works with new media in performing arts, music and installations, highly acclaimed by critics and audiences. His inter-media performances and artworks are shown at festivals and theatres throughout Europe, Asia, North and South America and Australia. He is visiting professor at the University IUAV of Venice and at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) teaching interactive arts and performances.