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Comments for “Thinking Beyond the Digital and Material Divide”:
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For your post on 8/30…
Your analysis of Emma Stanford’s article on digital surrogates is excellent, and I think you did a great job applying it to a lesser-thought-of medium in textiles. When you mentioned how you didn’t notice the reflective surface of the damask until you saw the NCMA piece in person, I was reminded about the issues with surface reflections that we encountered in our digitization workshop last week in reproductions. For images (photographs in this case) printed in books, sometimes digitized scans can pick up the texture of the book’s paper, altering a viewer’s perception of the piece. If the paper a an image is printed in has a strong/large grain, a viewer may interpret that grain as part of the weaving pattern. Some tools in Photoshop can mitigate these discrepancies, but only seeing the textile in person can truly showcase the details of the weaving pattern. -
Your observations of the gara cloth from the early 1970s in the collection of the North Carolina Museum of Art reminded me of a point that Emma Stanford also made in her chapter “A Field Guide to Digital Surrogates” about how when digitizing an object, optimal ways of viewing it must be considered. Stanford used the example of cuneiform tablets and how the characters could only be discerned when the tablets were angled towards the light (Stanford, 207). In this sense, a flat, digitized image, like the image of the gara used in the North Carolina Museum of Art’s digital collection, may not be the best method for viewing an object. A standardized method of “best practices” for photographing and digitizing images may then rob the viewer of important information regarding an object. In your example, the digital viewer misses the sheen created by the wax used on the gara.
On the other hand, I think that sometimes viewing digital surrogates may be the most effective method for viewing details and technical aspects of objects. For example, when I saw the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, I could barely see the painting itself behind a mass of people. In this case, if an observer wanted to study Leonardo da Vinci’s use of atmospheric perspective, it would have been impossible amid a crowd of people and from the distance created by stanchions.
Stanford does bring up—like many other articles describing digitized surrogates—Walter Benjamin and his concept of an objects “aura” that can only be experienced in person (211). Stanford also contributes to the argument that the more surrogates a work may have, the greater evidence of its cultural significance and “aura,” an argument that can be definitively applied to the Mona Lisa. Despite my limited view of the Mona Lisa, I, along with many people, shared the experience of viewing this masterpiece of human culture in-person. As I walked out of the gallery, a couple proposed in front of the painting. You may not be able to see the Mona Lisa very well in the flesh, but I guarantee that couples are not eagerly anticipating to propose to each other in front of a digital surrogate of it.
So, in an attempt to answer your question about how to reconcile our dependence on digital images with the absence of material objects, I think that it is necessary to recognize that digital surrogates are just that: surrogates for the real thing. Information will undoubtedly be lost in the digitization process, like the sheen of the gara, but it would also be unfeasible to take an art history class to see every work included in the syllabus in-person. Digital surrogates should not try to replace viewing objects in-person, it would be ineffective and futile to attempt such a task. Instead, they should be appreciated for their ability to be unapologetically examined and studied with periodically improved image quality. Their broad access and versatility are the greatest advantages for generating new scholarship. -
Thinking through digitization and surrogates/representations through a textiles lens is so interesting! You’re so right, it’s not something that easily translates to static images or even 3D recreations. Texture, reflectivity, and thickness are all vital pieces of experiencing a fabric. Tactile information is irreplaceable, and it’s so hard to convey remotely! I got a chance to visit the Jazz Museum in New Orleans last year, and I thought of this often when I was looking at some of the performers’ costumes (and some of the Storyville ladies’ dresses). Without stage lighting and a moving person wearing them, these garments can sometimes feel kind of lifeless. They’re designed to move, which is an aspect of a textile that I’m not sure we’ll be able to digitize with any degree of accuracy and simplicity in the foreseeable future- at least from my knowledge, simulating fabric and hair is an incredibly intensive computing process even with incredible advancements in the past few decades.
I’m also so glad you (and Emma Stanford) brought up the ways that early photographers were trying to understand their place in the art world as both creators and documentarians. There are so many parallels to the discussion of digital surrogates, especially with your point about the inherent staging of a photo! It’s probably a pretty over-used example at this point, but I always come back to O’Sullivan’s “Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter” as the example of this. When I first learned about it in a history of photography course as an undergrad, it had a huge impact on me. Here was a photographer who ostensibly was meant to document a tragic event in a new-ish medium prized for its accuracy, but came to the conclusion that staging a vignette was somehow a better if not more truthful narrative. From the beginning, the “full story” has never been a part of photography and it almost certainly will not be found even in advanced digital surrogates.
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I appreciated your discussion of your own technical troubles with CollectionBuilder. I encountered a similar problem! At first, I wanted to make a collection based on images that I had collected for my undergraduate art history thesis, but I think that my inconsistent file naming and format saving system from the past year did not lend itself for simple metadata entry to be easily translated into CollectionBuilder. I instead decided to start from scratch with a smaller collection of images from a developing research project. I am also hoping to expand this digital collection, based on a few images from Owen Jones’s 1856 publication “The Grammar of Ornament,” to include all of the book plates from this book into the repository.
Do you think that your digital collection through CollectionBuilder will play a greater role in your art historical research beyond being a personal tool for image organization?
I think that digital tools like CollectionBuilder are important for providing access to advanced digital tools for people that may not necessarily have the expertise to build a digital repository from scratch. Even though the creation process is very straightforward for CollectionBuilder, I still did not created it right until my third try. Although this tool is accessible, I think it highlights a growing reality in art history, as a field with increasing integration of digital tools. There will inevitably be art historians who are able to use these tools intuitively, while there are others who will need to take a longer pause to understand and use them most effectively.
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