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Valentine Bernasconi
Presentation
Projects
Publications
Conferences
Contact

Presentation

Valentine Bernasconi has been a Ph.D. fellow at the Digital Visual Studies group from 2020 to 2024 .
Strongly interested in the field of art and new technologies, she received a degree in computer science and art history from the University of Fribourg before accomplishing a first master’s degree in multimedia design and 3D technologies at Brunel University London. She then naturally came across the new field of study of digital humanities and completed a master’s degree at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). From September 2020 until April 2024, she has been working on her doctoral project at the Digital Visual Studies in Zurich. She successfully defended her PhD on 9 July 2024.
Her research was focused on the computational and historical analysis of hands in western early modern paintings. She developed new methodologies at the intersection of computer vision and art history towards the understanding of the role of the hand in pictorial narration and as part of a language. In her research, she used human pose estimation models for the detection and extraction of paintings, designed new interactive systems for the browsing of the collection and worked on data visualization systems for their historical analysis. She also questions the integration of computational approaches to the field of art history, such as the analysis of the detail at large scale, the implied notion of influence, and new modes of visualization and perception of the painted hand in the digital realm.

Projects

  1. Computational and Historical Analysis of Hands and Gestures in Early Modern Art
  2. PAPA - Pose Annotation Project for Artworks
  3. GAB - Gestures for Artwork Browsing

Publications

  • Bernasconi, V. (2024). Show Me Your Hand! Computational Methods for Hand Gesture Analysis in Early Modern European Painting (Doctoral dissertation, University of Zurich). https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-264460
  • Bernasconi, Valentine, Negueruela del Castillo, Darío. Pose Annotation Project for Artworks: A participatory annotation platform for automated body pose estimation in art. In Baillot, Anne, Tasovac, Toma, Scholger, Walter, & Vogeler, Georg. (2023, July 1). Digital Humanities 2023: Book of Abstracts. Digital Humanities 2023. Collaboration as Opportunity. (DH2023), Graz, Austria; p. 169. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7961822
  • Bernasconi, Valentine, Eva Cetinić, and Leonardo Impett. 2023. "A Computational Approach to Hand Pose Recognition in Early Modern Paintings" Journal of Imaging 9, no. 6: 120. https://doi.org/10.3390/jimaging9060120
  • Bernasconi, Valentine. A new gesture-based browsing experience for art historical research. In Book of Conference Abstracts for Digital Humanities 2022 [Abstract]; 25-29 July 2022, The University of Tokyo, Japan; p. 425. https://dh2022.dhii.asia/dh2022bookofabsts.pdf
  • Bernasconi, Valentine. (2022). GAB - Gestures for Artworks Browsing. In 27th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI ’22 Companion), March 22–25, 2022, Helsinki, Finland. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3490100.3516470

Conferences

  • Changing perceptions. Decoding Early Modern painted hand gestures through computer vision.
    Kommunikationstechniken im Wandel. Alternatives Schreiben, Lesen und Kommunizieren in der Vormoderne. Changing Communication Techniques, International Workshop, May 4, 2023, online
  • The Reality Behind Working with Body Pose Estimation in Paintings: Another Truth.
    From Hype to Reality: Artificial Intelligence in the Study of Art and Culture, 20 - 21 April 2023, Digital Society Initiative, University of Zurich, Rämistrasse 69 Zurich, Switzerland
  • Remonter le temps : nouvelles perceptions de la représentation picturale de la main à travers celle du chercheur.
    Les Entretiens de la Fondation Maison Borel, VIIe édition, Autour de la notion de filiation artistique Dialogue avec Elizabeth Prettejohn, October 21, 2022, Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland
  • Augmenting art history: a new story of the painted hand.
    DARIAH-CH Study Day October 20, 2022, Università della Svizzera italiana, Mendrisio, Switzerland. - BEST POSTER AWARD
  • Imperfect tools – When uncertainties of automated recognition reveal pictorial peculiarities.
    as part of the symposium Unexpected realities: how uncertainty and imperfection influence perception and interpretation in digital visual studies, VSAC 2022, Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • A new gesture-based browsing experience for art historical research.
    Digital Humanities Conference 2022, Tokyo, Japan
  • Understanding body and hand gestures through the lens of computational methods.
    Body posture and art, University of Ghent, Belgium, mai 2022
  • Voir autrement. Aperçu du langage de la main dans la représentation picturale à travers l’Europe d’hier grâce aux technologies d’aujourd’hui.
    Séminaire : Fortunes et circulations des images en Europe, Centre IMAGO, Paris, mai 2022
  • Missing annotations: towards automated gesture recognition in artworks
    Digital Images, Metadata and Cultural Heritage Objects, DH-CH 2021, Summer School, 07-09 June 2021, Istituto Svizzero a Roma, Rome, Italy

Contact

valentine.bernasconi[at]uzh.ch

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