Abstract

Defining a project in digital art history is exciting and full of promises: from the possibility to unveil artistic trends over a large period of time to the discovery of the source of inspiration to a recurring pattern, via the thrill of training a machine that sees what has been unseen by years of art historical practice. Unfortunately, the reality of such interdisciplinary projects is often far from these expectations that large digital corpora and computational powers seem to offer. Not only the voice of the art historian will quickly object to the fundamental research questions and the misunderstanding of the engineer who is juggling with exotic concepts, but the whole practical aspect is destined to affect the enthusiasm of the first moments. Machine learning models are trained on real images and do not meet the same accuracies on paintings, and the perfect corpus of paintings does not exist, yet. Not all paintings have been digitized, not all collections have implemented the requirements for computational approaches, and these digital corpuses have not been annotated for the purpose of machine learning training. Through a project on the computational and historical understanding of hands in Early Modern time, the talk aims to reflect on the contrast between the first research questions and the readjustments performed along the use of AI and art historical material. In a context at the crossroads of two very diverging and demanding fields, the talk will also question the possibility to really find an in-between among art history and computer science

Smyposium

Presentation at the Symposium From Hype to Reality. Artificial Intelligence in the Study of Art and Culture

https://fromhypetoreality.com/#program-section