Sight as Site in the Digital Age: Art, the Museum, and Representation (Digital Culture and Humanities, 5) 9811992088, 9789811992087

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Digital Culture and Humanities  5

Kwok-kan Tam  Editor

Sight as Site in the Digital Age Art, the Museum, and Representation

Digital Culture and Humanities Challenges and Developments in a Globalized Asia Volume 5

Series Editor Kwok-kan Tam, School of Humanities and Social Science, Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, New Territories, Hong Kong Editorial Board Members David Barton, Lancaster University, Arnside, UK Anthony Ying-hin Fung, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Sunny Sui-kwong Lam, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Open University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Associate Editors Joanne Tompkins, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia Lang Kao, The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong Anna Wing-bo Tso, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Open University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong

This book series on digital culture and humanities examines how digitization changes current cultural practices as well as the modes of thought in humanities subjects, such as art, literature, drama, music and popular culture (which includes comics, films, pop songs, television, animation, games, and mobile apps). It also addresses the opportunities and challenges for scholarly research, industrial practices and education arising from the wide application of digital technologies in cultural production and consumption. The series publishes books that seek to explore how knowledge is (re/)produced and disseminated, as well as how research in humanities is expanded in the digital age. It encourages publication projects that align scholars, artists and industrial practitioners in collaborative research that has international implications. With this as an aim, the book series fills a gap in research that is needed between theory and practice, between Asian and the global, and between production and consumption. Furthermore, the multidisciplinary nature of the book series enhances understanding of the rising Asian digital culture, particularly in entertainment production and consumption, cultural/artistic revisioning, and educational use. For instance, a study of digital animated Chinese paintings will elucidate the reinterpreted Chineseness in artistic representation.

Kwok-kan Tam Editor

Sight as Site in the Digital Age Art, the Museum, and Representation

Editor Kwok-kan Tam School of Humanities and Social Science Hang Seng University of Hong Kong Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong

ISSN 2520-8640 ISSN 2520-8659 (electronic) Digital Culture and Humanities ISBN 978-981-19-9208-7 ISBN 978-981-19-9209-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9209-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023, corrected publication 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore Paper in this product is recyclable.

Series Preface

“Traditional” humanities disciplines have undergone significant transformations in the twenty-first century, particularly the process of digitisation. New perspectives and methods are essential to comprehending these changes. This book series explores how digital culture has revolutionised the humanities in terms of production, presentation, interpretation and research. By addressing questions about knowledge, scholarship and practices, this book series aims to revitalise the humanities disciplines and explore new possible modes of critical thinking. This book series also seeks to address the rapid changes of contemporary culture. The rise of digital media is constantly changing our perception of the world in terms of politics, economies, social lives and culture. In the realm of culture, traditional cultural texts, forms and scholarly works are transformed even as new cultural practices are created. The emergence of virtual/augmented reality and digital communities has generated new cultural forms and interactions, which in turn intervene and reshape the non-virtual reality. By examining digital technology, this book series explores the social aspects of the emergence of digital culture, especially how changes in the form of cultural production affect expressions in art and communication. It seeks to provide a wide array of new thoughts, particularly from Asian perspectives, on various facets of digital culture in the globalising world. With the development of new media forms, our personal and social lives have come under the mediation of digital representation. The advent of digital technologies has greatly influenced how society functions, and how culture is (re-)mediated, (re-)produced, consumed, interpreted and manipulated. This series features books that seek to explore how knowledge is (re-)produced and disseminated, as well as how research in humanities has been expanded in the digital age. With all of this in mind, this book series will make connections between theory and practice, between

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Asian and the global, and between production and consumption. Furthermore, the multidisciplinary nature of this book series will enhance understanding of the rising Asian digital culture, particularly in entertainment production and consumption, cultural/artistic revisioning and educational use. Shatin, Hong Kong April 2018

Kwok-kan Tam

Introduction

In the humanities as well as in social sciences, site observation and field survey are considered an important means to empirical studies that rely on fieldwork data for verification of theoretical conjectures and hypotheses. Sites also provide evidence of sources to understand civilisation and culture. However, because sites can change and be lost over time, what remains are incomplete sites, or no site at all, and if lucky there remains text-based historical records for reconstructing at least images of the original sites. This method of archaeology has been extended to the study of intellectual history, especially by Michel Foucault. Much earlier in Greek philosophy, Plato already argued in The Republic that the object is much more valued than the replica. To use the analogy of site and sight, site is comparable to Plato’s object, while sight is its replica. However, as P.B. Shelley has shown in his 1917 poem “Ozymandias,” art lasts longer than the object described. In the poem, the poet laments the passing of the once powerful thirteenth-century Egyptian pharaoh whose magnificent tomb now lies broken and is remembered only in historical records. The poem is a literary reconstruction of a site by giving it a sight. Sights last longer than sites, despite that sights are constructed and are replications of sites. Similarly, art last longer than the original objects, though they are replications of the objects. Sights are necessary for understanding historical sites which no longer exist. For this reason, museums and archives serve the purpose of reconstructing and representing the past. Thanks to the advent of digital technologies, visual reconstruction of lost sites is made possible nowadays, and digital museums and archives become a reality in recapturing the past. Digital reconstruction serves many other purposes than simply reconstructing the past and lost sites, such as reproducing sites for sight-seeing and for cultural consumption in remote locations. Take for instance Disneyland in Anaheim, Orlando, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong and Shanghai which are all imagined constructions of the past and future of America combining the actual with the virtual in their representations. Disneyland is both site and sight; it is siting and sighting too. Yet, site and sight embody contentious relations in their representations. Another example can be found in the exhibition called “From Site to Sight” mounted by the vii

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Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard in 1986. The exhibition was a travelling exhibition on the historic and contemporary uses of photography in anthropology, which used visual materials from the vast photographic archives of the Peabody Museum and the work of members of Harvard’s anthropology department in demonstrating how anthropologists had employed the camera as a recording and analytic tool and as an aesthetic medium. Photographs ranging from daguerreotypes to satellite images were presented in an examination of the possibilities and limitations of using the camera as a fact-gathering and interpretive tool. In the exhibition catalogue, the authors also explore the broader implications of the uses—and misuses—of visual imagery within the human sciences. “From Site to Sight” has been considered groundbreaking, not only in its format of a travelling exhibition, but also in its concept of taking issue with representation in sighting sites. Same as the library, which has turned from being a warehouse of books and material collections to functioning as a centre for information dissemination since the 1980s, museums and archives also have witnessed the change from being a passive custodian of materials to playing an active role in presenting materials with a certain critical focus. Many exhibitions that use photographs and images raise critical issues of representation in material presentation. Museums are cultural sites that are meant to present historical sites by means of sighting historical events in their reconstructions. In this sense, sites are sights that have implications in cultural manipulation and representation. Put simply, museums are institutions of sighting historical and cultural sites. As sites tell stories by presenting sights, sites produce meaning via sighting.

Sites of Cultural Production Museums play the role of cultural production by re-siting culture, while exhibitions are manipulations by means of re-sighting. Similar to the Peabody Museum at Harvard, museums in other parts of the world, such as those in Croatia, New York and London, face the same issue of representation in exhibition, which cannot avoid manipulation and ideological bias. This volume begins with Chap. 1 “What is a ‘Site’? Human Scales, Embodied Experiences and the Physical-Digital Interface,” in which Robbie B. H. Goh raises questions on the changing meanings of a site and what a site signifies culturally. Goh argues that digital technology has disrupted the traditional notion of a “site” as a physical space, to be experienced in bodily terms. No longer are websites merely perfunctory adjuncts to their physical sites, performing simple functions like disseminating visitors’ information and transactions like ticket sales and fundraising. The increasing prevalence of virtual tours, interactive content, and the large amount of other data that can be housed on the virtual site makes the virtual visit less of a consolation prize and more of an interesting experience in its own right. At the same time, the physical site is not disappearing, despite these technological advances and the factors impeding physical travel (including the Coronavirus epidemic, and

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environmental concerns about air and long-distance travel), but remains primary to our own embodied experience of the world. The juxtaposition of physical sites and their corresponding digital ones raises both conceptual issues (to do with what now constitutes a “site,” particularly that of a well-known attraction or venue), as well as practical ones about how our narratives, methodologies and terminologies increasingly have to deal with this gap or duality. In the chapter, Goh considers all different sites, be they actual or virtual, as spaces that exist in different forms. While the digital has the advantage of transcending physical and temporal limits, it also has the disadvantage of being secondary to the actual and real. Goh offers the caution: “No longer merely supplements or adjuncts to the physical site, digital sites offer valuable components and features which make them compelling sites in their own right, particularly for those unable to visit the physical one. This gap is likely to increase as the world becomes more connected digitally, but also more disconnected in political, economic and environmental terms.” In Chap. 2, “Sight as Site: Virtual Andersen in East Asia,” Kwok-kan Tam offers a case study of how H.C. Andersen, the world famous Danish author of fairy tale, is represented in three East Asian civilisations, the Chinese, Japanese and Korean, in the twenty-first century. Andersen has been warmly received in East Asia for more than 100 years. Most of Andersen’s stories have been translated into Chinese, Japanese and Korean. They are read as children’s literature for values and morals that are universal, but hidden in these values and morals are notions of truth, selfidentity and individuality that challenge traditional East Asian concepts of selfhood. Andersen represents new values for East Asian modernity. Tracing the reception of Andersen in East Asia, this study deals with changes in representation, particularly the wide circulation of Andersen stories in animation films in Japan and Korea, and the technological representations of culture in the digital age. The Tokyo Andersen Park and the Shanghai Andersen Cultural Park are discussed as attempts of re-siting Andersen. In this study, Chinese representations of Andersen are contrasted with the Japanese and the Korean so as to understand the different receptions of Andersen, as well as the digitalisation in the East Asian context. The recent trends of mediatisation of Andersen are discussed in relation to cultural consumption and gamification in education. Since much of the recent development in mediatisating Andersen has to do with visual representation, photos will be provided as illustrations. An interesting phenomenon in the East Asian reception of Andersen is the representation by both physical sites, such as parks and restaurants, and virtual sites, such as in film, video, games and websites. Both forms of sites, the physical and the virtual, complement each other in reproducing Andersen for East Asian cultural consumption.

Museums as Sites and Sights In Chap. 3, “Archives and Museums in the Decontextualised Digital World,” Sandra Malenica argues that museums and archives play a strong role in representation, which works as a result of the interaction between the exhibits and the spectator. As

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she argues, “If we are all the same, but contextually different, and if our context in traditional humanistic historiography is defined by place and time, this study raises questions of how, in the digital world, decontextualisation and deplacing influence our divergence in the representation of ourselves in archives and museums.” Can archives and museums be seen as global distributive networks of world knowledge and heritage? Living in a world of networks and horizontal principles of modelling in a digital world which knows no time and place, in the world where all can be context, but also does not have to be, archives and museums in the digital world can represent in two ways: through contextualisation of content and through contextualisation of themselves. If there is the global, then there is no local, but if there is the local, then there is no global. But as we see—there is still the local, no matter how global, and the contrary is true. This study argues that we are always global, and that archives and museums are the proof of that—by their contents and by themselves—because they are preserving the global contents, not local, and because their contextualisation of contents does not change in the digital world, they are empowering. On the other hand, if contextualisation of museum contents does change, they are contextualised as local in the digital world. When objects the spectator sees are digitised, they are represented digitally and hence re-contextualised, and thus manipulated. The case study raises serious questions about representation and re-contextualisation. In Chap. 4, “Do Museums Still Need Objects? Politics of Museums Reconsidered in the Digital Era,” Wenrui Li focuses on the politics of museum under the digital context from two aspects: the first part goes through the origin and early development of museums as cabinets of curiosities in the colonial period, as the birth of the museum deeply intertwines the decolonisation agenda and the ongoing digitisation, and largely influences later views. Quoting Geismar, Li argues that the digital is a new kind of materiality with its own features and cannot be taken for granted as immaterial; affordance of this digital materiality and its influences on museums will be scrutinised. When museums in the age of digital reproduction seem to evolve in the progress of making themselves more participatory and accessible, the dilemma of museums still exists, and the digital is not a panacea. Therefore, in the second part, Li looks into two key features of the physicality of museums that cannot be replaced by their digital counterparts: firstly, museum architectures and spatial arrangements inside the museums create the aura of museum-visiting experiences; secondly, educational programmes designed for multisensory experiences based on physical objects provide an ethnographic approach to better understand collections and cannot be replaced by virtual interactions through a digital screen. While acknowledging the benefits of digital representation, Li argues that the physical object as well as the physical museum cannot be replaced by digital images because the educational function cannot be achieved without an interaction between the object’s presence, as well as the subject, that is, the spectator’s experience of his/her physical presence in the museum. Hence, the viewer's presence in the museum and in front of the physical exhibit presumes an interaction which cannot be replaced by digital images. Visiting a museum entails a process of mental constructions within the viewer and will have transformative power over the viewer.

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In Chap. 5, “Museums and Archives in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and PostRepresentation,” Yael Eylat Van Essen re-assesses the state of affairs when analogue archives and collections management practices used by museums in their traditional forms are replaced by digital technologies. These technologies redefine the relationship between the collection and the archive as well as the ways in which concepts such as representation, interpretation, truth and objectivity are perceived within the museum context. As a result, the museum archive is being considered not only as a storage space but as knowledge generator and as an arena of cultural discourse and interpretive space to the content it preserves. Based on contemporary archival theories, Van Essen argues that the changes in archival practices presented by digital platforms impact curatorial conceptions in museums, as the museum archive becomes a potential space for curatorial practices. She further claims that the new archival practices have the potential not only to change the ways in which knowledge is represented, stored and retrieved, but also to generate self-reflexive examination of the way in which meanings are being created in the museum. Special attention is given to explore how AI (artificial intelligence) applications influence the ways in which knowledge is documented and organised in the museum’s archives: It addresses the ways in which AI applications take place in the digitisation processes of museum collections, imposing “machine intelligence” on cultural analyses. In addition, the chapter also refers to potential future implication of AI on curatorial practices and on the visitor’s experience and refers to the societal and political implications of the use of AI-driven self-customisation practices. The chapter brings into light the Foucauldian notion of discourse in the roles of the museum. Chapter 6, “Implicit Heritage Values in Online Collection Databases: Assessing the Presentation of Egyptian Artefacts in Art Museum Contexts,” by Eli E. McClain, provides a fresh look at issues of representation in the digitisation of museum collections. As he says, the digitisation of museum collections continues to alter how objects are presented and how digital visitors and researchers interact with collections. Drawing on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework of value, the chapter seeks to critically assess the contemporary presentation of Egyptian artefacts in public facing online databases through a systematic multi-sited case study examining two collections connected to the American Presbyterian missionary Reverend Chauncey Murch (1856–1907). This sample is composed of 6095 object records across the British Museum (London, UK) and Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, USA). McClain argues that by highlighting and analysing patterns in the presentation of object record data not apparent through casual browsing one can interpret effects of the digitisation shift. In addition to contributing to the critical discourse on the reception of ancient Egypt, heritage values, digitisation and museological presentation, this research provides a contemporary model for further investigations into the implicit values embedded in museum databases. McClain notices that in a museum not only “the past is being constructed,” but also the database, its structure and its information are not treated as neutral sources of knowledge, but rather interpretive and influential in attributing value. Moreover, the process of digitisation should be considered within the larger scope of museum presentation

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as new technologies often draw on more traditional forms of display and pre-existing frameworks of value can influence digitisation efforts and priority.

Sight and Digitisation of Art While museums and archives are culturally constructed sites, its artefacts cannot avoid being manipulated when they are presented in digital forms. In the digital age, art objects can be produced with the aid of machine, especially computers. How does digitisation impact creativity in art? Entering the age of Industry 4.0 with AI widely applied in every field of production, including creative artwork, questions have been raised on how much human creativity remains. Is machine creativity another type or form of representation entirely beyond human imagination? How much more posthuman will the world become when AI replaces human intelligence in art production? In Chap. 7, “Large Datasets and the Particularity of Art: Will There be Any Art in the Deep Learning Age?” Ana Peraica raises a profound question about digitally produced art. As she says, the idea that machines can make and understand art originated in Modernism. With the advancement of computer technologies, initially linear algorithms, and recently nonlinear generative art, the number of attempts at producing and analysing art grows. Neural networks, capable of deceiving the artefact’s origin, are making the most significant advancement. Systems such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) can compute reproductions of paintings and photographs, producing new ones, while convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can analyse artefacts for their styles and originality. CNN systems can also rank and chose art, sorting it into predefined categories. Yet, averageness resulting from these processes is precisely what art criticism has despised for centuries. Peraica’s study analyses the possible status of an acknowledged piece of art—Dorothea Lange’s photograph “Migrant Mother” (1936), comparing the human qualitative and machine quantitative analysis. Besides pointing to a current gap, the article also points to possible future developments. Traditional art criticism, as Peraica points out, has limitations in that it fails to account for the human-machine interface in the creativity of art production. In Chap. 8, “Van Gogh’s Universe in the Crossways of Audiovisual Arts and Digital Technology: A Comparative Case Study from an Intermedial Perspective,” Fernando Valcheff-Garcia examines a corpus of three artistic objects which reimagine Vincent van Gogh’s life and work utilising a comparative intermedial perspective. The multicultural and interartistic nature of these works, coming from diverse geographical regions across the twenty-first century, calls for an exploration of their connections and contribution to Van Gogh’s universe. After presenting their general characteristics and the framework utilised for the inquiry, this chapter focuses on a critical analysis of the objects’ materiality, ranging from their technological configuration to the interweaving languages of painting, music and poetry. Van Gogh’s painting went through acute modifications over the years. One of the most radical

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changes that took place during the last years of his life gave way to much brighter colours due to the influence of the French Impressionists and the Ukiyo-e art, a genre of colourful Japanese visual art consisting of woodblock prints and paintings that enjoyed great popularity at the time. Along with Georges Seurat’s studies of Chevreul’s Law of Simultaneous Contrast of Colours (1839), these influences profoundly affected Van Gogh’s work, setting the ground for the most prolific period of his life. A heterogeneous use of the palette that conveys “a belief in colour as an emotional/aesthetic carrier of meaning, almost independent of form and composition.” The corpus hereby studied revolves around many of the aspects through strategies that transpose the aesthetic parameters of Van Gogh’s painting to digital media. In the case of transmedia art, Garcia’s study demonstrates the benefits of digitisation that can enhance the effects of artistic representation. In Chap. 9, “New Stage Aesthetics in the Digital Age,” Minghou Liu shows how stage performance can be enhanced by digital technologies, if not overused at the expense of performance art. She takes as examples the new-style Peking opera, The Imperial Concubine of the Tang Dynasty, staged by the Shanghai Peking Opera Theatre, and the dance drama, The Never Vanishing Radio Wave, staged by Shanghai Song and Dance Ensemble, which are acclaimed theatrical performances in 2019 in Shanghai. She argues that apart from the charm of the performers, the two plays’ appropriate application of digital multimedia and the virtual audio and video designed in line with the plot and the acting also greatly added to the power impacting the audience and enriched the language for stage performance. One example is replacing the traditional physical scenes and property on the stage with high-tech dynamic pictures on large screens, which resulted in giving the new Peking opera The Imperial Concubine of the Tang Dynasty more room for stage performance, and giving a movie-like quality to the dance drama The Never Vanishing Radio Wave, which depicts the espionage war between the Communists and the Kuomintang. The use of digital multimedia has broken through the traditional concept of time and space and promoted the development of 3D presentation on the stage. It is the result of merging various artistic forms and technologies in creative experimentation with new modes of performance, and has successfully brought to the audience a new aesthetic experience in the twenty-first century theatre. In many theatres in China today, there is increasing experimentation in using digital technologies in stage performance.

Sight and Representation In Chap. 10, “Luvv Bazar: Queer and Feminist Representation in Music Video After the Internet,” Ryann Donnelly argues that user-populated video platforms, such as Youtube and Vimeo, have accommodated the production and circulation of subversive Queer and Feminist music videos since the platforms’ rise in the mid-2010s. In the post-Internet shift away from MTV and comparable networks (VH1, BET) as the predominant source for music video distribution and consumption, websites such as

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YouTube and Vimeo have allowed independent, and emerging artists to create and display music video—a medium that was historically relegated to a few television stations, and produced almost exclusively by major label artists with sizeable budgets. The ways in which these technological developments of the mid-2010s changed music video’s modes of production, distribution, consumption and regulation are all inextricably linked to the proliferation of subversive representations of gender and sexuality in the medium. For independent artists and directors, Youtube has provided a place to distribute music and video, legitimising the DIY production of media that could suddenly be accessed as easily as work by mainstream artists. As an arena largely populated by the content of its users, YouTube has offered an unprecedented channel through which to present, and access Queer media, and to engage with cultural differences historically avoided, or censored by mainstream media. This study begins within an overview of the pre-Internet literature on sexual representation in music video to highlight the stark rise in Queer and Feminist representation in the medium, and its analysis after the launch of Youtube in 2005. Donnelly points out an interesting phenomenon that the digital media when it is userpopulated in the post-Internet age brings about ideological changes in representation. Chapter 11, “Demystify Twenty-First Century Creativity, Innovation and Education Through Film Analysis” by David Kei Man Yip, uses films as examples to study how creativity comes about. Creativity and innovation are respectively divergent and convergent thinking involving critical, reflective and design thinking across-the-board in various fields and settings. Creativity and innovation are important skills in the twenty-first century networked and knowledge-based global economy. In the future of work, being creative and innovative is very important to stay competitive. With emerging technologies, such as AI, Big Data, 5G and many smart technologies, new tools give rise to new ways of thinking, expressing and doing things. However, creativity is often an internal, hidden and personal thinking process. The essence of creativity and innovation is often abstract, intangible and sometimes full of mysteries and misconceptions. This study takes a content analysis approach to discuss creativity and innovation through biographical films about the most creative and innovative people of our time. Through content analysis, this study examines a selected group of biographical films inspired by or based on real-life characters in hopes of shedding new lights on how creative innovation works. Through analysing some of the thinking patterns of these great creative and innovative minds depicted in this film genre, the key focus of this study aims to discuss with new perspectives the topics of creativity and innovation, which is abstract and multi-factual in nature. After all, being creative and innovative is to examine issues from multiple perspectives. To demystify is to make this invisible and abstract process of creative innovation more visible for discussion. Yip’s study probes a very important issue in artistic creativity, that is, how technologies can inspire new ways of production and new possibilities of creativity. However, while technologies support creativity, they do not replace creativity. Chapter 12, “Visual Art as Alternative Epistemological Approach” by Myriam Dao, draws our attention to issues of epistemological roots, discourse, power and politics of visual art. As an artist and scholar, Dao presents a theoretical reflection on

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her artwork in relation to the underlying epistemologies. Quoting Jean-François Lyotard, Dao affirms that “knowledge and power are simply two sides of the same question: who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided?” The argument in her study is that alternative epistemologies need alternative analytical frameworks. In addition to academic epistemic standards, the primacy of written language, and particularly the English language, erodes cultural and epistemological diversity. The question this study seeks to address is how hegemonic thought and language might be replaced by an alternative approach, such as that of visual art, not only as tool but as an object of reflection and archive. Dao’s proposal for “Visualisation of Culture” presents a selection of two artworks constituting my corpus, my statement and manifesto. She further argues that art, and especially the visual arts, has been mobilised in Social Science seminars for some years in the study of social issues. However, the place given to them sometimes makes her confused. Is mobilising guest artists just a passing phenomenon to update the academy? Do works of art only have illustrative value to support the researchers’ points of view? What is the status of the image in the hierarchy of knowledge? The artist’s position of exteriority to the institution, or even his/her social commitment, is indispensable to the academy. The Pictorial Turn in 1992 gives the visual a subversive and critical force vis-à-vis ideology—a real social and political force. Writing from the perspective of a practising artist and architect and from her background in Vietnamese and French cultures, Dao problematises ideological representations of art in academic discourses, especially in the tradition of the French Academy.

Some Observations The rise of visual culture since the twentieth century can be accounted for by the advent of technology in film, TV and museum exhibition, but it can also be understood as a paradigmatic shift towards representation as a visual means to interpret culture, with new understandings of the site-sight dilemma and the co-implications involved in the dilemma and tensions. Visual culture is visual representation of culture, in which museums play a significant role in manipulation and representation. Complicating the issue of representation is the rise of digital sites replacing the actual sites. As digital sites rely heavily on visualisation, sights are replacing sites in daily life. In certain cases, especially in news reporting or in crime investigation, sights, such as photos and videos, are considered as a corollary of truth. In reading the twelve studies presented in the volume, the reader will find them so rich in their broad coverage of theoretical issues that deal with digital culture, representation and ideology in art and museum. The authors in this volume are museum curators, communication scholars, visual artists, theatre artists, filmmakers, literary critics, historians and university senior professors who are established in their own fields. The collection thus represents a multidisciplinary approach to the complex issues underlying the advent of technologies and digital culture.

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When we discuss digital culture, it is inevitable that we must touch on issues relating to “Industry 4.0,” arts tech and posthumanism. “Industry 4.0” has brought about the digital revolution where digital transformation has impacted the ways we live and work. Our lives are increasingly automated and we have become digital dependent in our daily activities. When we see a film or a stage performance, or when we go to a museum, we see objects and hear stories that are digitised in their representation and presentation. Many of these actual experiences are now being replaced by their digital counterparts: Digital theatre, animation films, digital museum, and digital library, all of which can be seen on a computer screen. We do not have to go the actual cinema, theatre house, museum or the library. Everything can be found in the fingertip. The virtual has replaced the actual, and the digital has displaced the physical. This is digital culture, digital life and digitalism. The wider applications of digital technologies in art and cultural production, the less is the human participation and creativity. Creativity remains and so far cannot be replaced by AI, but the role of creativity is changed to be more intellectual and less technical. That is the case of posthumanism that we witness in technological advancement. As AI and robots are playing increasingly important roles in our lives, we need to look to the future engaging with the realm of ethics and humanism.

Acknowledgements

The studies collected in this volume, which is the fifth in the Springer Series Digital Culture and Humanities: Challenges and Developments in a Globalized Asia, consist of contributions from many distinguished scholars who are specialists in art criticism, AI art, museum studies, theatre studies, filmmaking and creative education. I would like to express my gratitude to all of them, who have been patient with my work in editing their contributions and putting them together as a coherent volume. The idea of this volume sprang from my work on digital culture since 2016. I am privileged to have the support of many colleagues at the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong who share my interest in digital culture. My colleagues Paul Fung, Eva Hung, Anna Tso, Rochelle Yang, Patrick Mok, Shiru Wang, Muk Yan Wong, Rachel Lo, Joanne Chow, Wendy Liu and Vickie Chau must be acknowledged for their assistance in various academic and administrative roles. To all of them, I owe a debt of thanks. The contributors of this volume are scholars, artists and professionals from Austria, Croatia, France, Israel, Singapore, Spain, the UK, the USA, China and Hong Kong, who have been conducting research in their respective areas of expertise. The volume represents the interests we share and our hard work despite the abnormalities in life that we have gone through over the past two years of the pandemic. I am pleased that our work finally bears fruit. I would like to thank Lang Kao, Director of the Centre for Great China Studies, and the Research Grants Council, Hong Kong, for the funding support (Reference number: UGC/IDS14/17) given to the research that led to the publication of this volume. I must also thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions for revision of the manuscripts. The editors and the staff at Springer deserve a special note of thanks for their devoted work in making this publication possible. Kwok-kan Tam Editor, Volume 5 August 2023

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Contents

1

What is a “Site”? Human Scales, Embodied Experiences, and the Physical-Digital Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Robbie B. H. Goh

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Sight as Site: Virtual Andersen in East Asia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kwok-kan Tam

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Archives and Museums in the Decontextualised Digital World . . . . Sandra Malenica

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Do Museums Still Need Objects? Politics of Museums Reconsidered in the Digital Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wenrui Li

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Museums and Archives in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Post-representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yael Eylat Van Essen

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Implicit Heritage Values in Online Collection Databases: Assessing the Presentation of Egyptian Artefacts in Art Museum Contexts . . . 105 Eli E. McClain

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Large Datasets and the Particularity of Art: Will There Be Any Art in the Deep Learning Age? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 Ana Peraica

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Van Gogh’s Universe in the Crossways of Audiovisual Arts and Digital Technology: A Comparative Case Study from an Intermedial Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Fernando Valcheff-Garcia

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New Stage Aesthetics in the Digital Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Minghou Liu

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Contents

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Luvv Bazar: Queer and Feminist Representation in Music Video After the Internet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Ryann Donnelly

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Demystify Twenty-First Century Creativity, Innovation and Education through Film Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 David Kei Man Yip

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Visual Art as Alternative Epistemological Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 Myriam Dao

Correction to: Van Gogh’s Universe in the Crossways of Audiovisual Arts and Digital Technology: A Comparative Case Study from an Intermedial Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fernando Valcheff-Garcia

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Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

Chapter 1

What is a “Site”? Human Scales, Embodied Experiences, and the Physical-Digital Interface Robbie B. H. Goh

Abstract Digital technology has disrupted the traditional notion of a “site” as a physical space, to be experienced purely in bodily terms. No longer are websites merely perfunctory adjuncts to their physical sites, performing simple functions like disseminating visitors’ information and transactions like ticket sales and fundraising. The increasing prevalence of virtual tours, interactive content, and the large amount of other data that can be housed on the virtual site makes the virtual visit less of a consolation prize and more of an interesting experience in its own right. At the same time, the physical site is not disappearing, despite these technological advances and the factors impeding physical travel (including the coronavirus epidemic, and environmental concerns about air- and long-distance travel), but remain primary to our own embodied experience of the world. The juxtaposition of physical sites and their corresponding digital ones raises both conceptual issues (to do with what now constitutes a “site”, particularly that of a well-known attraction or venue) and practical ones about how our narratives, methodologies, and terminologies increasingly have to deal with this gap or duality. Keywords Aura · Bodily experiences · Digital site · Human scale · Physical site · Platform · Virtual realms The digital age has dramatically changed the notion of a “site”, both as a location for lived experiences and as a research practice and methodology about such experiences. On the one hand, digital culture has greatly expanded the notion of a site and the projection of the site beyond any actual physical location. Some notable examples include the digital projection of religious sites, such as churches, onto a web platform that can include not only information about the church, but also such virtual experiences as webcasting of religious services, and “deep” information (such as church history, or the biographies of key leaders) that may not even be available via “surface” interactions in the actual physical site. Digital platforms have also R. B. H. Goh (✉) Provost Office, Singapore University of Social Sciences, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Sight as Site in the Digital Age, Digital Culture and Humanities 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9209-4_1

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extended the reach of memorial sites, such as holocaust memorials and heritage buildings, again not only offering a “site” experience for those unable to visit the physical site, but even offering “deep” information (links to other similar sites, historical information, interactive experiences, etc.) not easily available in the physical site. The fact that all such digital information is available via search engines like Google means that e-visitors may come to know of such sites as it were “accidentally”, without prior knowledge of the physical site or any prior intention to visit it. This strongly qualifies any notion of the priority of the (older, pre-established) physical site. On the other hand, however, the advantages of digital versions of sites can also conceal the fact that they offer an alternative notion of the site that misses out on some of the crucial features of the physical site. These include physical experiences (dimensionality, acoustics, haptics, communal participation) as well as intangible aspects which might be called the “aura”, “spirit”, or “atmosphere” of a place. The etymology of “site”—from the Latin “situs”, meaning “position”—captures some of the physicality implicit in the origins of this term. This paper evaluates the interplay between these two notions of “site”—the physical and digital—and considers the implications of this divide for research in the humanities and cultural studies.

Varieties of Physical-Digital Site Interfaces The relationship between physical and digital spaces might be summed up in the following four categories: 1. As (purely) digital platform—this was inherent in the original conception of the “website” in the early days of digitalisation and is perpetuated in terms like “dating site” or “meeting site” to refer to purely digital platforms. 2. As inspired by a physical place, but without links or interactions between digital and real-world versions. Thus while there are player forums which try to identify real-world inspirations for game sites (for example, the worlds in the popular game “The SIMS”), such identifications are not verifiable, and the game worlds function as their own independent spaces (The SIMS forum). 3. As an analogue for a physical place—for example, digital reconstructions of physical sites, as in archaeological reconstructions of ancient cities, or virtual tours of properties in real estate websites, or Building Information Models (BIM) as a proxy for the inspection of physical buildings. Here the analogic relationship stipulates some correspondence between physical and digital sites; if the archaeological dig unearths new features, the corresponding digital site has to be updated accordingly. However, these updates and interactions can be fairly occasional and sporadic. 4. As the interaction with or complement to a physical space—for example, webpages that complement the information and roles of physical sites. This could include live streams or video recordings of events happening in the real,

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or websites that complement and expand the reach and functions of physical spaces such as places of worship, stadia, and stores. Both the physical and digital spaces interact closely, but both also have their independent roles, functions, and characteristics. The majority of existing scholarship has focussed on the first and second of these conceptions: the site as full digital experience, with the implications this has for research. The digital site is regarded purely on its own terms, as a virtual construction and experience; there is rightly little or no consideration of the interaction between digital and physical conceptions of space, since these forms of digital sites either have no corollary physical site or are only loosely inspired by such a site. This is the sense in which Jacobs and Cooper (2018, pp. 56–61) speak of the “physicality” in digital spaces such as simulators and games as “a simulation of physical space and tangible experiences”; while this digital physicality draws on our basic bodily experiences, it allows the radical transformation or transcendence of those experiences, for example “teleporting” over distances in Second Life. It is also the sense in which Smith (2017, pp. 25–26) speaks of the “political realm” as a space where participants meet, but in the “intangible connection” of a “web of relations”. Certainly the sense of digital space as a virtual platform for various purposes such as marketing, business modelling, “placeless”, and “invisible” virtual labour relies on the freedom that comes from a lack of correspondence to any physical, brick-andmortar site (El Sawy & Pereira, 2013; Flecker & Schönauer, 2016; Koslowski, 2016). It will immediately be seen that categories 3 and 4 impose different parameters on the notion of the digital site, parameters that come from the interrelation between the physical and the digital. For category 3, in which the interrelations between physical and digital sites are more fixed and static (than in category 4), the tenet of accuracy dictates that the digital site will correspond to the features of the physical one in various ways: dimensions and perspectives in immersive space need to approximate those in physical space or need to be specified in recognisable units of measurement (such as feet, square feet, cubic feet, acres) if drawn in plan or listed out. Since digital sites in this category are usually for purposes such as scholarship, commemoration, sales or promotion, a degree of fidelity (in terms of the correspondence of digital to physical site) is desired and sought for. Since they are primarily intended to replicate and disseminate the characteristics of the physical site, digital sites in category 3 are relatively limited in terms of offering alternative features that complement the physical site and that are capable of creating an alternative spatial experience. For example, a virtual or “360” tour offers little more than the possibility of seeing what would have been seen in a physical tour, but perhaps lacking some details not captured by the video, and without the somatic orientation (the number of steps from wall to wall, the degree of freedom of bodily movement between the bed and wardrobe, etc.) of a physical tour. In category 4, the relationship between the physical and digital sites is more diverse and complex than in category 3. While there is still some notional correspondence between the two—in the sense that the digital site is not merely an

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imaginary or invented place, not a purely digital platform, as in the case of categories 1 and 2—in category 4, the digital does not merely function as a faithful analogic extension of the physical site. In complementing the physical site, these digital sites not only extend the reach and accessibility of the former, but—in using digital media—also in many ways transform and augment the features and characteristics of the physical site. In so doing, these digital sites stretch the notion of the “site” from its original meaning of a physical position or location, thus also challenging the traditional human experience of sites. Such is the case with (for example) the physical experience of a play compared to the play’s digital form (which may include links to annotations or other relevant material) in the theatre’s archive; the experience of watching a sporting event in a stadium versus watching a recording with post-match analysis; touring a museum or gallery in person versus doing an online tour; attending a religious event in person versus online; and other similar scenarios. The present chapter focuses on digital sites in categories 3 and 4, where the necessary interrelationship between physical and digital sites creates complexities of translation and navigation between the two modes. The hybrid experience of both physical and digital versions of the same space may create constructive “cyborg” experiences in Haraway’s famous formulation (Haraway, 1985), but it may also create disjunctive scenarios in which the aspects of each space are lost in the pivot to the other space.

The Digital Site and the “Transcendence of Limitations” Digital sites generally represent a transcendence of the limitations of physical sites. Spaces that are too small and limit the number of physical visitors, can take on many times more visitors via a digital platform. Spaces that are too large and complex to be fully appreciated in a single day’s visit, can present more features in a shorter space of time through digital links and edited visual tours. Remote sites that are difficult to access physically, can gain more exposure through a corresponding website. A purely digital platform, with no corresponding physical site, does not have these limitations, although there may be others (such as limitations of server capacity, or poor site design and thus difficult navigation of the site). Digital sites that arise as a means of overcoming the limitations of its corresponding physical sites, have many advantages. These advantages became clear in the era of cheap mass travel when global tourism (excited in part by social media’s popularisation of certain physical sites) overloaded the capacity of many physical sites, and digital marketing developed strategies to extend the reach, accessibility, and income stream of physical sites beyond that which came from on-site visits (Wirtz, 2021; Kolb, 2011; Albert & Rebecca Dodds, 2013). As Kolb (2011, pp. 273–274) observes, the use of digital platforms to supplement physical sites (in this case, towns and cities as tourist attractions) creates the possibility of “multiple messages that differ for each group” of targeted visitors. This is also to say

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that the perception and experience of the digital site will differ from group to group, depending on what is accessed and what is not, how much time and attention is paid by different visitors to each menu item on the digital site. It is all the more true that the experience of visiting the physical site will differ markedly from the various different experiences that can be had by different visitors to the digital site. We can thus speak of the “plurality of site experiences” created by the functional existence of both physical and digital sites (as opposed to a relationship where one is dominant and the other largely subordinate, as with the case of sites in category 3 discussed above). This plurality of site experiences, and what it means for our understanding of the “site”, will be discussed subsequently, but before that it would be helpful to list the ways in which digital sites augment physical ones and transcend their limitations: 1. In space: allowing more visitors to access the site than would be physically possible. This is particularly true and pertinent for sites that are compact and difficult to navigate, for example, houses of historical significance, or remote archaeological sites. 2. In time: digital sites, having no closing or down time (apart from periods of server maintenance), allow 24/7 access in a way that physical sites (which have restrictions imposed by staffing, repairs, and upkeep, operating costs such as air conditioning and electricity) cannot. 3. In market/visitor segmentation: by presenting or highlighting different features or aspects of the site (vis-à-vis the physical site, as well as vis-à-vis different sub-sites or menu items within the overall web presence). 4. In structuring and containing additional information: while the information that can be presented at physical sites is relatively limited (in the limited space and attention span available for posters, brochures, and perhaps some multi-media displays), digital sites can make much more information available (to be accessed only if the visitor is interested in it), and can even hyperlink to related information on other websites. 5. In speed of updates: digital sites can post information such as closures and events almost immediately, lacking which the physical site can only rely on postal mailers or on-site posters which have a considerable delay between the incident and its dissemination. The examination of a few examples of the relationship between physical and digital sites elaborates on some of these advantages of the digital corollary. Over the past few decades, it has been common practice for certain popular physical sites— for example, places of worship, tourist attractions, historical sites, and sites which combine all these elements—to create digital sites that are in many ways correlates of the physical ones. The motivations may be to provide more information, to increase interest and “visits” (including digital ones), to preserve or archive material, to increase revenues, or (as necessitated by the coronavirus epidemic) to allow some form of continued activity and engagement when physical visits were impossible or extremely constrained. Accordingly, the digital sites have had certain general features: the visual-spatial correlation is fulfilled through elements such as photo

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Fig. 1.1 Canterbury Cathedral, in Kent, England

galleries, video tours, sometimes Google Maps functions such as location in the neighbourhood, map view, and street views. Important events held at the site could be live streamed or recorded for later access. The digital sites contain a wealth of diverse information that may include detailed historical information, financials such as ticket sales or donation information, links to transportation and accommodation information or related sites, and others; this information is organised in different tabs that effectively form sub-networks of information so that a visitor can more easily find what is required. In the event of important events such as unexpected closure or crises such as accidents or terrorist attacks, announcements and updates can be quickly flashed prominently across the main webpage, to alert the prudent visitor before any visit to the physical site is made. The digital site serves as an extension or amplification of the physical one, creating much greater reach, impact, or revenue than the physical one would have been capable of on its own. To illustrate this, a good example would be Canterbury Cathedral in Kent, England (Fig. 1.1). The Cathedral traces its history back to AD 597, and is a significant part of the historical heritage of England, a popular tourist landmark, but at the same time also an active place of worship. The Cathedral hosts close to 2000 worshippers at its main service on Christmas Eve and at its peak in 2007 welcomed more than one million tourists and pilgrims (Canterbury Cathedral “Cathedral Worship Statistics”; MacSwan, 2018). Upkeep of the 1400-year-old Cathedral and grounds, including the salaries of its hundreds of church staff and conservators, costs approximately £18,000 per day (Canterbury Cathedral “Did You Know?”). Challenges such as the coronavirus epidemic and fears of terrorist attack (especially in the wake of the 2015 Paris attacks) have resulted in dips in physical visitors, with a resulting fall in its visitor income to well below its operating costs, and a pressing need to raise funds through donations (MacSwan, 2018;

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Canterbury Cathedral “Did You Know?”). The physical limitations of the Cathedral (although it is sizeable relative to many other churches), together with the time limitations (given that visitors’ activities have to work around the church’s worship services), also mean that access to digital sites and resources would extend its reach and income stream beyond that derived from physical visitors and help it achieve its goal of covering its operating shortfalls. The website allows Canterbury Cathedral to make available a much larger body of information than would be available to the in-person visitor, over the course of a typical visit of several hours. This includes not only the more common “about” information typical of most websites, but also (under the “Heritage” menu) information about the Cathedral’s archives and library (including an interface to search the catalogues), the more important events in the Cathedral’s 1400-year history (including hyperlinks to more information about related topics such as “AngloSaxon Canterbury”, “The Magna Carta”, “Thomas Becket” [the Archbishop martyred in the reign of Henry II)] conservation work and projects, and so on). Another “Learning” menu contains plentiful information about school visits and learning resources, conferences, and research material (with some overlap from the “Heritage” menu). The “Visiting” menu not only contains the essential information about visiting hours and tickets, but also additional information about group visits and tours, special “behind the scenes tours”, and accommodations options. The “Get Involved” menu contains information about employment opportunities, volunteerism, church services, and the Cathedral’s organisation chart. The “Support Us” menu provides not only the expected appeal for funding, but also different donation options, and different loyalty and affiliation schemes. The Cathedral Shop is accessed through another tab and allows virtual visitors to purchase items connected to the Cathedral and have them delivered to their homes. In terms of the Cathedral space, this can be experienced through image galleries (which are categorised into general public-access images of the interior and exterior, as well as of services conducted in the Cathedral and images from the Cathedral’s archives). Some of the images include panoramic or inaccessible perspectives not easily available to typical visitors (except perhaps with drone images), as well as historical images which present a picture of the Cathedral very different from the present one. The Cathedral space can also be experienced through a virtual tour, which consists, not of video footage, but rather “360” still perspectives of 9 select locations in the Cathedral that can be dragged and manipulated (in the fashion of Google Map’s “street view” function) to give the viewer a view of the surrounding environment from that particular spot. The virtual space of the Cathedral, in presenting some perspectives not easily available to physical viewers, also becomes an alternative spatial orientation and experience compared to that obtained from a physical visit. The incorporation of historical views from the archives emphasises the Cathedral as historical artefact that has persisted over time, whereas in a physical visit the emphasis is more of the Cathedral as an imposing and architecturally stunning site in the present time. The offering of nine sites in the virtual tour— three in the Bell Harry Tower, one in the Crypt, and five in various points in the main Cathedral—imposes a selection and prioritisation to the virtual visitor’s experience

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Fig. 1.2 Game simulation of the Battle of Bannockburn, Stirling, Scotland. The electronic game captures some of the (historical and spatially diffuse) information which visitors would otherwise not be able to see

of the space, implicitly suggesting that these sites and perspectives are more significant than others (Canterbury Cathedral “Virtual Tour”). Canterbury Cathedral offers a particularly illuminating example precisely because of its rich history, large and complex spatial organisation, and multi-functional (historical, religious, touristic, research) status. The physical-digital spatial gap may not be as prominent in the case of more spatially simple or homogeneous contemporary sites with just one or very few functions—for example, a small neighbourhood park or a fairly new local bar or convenience store (assuming that these would have a digital corollary). However, the conceptual and experiential gap between the physical and digital space is not unique to Canterbury Cathedral and can be seen in other complex sites such as other religious sites (temples, synagogues, mosques, especially ones of greater spiritual, social, and historical significance); museums and art galleries; old and renowned educational sites such as the betterknown Oxford or Cambridge colleges; open spaces of historical and touristic significance (for example, the site of the Battle of Bannockburn in Scotland (Fig. 1.2), or filming locations for popular shows such as the New Zealand sites used in The Lord of the Rings, or the Northern Ireland sites used for Game of Thrones), and so on. Although the physical and digital versions of these sites are often treated as separate entities, they do at least notionally constitute alternative versions of the same site, which not only creates dissonances in the experience and

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understanding of the site, but also raises conceptual issues of what exactly constitutes a “site”.

Physical or Digital Sites: Types of Experiential Dissonances The gap that opens up between the physical and digital experiences of visiting a particular site will be most significant when both the physical and digital versions are (in their respective ways) large, complex, and packed with information or sensory data. The gap is correspondingly less significant when either version of the site is less developed and becomes seen as merely a complement or adjunct to the main version. Where the gap is more significant, the experiential dissonances occur in several categories: 1. The Branding or Narrativisation of the site. 2. The Somatic or Human Scale experience. 3. Intangible Factors (“Aura” and “Atmosphere”). 1. Branding or Narrativisation: the amount of information available on the digital site, which is not available on the physical one, can present the site in a quite different manner. To return to the example of Canterbury Cathedral, the physical site is more likely to be viewed and experienced as a tourist attraction, a pleasant site for a day visit, an example of grand church architecture. In contrast, the digital site not only presents a certain select or prioritised visual perspective—in this case, the gallery of contemporary and historical images, and the nine select visual tour sites—but also such an abundance of detailed historical information that slants the perspective of the Cathedral towards being a national treasure, an important historical resource. At the risk of oversimplifying, we could say that the physical Cathedral tends to present a “simpler” touristic experience such as would be suitable for casual visitors (including children) of all backgrounds, whereas the digital Cathedral presents a more “serious” image suitable for history buffs, researchers, and Christian pilgrims and worshippers. To illustrate with another example, we could consider the famous football stadium for the Manchester United club, known as Old Trafford. For Manchester United supporters, the stadium is a must-visit physical site on home game days, in order to participate in what is seen as the unique atmosphere of supporting their team during play, especially in a crucial game or against traditional rivals. However, the online version of Old Trafford is quite different, branding and narrativising itself more as a tourist attraction than as a site of intense match-day drama and emotions. In fact it would not be inaccurate to say that the Old Trafford website (in contrast to the physical stadium) prioritises the appeal to visitors more than to the football team’s supporters: thus there is a tab entitled “United Events” which pitches the stadium as a corporate events venue, a “Megastore” tab which encourages visitors to “pick up a souvenir to remember your visit to Old Trafford”, and a “Visiting Supporters Guide” for fans of other teams playing at

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Old Trafford (Manchester United “Old Trafford”). The webpage even encourages visitors to “visit on a non-matchday” (presumably in order to avoid crowds and maximise their access). For diehard supporters of Manchester United, the information on the Old Trafford website would be extraneous to their experience of the stadium, which focusses on their physical presence in the stadium and the sporting contest played out on match days. While the website still functions as a conduit for physical visits to the stadium, those visits become optional (in the sense that it is possible to “see” the stadium through digital tours or buy team or stadium merchandise online) in a way that is not possible for supporters of the team. In this way the website brands and presents a “different” Old Trafford than the physical site known to the local fans. It is not necessarily the case that the physical site is branded as a simpler, more touristic, and accessible site than the digital one. Some physical sites maintain as serious or solemn an aspect as their digital corollaries and may also control or limit access to visitors deemed to be suitable for this ethos. Examples include sites that are primarily places of worship (in contrast to a site like Canterbury Cathedral, where the worship function is in a sense overshadowed by its touristic significance and architectural grandeur), or sites of great solemnity such as the museums or memorials of genocides or visible human suffering and trauma. Access to such physical sites can be limited in various ways: by rituals and language use that discourage non-religionists, by refusing entry to children or by enforcing solemnity (as is the case in some genocide memorial sites), by restricting access to parts of the site and/or ensuring a certain degree of physical discomfort even in accessing the sites that are open (Goh, 2018; Wee & Goh, 2020). Contrastively, the digital versions may present a more generalised image that is more accessible to tourists and other casual visitors. This is the case, for example, with many of the mosques in Singapore, which tend not to have welldeveloped websites packed with information about their operations and beliefs; the consequence is that whatever web presence these mosques have tend to present them as sites of general cultural and visitors’ interest, even while the physical sites function as vital places of worship for Muslims. 2. Somatic or Human Scale Experience: under current technological conditions (and for at least the near future), visiting a digital site will be very different in experiential terms compared to visiting it physically. Even the best virtual tours are unable to capture the physical experience and experiential scale of a physical visit, including things like effort (the amount of energy expended to move from place to place), haptics (the texture, heft, resistance, and other physical attributes of objects), ambience (the full range of environmental sights, sounds, and contacts), and other somatic elements. Feedback sensors can create some of the physical sensations of interacting with a space and its objects, but these remain what Ivan Sutherland (1965) famously called a “mathematical wonderland” rather than the actual physical interactions they model. Indeed, the whole point of the digital space was to do things that could not be done in the real world, and Sutherland pointed out that “there is no reason why the objects displayed by a computer have to follow the ordinary rules of physical reality with which we are

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familiar” (1965, p. 508). While sensory and feedback devices and technology have advanced far more than Sutherland originally envisioned, and even where the aim (for example, with flight simulators and trainers) was for the digital experience to mirror or mimic the physical, there remains a considerable gap between the somatic sensations in the physical world and their corresponding virtual versions (Woolley, 1993; Hayles, 1999). If the gap persists in terms of physical versus digital “bodily” experiences of objects in space, this is also true of the experience of space itself. For one thing, as discussed above in the context of Canterbury Cathedral, virtual spaces can direct the visitor to certain select or preferred sites, thus effectively limiting the visitor’s experience when compared to the entire physical space of the site. In addition, there are also factors of human scale in the experience of space: the ways in which we measure and thus experience physical space in relation to the body. This can be seen in old terms and measures of space using body parts (such as “feet”, “hands”, or “handspans”, and “cubit” which was based on the length of the forearm), or using a measure based on human movement (such as the “mile”, from the Latin “mille passus” meaning a thousand paces). The human scale is also at play in experiential factors such as fatigue (the experience of long distances or durations of physical effort), aches and pains (the experience of prolonged use of or impact on a particular body part in the space), heat or cold (the experience of thermal properties of the space), and so on. Other aspects of human scale orientation include height and depth, for example, the feeling of looking up at a very tall building or of looking down from a great height. While there are devices that can approximate some of these human scale sensations in digital spaces (for example, the use of treadmills to simulate the sense of effort and fatigue in travelling distances, or thermal sensory suits to simulate heat and cold), the full array of somatic experiences of physical spaces cannot be simulated. Simulations in the digital space, where they exist, also do not correspond exactly to those in the physical, so that they create a different and parallel experience rather than the same one. 3. Intangible factors (“aura” and “atmosphere”): spaces where events take place— particularly events which bring together a large number of people with a common interest or goal—contain a set of intangible affective dimensions which are difficult to replicate. Examples of such spaces include famous sports arenas during a game, or concerts featuring very popular artistes, or religious venues packed with zealous religionists (Wee & Goh, 2020, pp. 60–77). Such places can be said to contain an “aura” or “atmosphere” which cannot be easily reproduced by reconstructing quantifiable components (such as the size and shape of the arena, the number of people contained in it, the lighting and sound equipment, etc). “Aura” here is used not in the sense of the intangible human energy postulated by Hinduism and New Age Spirituality, but rather in Walter Benjamin’s sense of the artistic quality which cannot be reproduced mechanically or captured by mechanical means of reproduction such as photography or filming (Benjamin, 1955/2019). Benjamin’s example is a stage performance of Macbeth, where for the audience the “aura” cannot be separated from the actor’s

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performance, for example, in a video recording of the stage performance (Benjamin, 1955/2019, p. 180). In the same way, a video recording of a live concert or a football match, while accurately conveying certain elements—the order of songs, certain particular features of the performance, the final score of the game and which players scored—cannot convey the experience of being in the concert hall or stadium during the physical event. Attempts to replicate the in-presence aura digitally—for example, comments by visitors on the site’s social media page, the use of emotive language and superlatives, the use of emojis, still pictures or recordings of live events—only go a certain way towards capturing the sensical and emotional atmospherics of the live event. Elements of that aura are closely tied to the emotional state of the event participants, but also attach to the place itself through shared memory, the dissemination of images and narratives, and a “reverence” which grows around certain places (Wee & Goh, 2020, pp. 60–72). Taking a tour of a famous church or stadium outside of a religious service or match does not have the same atmosphere as during those events; yet it can contain for the visitor an emotional connotation and excitement which is missing from merely a virtual tour of the same place. The excitement of visiting certain places is precisely what drives the pilgrimage impulse, even when we stretch the definition beyond purely religious sites and include other sites reverenced in sports, popular culture, history, and so on; it explains why such pilgrims are seldom content with digital alternatives and insist on a physical visit to the site (Goh, 2014; Wee & Goh, 2020).

What is a “Site”?—Conceptual Issues The experiential dissonances existing between our experience of physical and digital sites lead to the conceptual question of what, exactly, constitutes a “site” in our hybrid and cyborg state. On the one hand, the obvious answer is that both the physical and digital versions are sites in their own way. However, common usage is not to recognise multiple versions of a site as independent and separate entities, but to constantly juxtapose and compare them, including their differences. There is a persistent impulse both to insist on the singular and unique identity of a site and perhaps also to prioritise the physical version as the “real” one. Silcox (2017), in discussing the human reluctance to commit to spending all our time hooked up to a machine-generated reality, compares this to our aversion to remaining in a drugged state, a hallucination, or a perpetual dream. We would reject all these states (together with being in a virtual environment) because of “the idea that human autonomy has a peculiarly fundamental and non-negotiable type of value” that inevitably devalues in comparison these other states of being or consciousness (Silcox, 2017, p. 4). There are, of course, other more positive perspectives that envision the self as in a vital interaction between physical and digital realms or see the self as nested within a range of virtual experiences, rather than insisting on the privileging of the real physical existence (Heim, 1998; Gualeni & Vella, 2020). The more positive

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perspective on the role of virtual realms is largely based on gaming and social media, although even here there are numerous cautions about the “dark side” of investing too much time and one’s identity in such virtual worlds (Kallay, 2013; Sheldon et al., 2019; Weiss, 2020). There thus remains a persistent sense of the privileging of the physical realm and our place in it, the sense that no matter how much virtual worlds can enhance our consciousness, activities, and existence, they remain secondary to a primarily physical existence and world. This “secondariness” is all the more true of digital sites where a degree of faithfulness to the primary site is crucial, for example, in property virtual tours or archaeological models, where any failure to reflect significant features of the physical site would be lamentable if not actionable. Yet of course this view of the secondary nature of the virtual space is becoming increasingly problematic, in light of the many advantages it poses over the physical one. As discussed above, virtual spaces (where they exist as alternative to physical ones) can provide access for far more people than their physical counterparts, can facilitate access for people unable to travel to the physical site, can incorporate far more information than a physical visitor is likely to obtain in a single visit, among other advantages. In a world increasingly connected by technology, but also physically separated by politics, epidemics, distance, and the environmental costs of travelling long distances, practicality dictates that virtual connections and virtual spaces will increasingly become the go-to resource for tourists, researchers, spiritual pilgrims, sports fans, concert goers, and other visitors. There are several implications for this intractable gap between physical and virtual sites. Firstly, as Benjamin (1955/2019) posited for the work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction, the “aura” of physical sites may well fade, or at least be experienced only by a small group of people privileged to visit the site in person. For the majority of visitors only able to visit the site virtually, that aura—the atmosphere, touch, affective impact, human scale, and other dimensions unique to the physical experience of the site—would be completely inaccessible. The two types of visitors would have to acknowledge that they are in essence talking about two different spatial experiences altogether, even though they are notionally bound by the same designation. Secondly and consequently, the two different types of spatial experience require terms and methodologies which respect that gap or difference. The experience and study (whether informal or formal and researched) of a virtual site require terms which acknowledge the peculiarities of that site vis-à-vis the physical one: the terminology of the archived, arranged, mutable, and ultimately constructed nature of the site, and the issues of subjectivity and impermanence associated with that nature. Researchers already acknowledge this in citing web-based material, by indicating in the bibliography the date on which the website was accessed, implying the possibility that another researcher visiting the site on a different date may see (or may have seen) something quite different. Concomitant with the transient and mutable nature of the digital site, however, is its constructed and archived nature, which also needs to be acknowledged and taken into account: virtual tours, for example, need to acknowledge their limitations, omissions and editorial changes from the physical site, and to account for these choices and emphases. This includes

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details such as lightening/darkening, filtering, changes in speed, and other video editing that go into virtual sites which may superficially pass for “exact” correspondences with the physical version. The flip side of this is the terminology and analysis of physical aspects—the aura or atmosphere, the human scale experiences, the haptics, and other bodily encounters—which cannot be captured in the virtual site. While this latter is often noted in performance studies (when referring to a video recording of a live performance), there needs to be a similar awareness of the difference of the physical site in other phenomena such as sports and religious events, real estate advertisements, tourism brochures, and the like. Thirdly, as the physical and virtual experiences of space differentiate and widen, and as fewer visitors may have the opportunity for a physical visit compared to visitors in the virtual realm, there is a need to acknowledge the widening gap between the “local” and the “global”, between those with physically sited knowledge and those who can only encounter the site from an “outside” perspective via various digital platforms like websites, and social media images and recordings. In a sense anthropologists have anticipated this spatial divide by postulating the ethnographic binary of “emic” and “etic” meanings. The local “emic” experience, of the site in its physical aspects and as it is used as a venue, needs to be differentiated from an “etic” analysis based mostly or solely on reconstructed views and data “outside” of the site’s physical status and function. In the Manchester United example discussed above, the discernible gap between local supporters’ experience of Old Trafford as a match-day site on the one hand, and visitors’ experience of the stadium as a web resource and possibly as a physical site (but preferably on non-matchdays, as encouraged by the website), could usefully be distinguished as “emic” and “etic” experiences, respectively, of notionally the same stadium. This is not to invalidate etic analyses and perspectives (which have advantages of objective distance and a wider range of resources and comparisons), but simply to say that our understanding of the virtual site is as different from the physical one as the anthropologist’s etic analysis is from an emic experience.

Conclusion: Living with/in Two “Sites” The coronavirus epidemic and the boost it has given to virtual meeting platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, as well as to virtual travel and entertainment alternatives, should certainly not be seen as the twilight of physical sites such as office spaces, tourism sites, places of worship, cultural venues, and the like. The same should be said of the much-hyped “metaverse” and its promise of a compelling “embodied internet” (Newton, 2021), which will not overturn the physically embodied nature of our interactions with each other and the world. Even as technology enables more detailed virtual spaces to be constructed and popularises the use of such spaces in increasing aspects of human behaviour, it is sanative to remember that physical sites are not only the anchor of our existence as physical creatures, but also that they contain tangible and intangible distinctive features which compel their use.

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Virtual spaces which have little or no correspondence with real ones are unlimited in their imaginative construction, with no significant issues of correspondence or interaction with real sites to constrain their nature. Any limit or constraint will only be imposed by human neurological and sensory patterns and what they expect and are capable of dealing with. However, a significant number of virtual sites will have various forms of correspondence with well-known and much-used physical ones, and this is where conceptual and analytical issues may arise from the increasing gap between the two. No longer merely supplements or adjuncts to the physical site, digital sites offer valuable components and features which make them compelling sites in their own right, particularly for those unable to visit the physical one. This gap is likely to increase as the world becomes more connected digitally, but also more disconnected in political, economic, and environmental terms. It is thus timely for a recognition of the conceptual separation of physical sites and their digital versions, and for the creation of separate analytical and terminological tools and methodologies to account for their different roles in our society.

References Albert, D. P., & Rebecca Dodds, G. (2013). Emerging methods and multidisciplinary applications in geospatial research. IGI Global. Benjamin, W. (2019). Illuminations (H Zohn, Trans. & H. Arendt, Ed.). Mariner Books. (Original work published 1955 by Suhrkamp Verlag). El Sawy, O. A., & Pereira, F. (2013). Business modelling in the dynamic digital space: An ecosystem approach. Springer. Flecker, J., & Schönauer, A. (2016). The production of ‘placelessness’: Digital service work in global value chains. In J. Flecker (Ed.), Space, place and global digital work (pp. 11–30). Palgrave Macmillan. Goh, R. B. H. (2014). The Lord of the rings and New Zealand: Fantasy tourism, pilgrimages, imaginative transnationalism. Social Semiotics, 24, 2. Goh, R. B. H. (2018). Memorialising genocide: Embodied semiotics in concentration camp memorials. Social Semiotics, 28, 1. Gualeni, S., & Vella, D. (2020). Virtual existentialism: Meaning and subjectivity in virtual worlds. Springer. Haraway, D. (1985). Manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology and socialist feminism in the 1980s. Socialist Review, 15(2), 65–107. Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. University of Chicago Press. Heim, M. (1998). Virtual realism. Oxford University Press. Jacobs, N., & Cooper, R. (2018). Living in digital worlds: Designing the digital public space. Routledge. Kallay, J. (2013). Gaming film: How games are reshaping contemporary cinema. Palgrave Macmillan. Kolb, B. M. (2011). Tourism marketing for cities and towns: Using branding and events to attract tourists. Routledge. Koslowski, N. C. (2016). ‘My company is invisible’: Generating trust in the context of placelessness, precarity and invisibility in virtual work. In J. Flecker (Ed.), Space, place and global digital work (pp. 171–200). Palgrave Macmillan.

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MacSwan, A. (2018, April 26). Slump in tourist visitor numbers to Canterbury Cathedral blamed on terror attacks. Kent Online. Retrieved October 28, 2021, from https://www.kentonline.co.uk/ canterbury/news/terror-attacks-behind-cathedral-visitor-slump-182020/ Newton, C. (2021, July 22). Mark in the Metaverse: Facebook’s CEO on why the social network is becoming ‘A Metaverse Company.’ The Verge. Retrieved November 13, 2021, from Mark Zuckerberg is betting Facebook’s future on the metaverse—The Verge Sheldon, P., Rauschnabel, P. A., & Honeycutt, J. M. (2019). The dark side of social media: Psychological, managerial and societal perspectives. Academic Press. Silcox, M. (2017). Introduction: The experience machine: From thought experiment to (virtual) reality. In M. Silcox (Ed.), Experience machines: The philosophy of virtual worlds (pp. 1–12). Rowman and Littlefield. Smith, T. G. (2017). Politicizing digital space: Theory, the internet, and renewing democracy. University of Westminster Press. Sutherland, I. E. (1965). The ultimate display. In Proceedings of the IFIP Congress (pp. 506–508). Wee, L., & Goh, R. B. H. (2020). Language, space and cultural play: Theorising affect in the semiotic landscape. Cambridge University Press. Weiss, A. (2020). The dark side of our digital world, and what you can do about it. Rowman and Littlefield. Wirtz, B. W. (2021). Digital business and electronic commerce: Strategy, business models and technology. Springer. Woolley, B. (1993). Virtual worlds: A journey in hype and hyperreality. Penguin.

Robbie B. H. Goh, PhD, Professor of English and former Dean of Humanities, National University of Singapore. He currently serves as Provost and Professor of the Singapore University of Social Sciences. He has published on English literature and cultural studies, which include Christianity in Southeast Asia (2005), and Protestant Christianity in the Indian Diaspora: Abjected Identities, Evangelical Relations, and Pentecostal Visions (2018), Contours of Culture: Space and Social Difference in Singapore (2005), and Asian Diasporas: Cultures, Identity, Representation (2004). Email: [email protected].

Chapter 2

Sight as Site: Virtual Andersen in East Asia Kwok-kan Tam

Abstract H.C. Andersen has been warmly received in East Asia for more than 100 years. Most of Andersen’s stories have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. They are read as children’s literature for values and morals that are universal, but hidden in these values and morals are notions of truth, self-identity, and individuality that challenge traditional East Asian concepts of selfhood. Andersen represents new values for East Asian modernity. Tracing the reception of Andersen in East Asia, this study deals with changes in representation, particularly the wide circulation of Andersen stories in animation films in Japan and Korea, and the technological representations of culture in the digital age. The Tokyo Andersen Park and the Shanghai Andersen Cultural Park are discussed as attempts of re-siting Andersen. In this study, Chinese representations of Andersen are contrasted with the Japanese and the Korean so as to understand the different receptions of Andersen, as well as the digitalisation in the East Asian context. The recent trends of mediatisation of Andersen are discussed in relation to cultural consumption and gamification. Since much of the recent development in mediatisating Andersen has to do with visual representation, photos will be provided as illustrations. An interesting phenomenon in the East Asian reception of Andersen is the representation by both physical sites, such as parks and restaurants, and virtual sites (or sights), such as in film, video, games, and websites. This chapter is a revised and much expanded version of an article published by the author in 2019, “Technologizing Cultural Consumption: The Tales and the Virtual in East Asian Andersen” (Tam, 2019). Keywords Andersen · Andersen Park · Children’s literature · China · Cultural consumption · Denmark · Digital · Digital technology · Exhibition · Film · Gamification · Japan · Korea · Mediatisation · Museum · Seoul · Shanghai · Sight · Site · Storytelling · Technologisation · Tokyo · VR · Zen meditation

K.-k. Tam (✉) School of Humanities and Social Science, Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Sight as Site in the Digital Age, Digital Culture and Humanities 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9209-4_2

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H.C. Andersen has been received in East Asia notably as an author of children’s literature. His fairy tales have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean and have been made into live-shot films as well as animation films. Andersen’s tales are an important component of the school curriculum in China, Japan, and Korea. As Johan de Mylius has commented, “In China and Japan, Andersen enjoys immense popularity. In many parts of the Far East, budding writers of children’s books model their style on Andersen’s techniques” (Quoted in Follet, 1991). Fairy tales are of course not necessarily meant only for children because they carry messages that are of interest and of moral values to adults. In a newspaper report on the Andersen exhibition held in Zhejiang Museum in 2015, there was the following comment: ‟Andersen’s enlightening fairy tales are not only bedtime stories for Chinese, but also listed as texts in Chinese primary and middle schools. Educators think that noted fairy tales including ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and ‘The Ugly Duckling’ can nourish children’s minds and cultivate morality” (Wu, 2015). Andersen appeals to both adults and children all over the world. It is the adults, such as teachers, parents, museum curators, TV programme hosts, and filmmakers, who project the image of Andersen as a writer of children’s literature. The Andersen community in East Asia is a constructed world in both reallife and digitised virtual representations. Both China and Japan have Andersen parks, while Korea has held exhibitions of Andersen’s life and works and adapted Andersen in TV drama and films. This shows that Andersen is not to be read only; his tales are to be experienced as part of contemporary life. One thing that deserves attention is that the Chinese and Japanese Andersen parks and the Korean exhibition have acknowledged their connection with the City Museum of Odense.1 In this sense, the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Andersen are extensions, but also variations, of the Danish Andersen. Together they form an international community that presents a world of fantasy derived from Andersen’s tales. It is a cultural community, in which interrelations are reimagined and are based on the universal values of love, sympathy, respect, friendship, trust, truthfulness, equality, humanitarianism, and environmental protection. The East Asian Andersen is part of the international Andersen community, which is not simply a connection with different cultures, but also a world of fantasy and self-reflection that transcends the limits of national or regional culture. In China, Japan, and Korea, Andersen is a household name. Most of Andersen’s tales have been translated into local languages and are in some sense culturally and literarily localised. According to a survey conducted by Book People, the ten best fairy tales by Andersen in Britain are ranked as follows:2 1

Odense is a city in Denmark where Andersen was born and there was an Andersen Museum. Odense also serves as a major centre that promotes Andersen in the world. 2 The Book People’s survey is based on readerships in the UK. Here is the link to it: https://www. thebookpeople.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/article?articleId=top-10-best-hans-christian-ander sen-fairy-tales. Accessed 29 May 2018. However, in China and Japan, the ranking is different. The UK ranking can be used as a comparison because the Andersen tales are translated from English that began one hundred years ago, rather than from Danish.

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

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The Emperor’s New Clothes The Little Mermaid Little Ida’s Flowers The Ugly Duckling Thumbelina The Princess and the Pea The Little Match Girl The Nightingale The Steadfast Tin Soldier The Red Shoes

However, in East Asia there is some variation in popularity. “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is No. 1 in China and South Korea, while it is the “Little Match Girl” that is No. 1 in Japan. The difference in popularity shows the variation between China, Japan, and Korea because of cultural differences in the three countries.3

Virtual Re-siting of Andersen in Shanghai The Shanghai Andersen Cultural Park is also called the “Andersen Paradise”. As the word “paradise” suggests, it is meant to be a utopia for visitors to experience a world of recreated Nordic culture in China. It is an 81,000 square-metre cultural site opened in 2017 and an educational facility purposely built for children. The entrance to the Park is designed in such a way that it looks like a time passage (Fig. 2.1), physically separating the present and the future, but culturally conjoining the future with the past. When one enters the Park through this entrance, one enters into another temporal zone, which is more than one hundred and fifty years ago in Andersen’s time, and also another spatial zone which is Denmark. The passage is designed as a time and geographical tunnel. Once entered, one goes to another world. It opens up to the future, but it brings one back to the timeless world depicted in Andersen’s tales in the nineteenth century. The park is a Chinese futuristic project in re-siting Andersen. It is futuristic because Andersen is digitised and gamified in interactive contexts for the virtual generation of the Chinese. The park uses Andersen’s fairy tales as theme elements to create seven different theme districts: “The Tin Soldier Square”, “Thumbelina’s Adventure”, “Star Wishes’ Town”, “The Emperor’s Garden”, “Mermaid’s Harbour”, “Ugly Duckling’s Village”, and “The Swan Group”. Each district has its unique landscape gardening and there are different games and rides for children (Fig. 2.2). It uses the same principle of design as in a utopian fun park. The centre piece in the Park is the Andersen Museum which was designed by the Odense City Museum, and it allows children to listen to Andersen’s tales and see the paper cut art of Andersen. 3 According to a Ph.D. study conducted by Li Wenjie, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is the most popular of Andersen’s tales in China. See details in https://gbtimes.com/how-hans-christianandersens-tales-changed-on-the-journey-to-china. Accessed 29 May 2018. I will discuss this difference in greater detail in the later part of this chapter.

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Fig. 2.1 Entrance to the Shanghai Andersen Cultural Park. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

The Shanghai Andersen Cultural Park is architecturally designed like a fairyland, with a three-storey castle (Figs. 2.3 and 2.4) occupying the central position in the park. It is the centre piece of the architectures in the park. Other buildings and streets are meant to visually repricate a Danish town. There are also installations of characters, such as the Mermaid (Fig. 2.5) and the Emperor, from Andersen’s tales. The Park gives visitors, children and adults alike, the sense of a dream world. It is a site of sight, a cultural construction of culture with artificially built scenery and technologically enhanced educational facilities, both of which are meant to replicate the scenes depicted in Andersen’s stories and to re-capture the historical scenes where Andersen was telling stories to children (Fig. 2.7). Visiting the park gives the experience of being transposed to another world at another age. The park thus serves the purpose of re-siting Andersen for re-sighting. Sight-seeing in the park is site-seeing in re-imagination. Andersen and the characters in his tales are presented in an exotic environment as the Park attempts to recreate Danish culture as much as possible in its original. Visiting the Shanghai Andersen Cultural Park provides children with the experience to immerse themselves in the plots they have learned from the tales. They can reimagine themselves being part of the tales and thus share the values and morals Andersen’s tales convey. It is an identity building experience. For the lack of reallife experience in Denmark, Chinese children may find it difficult to imagine themselves being part of the Andersen tales. However, once they are in the Park,

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Fig. 2.2 Guide map of the Andersen Fairy Tales Park in Shanghai. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

they will have the feeling of “dreams come true”. This experience requires a different dimension of imagination because it is an extension of reading experience to real-life encounters. The Andersen Cultural Park is a cultural site which is made possible by the sight experience that it provides to the visitors. Sight-seeing is site-seeing. The sight experience consists of the park landscape with a river (Fig. 2.6) that runs through the park and provides the context to visualise “Thumbelina”, “The Little Mermaid”, “The Emperor”, and other stories. As water is a major metaphor in Andersen’s fairy tale world, it is through the river and the water landscape in the Park, which connects the seven tales represented by the seven districts, that children are able to exercise their imagination about the Andersen community in which animals, human beings, and nature co-exist in harmony with each other and share the same values. The architectural design with Western-style streets and buildings constructs a world of colourful experience. Sight-seeing in the Park is to make the experience of the site part of the viewer’s subjective experience. The saying “eye opener” works in the way that the viewer’s experience is transformed after seeing the site and

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Fig. 2.3 An aerial view of Shanghai Andersen Park. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

Fig. 2.4 Architectural design, Shanghai Andersen Cultural Park. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

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Fig. 2.5 The Little Mermaid. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

Fig. 2.6 River connecting the tale districts in the Park. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

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Fig. 2.7 Statue of H.C. Andersen showing his storytelling. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

experiencing the cultural exoticism. Through the exotic landscape, the viewers situate themselves in the world of Andersen’s tales which are rendered as sites of culture with morals that promote values universal and basic to humanity. The Andersen Museum in the Park is a two-storey building with exhibits that showcase a chronology of major events in Andersen’s life, his achievements as a fairy tale writer, the art of his paper cuts, and Chinese translations and adaptations of Andersen’s tales. The first thing that visitors see is a white marble stature of Andersen telling his stories to children (Fig. 2.7). For children visitors, the statute appeals to children’s sense of identification with Andersen as a figure who speaks to them and is in a close relation with them.

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Fig. 2.8 Andersen’s paper cuts in the museum. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

The area following the statute of Andersen is an exhibition of paper cuts, which shows Andersen’s mastery of the art (Fig. 2.8). In this section, children are excited to see the paper cuts, which are animated by the shadows and lights and seem to speak to them in the children’s language. Paper cuts are animated images from Andersen’s tales that look like live characters. The museum is a secluded world that brings the visitors back to Andersen’s world in the nineteenth-century Denmark. It achieves an estrangement effect in a black box environment, where the visitors are confronted with a distant world of unfamiliar but shared experience. In the museum, there is a section that exhibits early Chinese translations of Andersen’s tales (Fig. 2.9) and Chinese writers’ praises of Andersen. Visitors to the museum will see Andersen as a

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Fig. 2.9 “The Little Mermaid” in Chinese. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

writer and an artist who has a vision to re-present the world with new morals that transcend human limitations. The world in Andersen’s tales is a utopia and a dream, but it is possible to be realised if human beings identify with Andersen’s values of love, friendship, respect, and equality. This is the educational part that is meant to impart knowledge about Andersen to the children with a view to deepen their understanding and appreciation of the values in Andersen’s tales. Being in the park, the visitor feels like being transposed to a different realm of experience; it is hence a world of re-siting the visitor, but just re-siting Andersen. The Shanghai Andersen Cultural Park is a carefully designed dream world that aims at identity building for China’s new generation. This dream world provides a physical space for the real and the virtual to meet so that what is real and what is

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Fig. 2.10 An animated portrait of Andersen who brinks his eyes and talks. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

virtual do not distinguish, and together they form a new dimension of experience. The exoticism in the Park serves two purposes: one is to appreciate Andersen in a Danish context and environment; the other is to globalise the younger generation so that they are culturally broadened in their vision of the world. After visiting the Park, they will know ‟Antusheng” is Andersen, a Danish author, though he has a Chinese name in transliteration. The Shanghai Andersen Cultural Park offers a journey of visual experience and interactive participation, where children learn while they play. At the entrance of the Andersen Museum, there is an animated portrait in which Andersen brinks his eyes and talks (Fig. 2.10) as if he were a living person welcoming visitors to the museum. The use of digital technology in animating the portrait brings Andersen to life. “The living Andersen” lives not just in his ever-fascinating tales, but also in a technology enhanced image that greets the visitors. The interactive digital representation brings Andersen live and culturally friendly to children who grow up in the digital age. Besides the animated portrait of Andersen, there are digital games for children and adults to play in the Castle. These games are based on scenes taken from Andersen’s tales. The most popular among the interactive digital games is “The Little Mermaid” (Fig. 2.11), where children learn the relationship between human beings and sea animals and understand that water is the source of life. The awareness of environment protection is thus enhanced. In the game, the player will take the perspective of the mermaid and take an active role in navigating the sea and hence will undergo the process of identification. The interactive games are designed in such a way that a child has to play together with an adult, supposedly a parent. They are humanising activities for collaboration

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Fig. 2.11 The big screen in “The Little Mermaid” interactive game. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

and sharing of experience. As a BBC report states about the Shanghai Andersen Cultural Park, “Children will be educated through playing in the theme park” (2018b, BBC, 2006). The gamification of Andersen shows not only that morals in Andersen’s tales can be fun, but also how childhood is conceived in Chinese education in which playing is emphasised. Playing is participation, in which the players become an active agent in self-building and identity construction. The players will learn to master not simply the skills of the games, but also the concepts embedded in the processes. Through the processes, the players will be immersed in “gameful thinking” (2018c, “Gamification in Education” 2016). A study of gamification in childhood development makes the following comment about digital culture: With the advent of video games, games have returned in full force as a cultural product, with more people in North America consuming video games than movies and music. In point of fact, 58% of Americans play video games, 45% of gamers are women, and 58% of parents play video games with their kids as a way to socialise with them. Games are part of the cultural landscape, and they aren’t going anywhere. (2018a, “Why Use Gamification in Education”.)

Games are part of human culture and have a long history. It is human instinct to play games, and they are also the origin of sports. A sense of cooperation with other players and competition is developed in playing games. In the digital age, games are ways to expand the players’ perception of life and of the world because many of the digital games make use of Internet technology that connects different cultures and different geographical locations. Geographically far from each other and culturally different, Denmark and China are linked through Andersen, now in new ways by means of digital culture. From the perspective of the children, playing games requires creative thinking, active participation, and interpretive skills, all of which

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are conducive to the expansion of the self beyond a person’s sphere of experience. Learning foreign culture makes children global in their mindset (AlMarshedi et al., 2017, “Gamification and behaviour“). As can be seen in the Park, gamification has been playing an increasingly important role in Chinese life today. As of today, two more Andersen Parks have been built in China, one in Yancheng, Jiangsu Province, and the other in Qingdao, Shangdong Province, both of which are modelled after the Shanghai Andersen Park. While the two new Andersen Parks use more advanced digital technologies in the gamification of Andersen’s tales and characters, the Shanghai Andersen Park remains the prototype of the Andersen Park industry. Andersen has become part of modern Chinese consciousness, and his morals and values are ingrained in modern Chinese culture. With children growing up in their imagination of the characters and the tales, Andersen has entered the Chinese collective memory and cultural imaginary. The animation films made by Disney, such as the Little Mermaid (1989) and Frozen (2010), are favourites of Chinese children. Today, Andersen is a household name in China. Needless to say, it has become an industry with some commercialisation, such as the Andersen hotels in Beijing and Shanghai. However, there is another face of Andersen, which is the cultural and the educational, and this face of Andersen will never be compromised by commercialism. In Fudan University, there is a Nordic Centre which has held regular activities and conferences on Andersen. The book Hans Christian Andersen in China (2014), edited by Johs. Nørregaard Frandsen, Sun Jian, and Torben Grøngaard Jeppesen, deserves special merit for its comprehensive study of Andersen as an academic subject (Frandsen et al., 2014). The essays collected in the volume are used as references for teaching Andersen and children’s literature in university courses. The reception of Andersen is an educational project in China, regardless of what form it has taken or will take.

Re-siting Andersen in Tokyo Similar to the reception in China, Andersen is also a household name in Japan. There are restaurants and bakeries named after Andersen. There is an Andersen Village, even Andersen Temple and Andersen Academy. The HCA Society of Japan was founded in 1980. Most of Andersen’s fairy tales and two biographies have been translated into Japanese. The Funabashi H.C. Andersen Park is a cultural site established in the Chiba prefecture in the year 1968. Funabashi is a sister city of Odense. The Andersen Park has an area of 36.7 ha and is built on a hill. It comprises three zones, the “Children’s Kingdom”, the “Fairy Tale Hill”, and an art museum for children (Fig. 2.11). The “Fairy Tale Hill” is a reproduction of the countryside landscape of Denmark in the 1800s where Andersen was born. In the Park, Andersen symbols or installations are few, except for the statute and a few sculptures. The Funabashi H.C. Andersen Park is a green park, as well as a fun park with a large playground for children (Fig. 2.12). Its iconic view is a windmill (Fig. 2.13) on the topic of the “Fairy Tale Hill”, which gives a sight of exoticism. Visitors in this

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Fig. 2.12 A guide map of Funabashi H.C. Andersen Park. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

part of the Park feel that they are in Denmark because of the European landscape, the architectures, and the installation, such as the Little Mermaid (Fig. 2.14). The Danish houses in miniature (Fig. 2.15), together with the windmill and the Little Mermaid installation, form a picture of exoticism. However, the visitors who are not Japanese

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Fig. 2.13 The Windmill. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

and have seen images of the Mermaid in Denmark will wonder whether the Japanese one is represented in the style of Japanese comics (Fig. 2.14). A comparison between the Shanghai Andersen Cultural Park and the Funabashi H.C. Andersen Park yields insights into how the Chinese and the Japanese are different in their reception and presentation of Andersen, though both attempt to create a site for the sight. The Chinese Park is a world of re-created experience with exoticism for consumption by children. The major attractions are games, both digital and mechanical, that are designed based on themes in Andersen’s tales. However, the Japanese Park is more indigenised in its presentation of Andersen. The landscape is constructed in the style of a traditional Japanese garden which brings a sense of

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Fig. 2.14 The Little Mermaid. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

Zen silence for the contemplative visitors who are adults, not children. On the style of the Japanese garden in Funabashi H.C. Andersen Park, the Japanese architect Akira Suzuki has the following description: “This has moved creativity away from the folly, as an object of contemplation, scale-less and position-less on the landscape’s horizon and solitary in the mind” (Suzuki, 2015). While the “Children’s Kingdom” is nicknamed “Naughtiness Zone” which is to make children crazy by indulging them in physical game activities, the “Fairy Tale Hill” and the pond below is a place for visitors to indulge themselves in contemplative thinking in an environment removed from city life. On the whole, the Park has two sides of character: activities and quietude.

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Fig. 2.15 Danish houses in miniature. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

In terms of landscape, the pond (Fig. 2.16) below the “Fairy Tale Hill” and the iron bridge (Figs. 2.16 and 2.17) above it form a contrast. While the pond is in Japanese style, the bridge is in Western style. The bridge is called “Bridge of Love” connecting the two high grounds in the Park. In this part of the Park, there is obviously a mixture of the Japanese and the Danish landscape symbolised by the connecting bridge. The aesthetics of a Japanese garden is shown here in its simplicity, naturalness, and minimalism so that the visitors become one with the environment and can perform Zen meditation. The landscape in this part of the Park with the bridge dividing the Western from the Japanese suggests the co-existence of two cultures and a transition from the Western to the Japanese as the visitors walk from one side to the other. It signifies how Japan absorbs Western culture in a way that it also preserves its own tradition. The art museum has exhibitions of Japanese comics, which show little relation with Andersen. Comics are a necessary part of Japanese life, especially for children. The comics exhibition in the Children’s Art Museum shows that the Park has Andersen as a focus, but it includes other Danish cultural figures. The exhibition in November 2017 focused on Rasmus Klump and demonstrated how the comic strip series had impacted Japanese comics. The lit display (Fig. 2.18) shows Ramas Klump and his friends on a sailing boat to Japan under the stewardship of a Japanese sailor in manga style. It vividly carries the message of Japan’s efforts in bringing Western culture to Japan, though on a Japanese boat, meaning being host and being

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Fig. 2.16 A pond in Japanese landscape below the Western-style iron bridge. (© Photo by Kwokkan Tam)

Japanised. On the boat, the sail hangs the national flags of Japan and Denmark. The Chinese characters (Kanji) on the boat say: Have a smooth and safe sail. On the lower right hand corner, there is a sign saying “Velkommen” (welcome) in Danish. The Chinese characters, or Kanji, and the Danish welcome sign that appear on the same artwork are sufficient to give a sense of cultural mixture in the Japanese reception of Danish culture. The poster of the Rasmus Klump exhibition (Fig. 2.19) shows a picture of Rasmus Klump painting a Japanese manga with the assistance of his friends. This is a subtle way to hint at the Danish influence on Japanese comics.4 Rasmus Klump putting the finishing touch on the nose of the manga means to give life to it. The exhibition showed many Japanese translations of Rasmus Klump comics, some of which have been translated into Japanese.

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Rasmus Klump is a Danish comic strip created in the 1950s for children. The exhibition displays Japanized images of the comics.

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Fig. 2.17 Iron bridge seen from the Japanese pond below. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

Fig. 2.18 Danish comic figure Rasmus Klump on a Japanese sailing boat. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

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Fig. 2.19 A poster of the Rasmus Klump exhibition in Japanese comics. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

Re-imaginging Andersen in Korean Fantasies South Korea has many parks, but not an Andersen Park. In general, fun parks are less as popular as traditional parks in Korean culture. In other aspects of reception, such as translation (Fig. 2.20) and school curriculum, Andersen is one of the most wellknown authors in South Korea. His tales are memorable among Korean children.

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Fig. 2.20 Korean translations of Andersen’s tales. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

Fig. 2.21 Andersen Exhibition in South Korea, 2015. (Source: ttp://srdesign.co.kr/?ckattempt=1. Screen capture on 29 May 2022)

Despite the lack of an Andersen Park, Korea’s Andersen Exhibition in 2015 attracted more than 300,000 visitors. The exhibition was held in various places in South Korea, and the exhibition is like a movable museum with exhibits comparable to those in the Shanghai Andersen Cultural Park. Paper cuts and storytelling are the two major themes in the exhibition (Fig. 2.21). The exhibition was widely reported in the Korean media. The following is a description of the exhibition from “Denmark in Korea”: The result of cooperation between Seoul and Odense Municipality and sponsored by the Embassy of Denmark in Seoul and LEGO, the exhibition ‘I Belong to The World’ addresses children, families, and fairy tale-enthusiasts to see Hans Christian Andersen as a person – a young boy with a big imagination and many talents who grew up to write many stories that are loved all over the world even today, which also inspired countless adaptions and artistic interpretations. On display at the exhibition are original artefacts such as his bed and chair,

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Fig. 2.22 A poster of Red Shoes. (Source: http://www. listal.com/list/great-asianposters. Screen capture on 29 May 2022)

hand-drawn drawings, and paper ornaments, as well as inspired works by H.M. Queen Margrethe II and the American artist Andy Warhol. The exhibition also entails activity areas where visitors can explore their creativity in the spirit of Andersen by reading his works, watching animated films based on his tales, making paper ornaments, and listen to talks by a representative from the Children’s Book Research Organization. Another part of the exhibition is an interactive area where visitors can view LEGO artwork inspired by Andersen’s fairy tales and enter a LEGO building competition to win a prize. (Anonymous, 2018e, “Hans Christian Andersen exhibition opens in the heart of Seoul” 2015.)

Although the exhibition is not a park, it has all the elements of creativity, games, and artwork that are comparable to those in Shanghai and Funabashi. However, when film adaptation is considered, Korea no doubt takes the lead in the reception of Andersen in East Asia. Korean films and TV series have borrowed scenes or derived themes from Andersen’s tales. The most notable are Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (Dir. Kim, 2002), The Red Shoes (Dir. Kim, 2005), and Snow Queen TV drama (Dir. Lee, 2006). There is also a Korean song titled “Red Shoes”, performed by South Korean singer IU, from her third studio album Modern Times. The “Korean Dance: Andersen’s Gazes” (Lee, 2014) held performances in Seoul as well as in London and Hong Kong, both in October 2014. All these adaptations reflect Andersen’s place and role in Korean popular culture, which is a hybridised

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Fig. 2.23 Cover of a DVD of Resurrection of the Little Match Girl. (Source: https://opuszine.us/ reviews/resurrection-of-the-little-match-girl-jang-sun-woo-2002. Screen capture on 29 May 2022)

form with elements from European and American culture and also the technologised mediation of moral values in filmic images. The Red Shoes (Fig. 2.22) is a horror film, in which a woman picks up a pair of red shoes in the metro and later finds out that the shoes are cursed. The shoes bring her bad luck and causes a series of murder until the woman finds out the secret. Except for the pair of red shoes which is an image taken from Andersen’s tale, the film develops its own story line. In this case, it can be seen that Andersen’s tale serves as an inspiration for the film and also that Korean directors adapt foreign

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sources for the purpose of giving their own creations an impression of the exotic and unfamiliar. Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (Fig. 2.23) deals with contemporary life in South Korea. Typical of contemporary Korean culture, the film is a mixture of the real and the virtual. It has a story about a young man who is being bullied and finds no satisfaction in his job. One day he meets a girl who is the resurrection of the Little Match Girl in Andersen’s tale, and his life is completely changed after the meeting. To achieve a complete change in his life, the young man enters the world of a VR game to save the Little Match Girl from all sorts of dangers including attempted rape by a gangster. In the series of challengers that the young man faces, he enters the virtual world, in which there is a game called “Resurrection of the Little Match Girl”. If he wants to win, he must kill all those who buy a lighter from the young girl. When the young man wins, he finds that the Little Match Girl has been reprogrammed in the VR game. At the end when the game ends, the young man wakes up from his fantasy and returns to the real world, only to find that the Little Match Girl is beside him, but she has forgotten everything about the past. It is a fantasy world created in VR, in which the Little Match Girl has resurrected, and this fantasy world is part of contemporary Korean life. In the film, Andersen’s tale serves as an inspiration for fantasy in the virtual world in Korean culture. This world is a mediatised version of “magical realism”. Perseverance and sympathy are values advocated in the film. Snow Queen is a Korean TV drama. It bears the same title as Andersen’s tale, but its story departs from Andersen’s, except for that there is a cold-hearted girl in the Korea TV drama and this cold-hearted girl’s heart is to be melted with love. The motif of love is borrowed from Andersen, but the story is contextualised in Korean culture. China has an amateurly-produced film entitled The Mermaid Prequel (2016), which is an adaptation with a story about how the mermaid saves a village nearly ruined by a sand manufacturing plant. The film is a reflection on contemporary issues of environmental protection in China. Similarly, Japan also has an animation film, Ponyo (2008), which is inspired by Andersen’s Mermaid tale, though the story is not the same. Compared to Korea, China and Japan have few film adaptations of Andersen’s tales.

Virtual Andersen in East Asian Digital Mediatisation Other than the parks and exhibitions, which are physical displays and gamifications of H.C. Andersen and his tales, the major means by which Andersen is circulated and consumed in East Asia today is via digital media. Most of Andersen’s tales are available in video format on the Internet or in DVD, and they are dubbed into the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages for appreciation by children. Most of the videos are provided by Pingu, Cartoon Movies, or Gingerbread, and they are available in YouTube. In terms of story lines, there is little variation in the tales though being delivered in different languages. Children can watch the same story in

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Fig. 2.24 Andersen’s tales in Chinese-language videos and animation films. (© Photo by Kwokkan Tam)

Fig. 2.25 Andersen’s tales in Japanese-language animation films. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

different languages, and hence available on the Internet is a world of Andersen in multiple languages (Figs. 2.24, 2.25, and 2.26). A comparison of the Chinese-, Japanese-, and Korean-language videos shows that Andersen’s tales are sometimes adapted from the same sources, only that they are dubbed into different languages. The characters become Indian people if the source is from India; otherwise, they are Chinese or Japanese, so that the stories are localised to some extent. This shows that Andersen’s tales are universalised and adaptable for different local purposes. Besides, China, Japan, and Korea have their own versions of Andersen’s tales in video format. For children who have access to the Internet, they can choose international videos or local videos of Andersen’s tales. The availability of both international and local sources means that children are

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Fig. 2.26 Andersen’s tales in Korean-language animation and video. (© Photo by Kwok-kan Tam)

exposed to an international environment in their contact with Andersen. Though the representation of costume, manners and values may vary and may have different emphases, the international sources follow the same plots as in the original Andersen tales. Children who watch the videos will have similar experience about Andersen’s tales. In terms of local productions, Japan takes the lead in making animation films of Andersen because China and Korea have fewer productions of animation films. Japan’s anime and animation films are part of a huge industry that has a large market and is much more mature and advanced than China’s or Korea’s. Japanese anime and animations are unique and distinctly different from international animation. The colour tone, the narration, and the thematic emphasis are characteristics of Japanese culture. For example, “The Little Match Girl” is the most popular Andersen tale in Japan because, first, the animation film has excellent artistic features and the characters are beautifully drawn; and second, because of her sufferings the girl has won the hearts of many Japanese, for whom poverty and hardships in life are to be sympathised. In China and Korea, the most popular Andersen tale in recent years is “The Emperor’s New Clothes” because of the tale is a mockery of self-deception and lack of self-knowledge and it has relevance in contemporary politics.5 Digital representation of Andersen brings more possibilities for imagination and role playing, and hence fantasy. It is a techno-cultural trend in East Asia that is going to revolutionise our perception of the world. Enabled by the use of new technologies, such as VR and AR, interactive games have developed new capabilities that allow the players’ roles to be fantasised. Traditional texts can appear in new animated forms to enhance their visual sensibility, and in this way reading is complemented by watching and playing (Fig. 2.27).

5 For example, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” was cited in Korean politics to mock the follies of the last president Park Geun-hye in 2016.

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Fig. 2.27 Andersen’s tales are available in hand-held devices such as iPad and iPhone. (Source: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/h-c-andersen-read-along/id771769004. Screen capture on 29 May 2022)

Apart from producing new art forms, digital technology also connects cultures. An example can be found in the use of an Andersen App that has been launched since 2011: “Since January [to September 2011], Danish children and their parents have downloaded Denmark’s first children’s books for iPad approx. 70,000 times, and more than a third pay to have access to additional fairy tales. This success has become an incentive for Egmont to launch internationally in China, Turkey, England, Germany, Japan, Norway and Finland” (Anonymous, 2018d).6 Digital technology helps transcend the locale limitation of a site by mediating it as sight.

References AlMarshedi, A., Wanick, V., Wills, G. B., & Ranchhod, A. (2017). Gamification and behaviour. In S. Stieglitz, S. Robra-Bissantz, R. Zarnekow, & T. Brockmann (Eds.), Gamification: Using game elements in serious contexts (pp. 19–30). Springer. Anonymous. (2018a). Why use gamification in education? Classcraft. Retrieved May 29, 2018, from https://www.classcraft.com/gamification/ Anonymous. (2018b). China to open Andersen Theme Park. BBC. Retrieved May 29, 2018, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4782955.stm Anonymous. (2018c). Gamification in education. Learning theories, 2016. Retrieved May 29, 2018, from https://www.learning-theories.com/gamification-in-education.html Anonymous. (2018d). H.C. Andersen App Ready for International Launch. Egmont.com, 8 September 2011. Retrieved May 29, 2018, from https://www.egmont.com/Press/news-andpress-releases/HC-Andersen-app-ready-for-international-launch/ Anonymous. (2018e). Hans Christian Andersen exhibition opens in the heart of Seoul. Denmark in Korea. Retrieved May 29, 2018, from http://sydkorea.um.dk/en/about-us/temp-news-list/ newsdisplaypage/?newsid=dad36ed2-a7aa-4460-a115-122f5e4bfca4 Follet, C. (1991, October 13). Hans Christian Andersen’s Tales also draw scholarly audiences: Literature: Serious study of the Danish author challenges his image as writer of stories for children. Reuters. Retrieved May 29, 2018, from http://articles.latimes.com/1991-10-13/news/ vw-655_1_hans-christian-andersen

“H.C. Andersen App Ready for International Launch.” Egmont.com, 8 September 2011. https:// www.egmont.com/Press/news-and-press-releases/HC-Andersen-app-ready-for-internationallaunch/.

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Frandsen, J. N., Jian, S., & Jeppesen, T. G. (Eds.). (2014). Hans Christian Andersen in China. University Press of South Denmark. Kim, W.-H. (Director). (2002). Resurrection of the Little Match Girl [Film]. Retrieved May 29, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA0CQJbcHas Kim, Y.-G. (Director). (2005). Red shoes [Film; DVD]. Lee, H.-M. (Director). (2006). Snow Queen [TV drama]. Retrieved May 29, 2018, from https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8kcZzbBpRE Lee, K.-O. (2014). Andersen’s Gazes. Korean dance, Lee Kyung-Ok dance company. Retrieved May 29, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUUgLtOVnSU Suzuki, A. (2015, April 10). When a tree house no longer says ‘house,’ are we virtually there? Architectural Design. Retrieved May 29, 2018, from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ pdf/10.1002/ad.1905 Tam, K.-K. (2019). Technologizing cultural consumption: The tales and the virtual in east Asian Andersen. AKtualitet: Literatur, Cultur og Medier, 13(1), 218–248. Wu, H. (2015, January 30). 100 years of Andersen’s fairy tales in China. ShanghaiDaily.com. Retrieved May 29, 2018, from https://www.shine.cn/archive/hangzhou/100-years-ofAndersens-fairy-tales-in-China/shdaily.shtml

Kwok-kan Tam, PhD, is currently Chair Professor of English and Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science at the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. He is former Professor and Chairman of the English Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong where he worked for 21 years before joining the Open University of Hong Kong (renamed as Hong Kong Metropolitan University in 2021) as Chair Professor and Dean of Arts and Social Sciences in 2007. He is the former Head and current member of the International Ibsen Committee, University of Oslo, and is a Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. He has held visiting positions in teaching and research at Stockholm University, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität ErlangenNünberg, University of Tokyo, National University of Singapore and the East-West Center, Honolulu. His publications include Ibsen, Power and the Self: Postsocialist Chinese Experimentations in Stage Performance and Film (2019), Chinese Ibsenism: Reinventions of Women, Class and Nation (2019), The Englishized Subject: Postcolonial Writings in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia (2019), Ibsen in China 1908-1997: A Critical-Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, Translation and Performance (2001), The Politics of Subject Construction in Modern Chinese Literature (2000), New Chinese Cinema (co-authored with Wimal Dissanayake, 1998), and many edited or co-edited books on Ibsen, Gao Xingjian, Anglophone literature, modern Chinese literature, drama, and film. He is editor-in-chief of the Springer Series Digital Culture and Humanities. Email: [email protected].

Chapter 3

Archives and Museums in the Decontextualised Digital World Sandra Malenica

Abstract If we are all the same, but contextually different, and if our context in traditional humanistic historiography is defined by place and time, this study raises questions of how, in the digital world, decontextualisation and deplacing influence our divergence in the representation of ourselves in archives and museums. Can archives and museums be seen as global distributive networks of world knowledge and heritage? Living in a world of networks and horizontal principles of modelling in a digital world which knows no time and place, in the world where all can be context, but also does not have to be, archives and museums in the digital world can represent in two ways: through contextualisation of content and through contextualisation of themselves. If there is the global, then there is no local, but if there is the local, then there is no global. But as we see—there is still the local, no matter how global, and the contrary is true. This study argues that we are always global, and that archives and museums are the proof of that—by their contents and by themselves—because they are preserving the global contents, not local, and because their contextualisation of contents does not change in the digital world, they are empowering. Conversely, if contextualisation of museum contents does change, they are contextualised as local in the digital world. (Thanks go to the director of the State Archive in Varaždin Damir Hrelja and the director of the Varaždin City Museum Ivan Mesek, as well as to the museum employees Spomenka Težak, Petra Marincel, and Jelena Rančić who gave answers on the questions in the interview.) Keywords 3D · Archive · Croatia · Digital networked society · Digitalisation · Digitisation · Flows · Global · Local · Museum · Space · Time · Digital world An increasing number of archives and museums can be found online or in the digital environment, whether as 3D models of themselves or as artefacts held there, and whether they use digital platforms for virtual exhibitions or as online storage. When S. Malenica (✉) Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Sight as Site in the Digital Age, Digital Culture and Humanities 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9209-4_3

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digitalisation is an upgrade, a new way of reaching the public or a preservation technique, it does not present the digital in the scope of what being digital today is. Digitalisation is not only technology, communication, or metaphysical elaboration on the changes that are taking place (Bollmer, 2018). Digitalisation is so present today that we cannot define where it starts and where it ends (Gere, 2008). Digitalisation is a structure, a paradigm that has changed and is still changing, yet it also challenges our everyday life and our social models. Digitalisation transforms organisations, functions, and modes of society, thus making them distributive (Castells, 2010b; Carr, 2010; Galloway, 2004). Digitalisation of culture is more than a tool—the use of digitalisation, primarily in museums and archives, is to ask new questions beyond the standard practices, and not only to accept digitalisation as a moderator of new collaborations, but also as the platform where by distancing from the formative cultural context and ideas on participation can make archives and museums extensions of new real-life practices (Arrigoni et al., 2019). Redefining archives and museums should take into account that digital infrastructural models transform social interactions, therefore archives and museums which are public institutions and as such affected by social transformation. Provided that, the main premise of this study is that the digital world has influenced the physical world with its forms of organisation, consequently making archives and museums an integral part of the networked society. Therefore, the theoretical approach of this study includes the application of the theory of distributive networks on the concept of archives and museums in the global world. With an interdisciplinary approach, it is possible to respond to the challenges cultural institutions are facing related to the tendency of digitisation of their material, with emphasis on archives and museums, in order to become a part of the digital world. Subjects of this study are archives and museums as institutions, as well as the artefacts and documents stored in them. This study examines the State Archive in Varaždin and Varaždin City Museum, which have regional significance in the artefacts and documents gathered in the region. Varaždin is the old medieval city with rich and vibrant history and culture, which was for a short period of time the capital of Croatia (Težak, n.d.) in the eighteenth century.

Archives and Museums as Institutions Archives and museums are considered highly political in their selection and representation of the exhibits (Brown & Davis-Brown, 1998; Friedrich, 2018; Chambers et al., 2014). There is politics not only at the management level, but also in the work process of archiving, selecting, maintaining, and keeping material and that put archives and museums in the spotlight of preserving the social hierarchical structure in constructing a national identity (Brown & Davis-Brown, 1998). National identity was built and structured throughout the nineteenth century (Gellner, 1995, p. vii), the period when the archives and museums were built (Friedrich, 2018, p. 65; Chambers et al., 2014, p. 12). At the time when national institutions, similar as national

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language and literature, were constructed, the purpose was to distinguish one nation and its representation differential from every other. Archives and museums as they are perceived on the national agenda should make coherent structures and coherent narratives; they should not question them (Brown & Davis-Brown, 1998). Those social hierarchies are present and presented in the core of archives and museums, both reflecting but also forming structures that define them. Postcolonial theory reveals that the way history is written and presented is increasingly unicentric, markedly in the Western perspective. That is why the ethical dimension of collecting material in archives and museums is a point of concern (Murphy, 2016), as the curators and managers should take into account the circumstances and reasons for collecting certain material and place them in the wider context, respecting the transfer and interpretation of it (Kakaliouras & Radin, 2014). As Brown and Davis-Brown (1998, p. 18) state “archival activities such as acquisition, classification and preservation, are ‛technical’ activities that [...] are political, at least latently or potentially”. After the 1970s, when the main inquiry of humanities was concerned with identity, at the end of the twentieth century the main subject became a global agenda, in some way the natural outcome of postcolonial theory (Jay, 2010). However, as Spivak (2003) states, the global is not about making the East same as the West, it should be about inclusion of the other, about the other as a subject, not as an object. Abungu (2019) states that museums should be decolonised and the realities that they represent should be distinct, representing and making each part of our world unique and specific as it is, including all irregularities and injustice done in the past in the sphere of colonisation. Digitalisation has an important role on the organisational level of museums as it has on the level of representation, and the more global the reach, the more local their actions are—museums are becoming nodes of a wider global network making new knowledge through new collaborations (Vitali, 2016). Archives share data and use metadata since the beginning of information technology, but archives are not yet embracing the structural change of networked society, so they cannot respond to the phenomena that is specific to the networked distributive world where everything has a context (Gilliland, 2014). Museums, as archives, can connect our existence to all the other existences, with other pasts, other communities, and other cultures, making each artefact and document a nod in the variety of past, present, and future connections and interaction with all the human and nonhuman, material and immaterial world. Being distributed means that the institutions will become connected in new ways and that the artefacts and documents stored in different institutions will become accessible in their collective content oriented on the topic, not on institution or the place where it is stored (Marcum, 2014). Museums can be places for social integration (Brstilo & Jelavić, 2010) and archives can have a role to safekeep the records of the underprivileged (Gilliland, 2021), but the roles must not be misunderstood for the defining factors on the organisational level (Fraser, 2019). Connections in the digital world do not follow linear time and do not follow the social hierarchies or national borders; they have different kinds of order and modes of functioning based on global horizontal connections (Castells, 2010b).

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Furthermore, to communicate is to be a part of the network (Galloway, 2004). Theoretically speaking, all archives and museums make a network with many subnetworks. Those networks can be presented on the geographical map because each archive and museum has its own specific physical place but the map of the networks made of the artefacts is more complex. In the world of the digital, in which the digital and physical worlds combine, a network of artefacts becomes a network that can be identified concretely by location, either as in the original or as being represented, but it can also be abstract. Artefacts can be joined by any feature, even by size, colour, or material, making endless possibilities of combining artefacts beyond historical time and place (Lien et al., 2016). The digital in that network becomes a maker, both the structure and the context, constructing the artefacts in a nonlinear and non-national space. That context is not an empty space freed from the physical world; it is the network of artefacts that can be connected through various protocols (Galloway, 2004) and they can be localised. The global digital world is a process that began in the 1990s when the Internet and computers became part of everyday use and when a change in the fundamental structures of society, relationships, and communication began (Gere, 2008; Carr, 2010). In a globally connected world, nation-states lose power in the face of global forces of connectivity (Castells, 2010a, p. 303). There is no need for nations to be mediators between the local and the global, so one can be global without being national first. The complex relations of multiple identities function within local and global forces, but in the global world they do not signify the uniformity of global culture. On the contrary, they signify the profiling of a community that shares its identity on a global scale (Castells, 2010a). Therefore, the stronger the global connection is, the stronger local identity that is defined according to global paradigms and participation in the global network is. Globalisation is not about unification as abstraction; being local is always about a concrete place. Local is where all the universal values are transformed into the variation of possibilities determined by the various circumstances (Eagleton, 2002, p. 62). Since the twenty-first century the networked researches became more in use which marked a shift in the approach to the social phenomena by making relations and interactions more complex and detailed (Hensley, 2015). Those multileveled relations cannot be described merely with traditional tools and methods and the network as a method goes beyond the temporal and the specific, and it gives possibilities for new interpretations. Networked approaches can comprehend the hidden meanings in the layers of micro- and macrostructures and make the world seen as an interconnected collective where there is no hierarchy between the local and the global (Latour, 2005).

The Distributive Principle of a Networked Society The theoretical framework of this study is the concept of a networked society as defined by Castells (2010b). The most important characteristics of a networked society are flexibility, openness, dynamics, boundless and infinite expansion, and

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the possibility of fast and constant rearrangement. Within a networked society, the main forces are horizontal, and the relationship between the local and the global is directly related. Under the influence of the development of communication technology, the nation-states are no longer the main structures. In the network, all parts are connected and interdependent. The structure is multicentric, but also multi-layered. Although governance is global, the manifestation of the network is always local. According to Castells (2010b), what also changes within the paradigm of a networked society are places and time. Place thus becomes a space of flows, while time takes on the characteristics of timeless time. Within the space of flows, space is what defines time, not the other way round. Thus, in the context of archives and museums, space defines the time that is stored and presented within them. Archives and museums preserve the historical, linear time, but also participate in the world of simultaneity. In the joined world of the digital, the times interconnect and make the network of nodes where migration from a historical, local place to the global space is vertical; but connections are horizontal as well as global, making the local manifestation of a global network. When describing a networked society, Castells (2010b) elaborates on changes of organisational structures of the global world as a result of technological development which also becomes the main social structure. This study attempts to answer questions on what does it mean for archives and museums to participate in a globally distributive network, how the local is present in the global distributive network of archives and museums, what does it mean for archives and museums to be within the paradigm of a networked society, and how can archives and museums be studied in the distributive networked world.

Research Methodology For the purpose of this research, two in-depth interviews were conducted. Interviews were done in written form since questions were sent by email in March 2021. Both Varaždin City Museum and State Archive in Varaždin were asked the same questions. Questions were not numeric or segregated, but represented four topics and aspects of digitalisation. The first set of questions asked about new ways of presenting the work done in the institutions, including online presence and the use of the website and social networks. The second set asked about collaboration with similar institutions on local, regional, national, and international levels. The third set of questions asked about the amount and accessibility of digitised material through digital media, digital technology, and global connections. The fourth set contained statements that could be answered or denied. Most of the interview questions required written answers from which qualitative data were collected, while several questions and answers included quantitative data with possibility for written elaboration. The archive and the museum were also asked to describe their concept in present time and in 2030, so as to allow them to tell the story of their future vision. The interview was conducted in Croatian, the English (translated) version can be

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found in Appendix. For the purpose of the article most answers were paraphrased and some were summarised, but those cited in full are given in quotation marks. Except one subsequent explanation about the percentage of the digitised material in the archive and except the ones given in the answers, no other data was added. The interview was conducted for the purpose of allowing archives and museums speak about themselves in their own words, marking the things they considered to be important regarding their past, present, and future.

State Archive in Varaždin About the Archive The State Archive in Varaždin was founded in 1951 after the idea appeared 3 years earlier within the Varaždin City Museum. The State Archive in Varaždin operates at three locations in Varaždin, two in Koprivnica and one in Krapina. The headquarters are in Varaždin, while there are collection centres in Koprivnica and Krapina. In addition to the Department for General Administrative, Accounting and Auxiliary Technical Affairs, the State Archive in Varaždin also runs a Department for the Protection of Archival and Documentary Material Outside the Archives, a Department for Arranging, Professional-Scientific Processing and Publishing of Archival Material and Information Aids, and a Department for Documentation and Information Affairs and a professional library. The State Archive in Varaždin has 985 archive funds and collections, of which 218 funds and collections relate to Varaždin and other refer to the area of northwestern Croatia.

Online Presence The State Archive in Varaždin stated in the interview that it has “obsolete website”, but a new page is under construction because ‟the concept and appearance of the pages have ‛run out of time’”. One person is in charge of updating the existing website, which are updated several times a year during informative announcements about dates or announcements of exhibitions or book presentations, though several archivists will be in charge on the new website, each for his or her own section and it will be updated monthly. The State Archive in Varaždin has a Facebook profile that it uses for “program notifications” and as a “platform for presentation space”. In response to the question (“what does the archive use social networks for”), it was possible to choose the answers offered. In addition to the above answers, it was also possible to choose ‟interaction with network users (asking questions, proposing, etc.)” and ‟something other”. Also, the instruction in the questionnaire said that it could be briefly described if they used social networks, but the archive did not use that option.

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Digital technology facilitates the everyday work of archives, especially in the search, but also the presentation of material, as well as in the display of material. When asked about the possible use of digital technology in the presentation or display of material, the archive answers that it will use digital technology for online exhibitions on the website. The following options were offered: ‟virtual walks, online exhibitions, use of modern technologies in presentations, large touch screens. . .”. When asked about the use of digital technology in work and presentation, the answer was: ‟Digital technology would in optimal conditions (the existence of appropriate equipment and experts of appropriate profile) allow converting a part of the ‘classic’, analog archive material into digital form to reduce the need of archival repositories”. It further elaborates that “Digitisation of valuable archival material and its presentation on the Archive’s website would make it more accessible to potential users. In addition, experience to date has shown that the availability of some digitised material on the website has a positive effect on the increased use of archival material in the Archive Reading Room”.

Collaboration In the group of questions about cooperation with other archives and museums, the State Archive in Varaždin answered that it cooperated mostly with territorially close archives and museums (State Archive Međimurje, State Archive Zagreb, Varaždin City Museum, Museum of Koprivnica). When asked about cooperation 5 and 10 years ago (in presenting material, preparing exhibitions, technical assistance, organising conferences, etc.), the State Archive in Varaždin emphasises cooperation on the Znameniti.hr. portal,1 which enables the availability and use of ‟non-commercial scientific, cultural and artistic digital content for researchers and the general public”. The portal combines ‟metadata of digital material of Croatian cultural, artistic and scientific institutions about the highlights of Croatian culture, science, art and public life from various collections/repositories”. The State Archive in Varaždin is also one of the founders of this portal, along with the Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences with its Library as coordinator and the National and University Library in Zagreb and the Libraries of the City of Zagreb. The Miroslav Krleža Lexicographic Institute, the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, and the Museum of Arts and Crafts later joined the project. For the past 5 years, the State Archive in Varaždin has been a guest with the exhibition ‟Mladen Genc—War Photo Records” in a number of museums, galleries, libraries, and other spaces throughout Croatia (from Zagreb, Pakrac, and Novska to Knin, Kaštel, and Šibenik). The State Archive in Varaždin is not a member of either national or international associations, but since 2011 it has been participating in a cross-border SIHeR project

1

The English translation of “Znameniti” is notable.

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on ‟coexistence on the Croatian-Styrian border”. The partners of the SIHeR project are three Slovenian (Ptuj Historical Archive, Celje Historical Archive, Maribor Provincial Archive) and three Croatian archives (State Archive in Varaždin, State Archive Međimurje, State Archive Zagreb). “There were 2 joint exhibitions (Cities and markets on the Croatian-Styrian border, by train across the border) which were set up in the Republic of Croatia (9 exhibitions), the Republic of Slovenia (11 exhibitions), and the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1 exhibition). During 2021, the third exhibition (Wine at the Border) was realised”.

Digital Connections The State Archive in Varaždin has digitised around 8000 archival units (which is, according to the director, less than 1% of the material). About 2000 archive units are available on the Internet, but with the new website, an additional 1000 digitised archive units have been made available since mid-2021. The State Archive in Varaždin thinks that it has adapted to the digital age only in some aspects such as digitisation and presentation of material, but the lack of equipment and people who will take over and store archival material originally created in digital form is a disadvantage. The question was also asked whether the need for physical spaces will cease under the influence of digital technology, and the answer was that digital technology will reduce the need for physical storage that will store material created on paper or parchment which will not be converted to digital form. Taking advantage of digital technology and the globally connected world, the State Archive in Varaždin states the possibilities for cooperation with various heritage institutions on national and international projects, as part of the Europeana or European archives portal. But as a prerequisite for the networking of archives around the world, the need for appropriate technical assumptions in all parts of the world is necessary.

Statements The aim of the statements was to determine the way of thinking about the local and the global. Statements could either be refuted or answered. On the first statement “Related material kept by the museum/archive in Varaždin can be found in museums/archives around the world”, the archive stated that most of the archival material are ‟unique” and that the contents of the documents are what makes them unique, no matter whether they are more or less the same types of material. The second statement “A document mentioning a city’s name for the first time exists in countless archives and/or museums around the world”. Archive stated that those kinds of documents exist in countless archives or museums around the world: “The name of a city can be mentioned for the first time in only one document (for example,

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the name of Varaždin was first mentioned in 1181 in a document kept in the Zagreb Kaptol Archives)”. Third statement “Records of trials of murder and theft from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries can be found in other museums/archives, but involving different actors” was answered that records of murders in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries can be found in various archives around the world, but not all archives have material from that time, some Croatian archives do not have material that old. Fourth statement “Swords and cannons kept in Varaždin can be found in museums/archives around the world, only in a different version” was not applicable on the archive. The fifth statement “Old photographs kept by a museum/archive are common in museums/archives around the world” was answered that old photographs were part of almost all archival material.

Concept Two questions were asked about the concept of archives. One referred to the archives today, and the other to the archives in 2030. The State Archive in Varaždin states that archives are ‟institutions that collect, preserve and process, enable the use of documents and other material of lasting value created by the activities of state bodies and institutions, individuals, organisations and families that have played a prominent role in history”. It also states that archives used to be partially “closed” institutions with various restrictions on access to the archival material that they keep, but that ‟the new millennium brings ‘opening’ of archives through greater availability of archival material in both physical and digital form”. The State Archive in Varaždin wants to follow ‟modern trends”, but states that ‟undercapacity in human resources, limited funds for the purchase of IT equipment and space that does not meet the standards of modern archival services” are the biggest obstacle to the new policy. By 2030, the archives will face new challenges related to the material created in digital form or converted to digital form. The archives will therefore change into ‟modern information institutions”, which will change the staff needed for a new type of archive. Therefore, the ‟professional profiles of employees” predominantly consisted of staff ‟in the field of humanities will be replaced by experts in the field of informatics and information sciences”.

Varaždin City Museum About The Varaždin City Museum has about 200,000 items and about 35,000 books and museum documentation related to the museum items. Almost 99% of the material refers to the history of Varaždin, a smaller part to the history of Varaždin County,

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and another part belongs to modernity ‟which is also a part of Varaždin’s history and Varaždin County”. The Varaždin City Museum was created on the initiative of the Varaždin Museum Society. The idea of a museum has existed since the end of the nineteenth century, but 1932 was especially important when a cultural and historical exhibition was organised and it became obvious that there is preserved heritage in Varaždin that should be kept. Material was originally based on donations from Varaždin families. The museum was inaugurated in the Old Town Fortress on 16 November 1925. Today the museum operates at five locations and is divided into nine departments: Archaeological Department, Cultural History Department, History Department, Ethnographic Department, Art Gallery, Natural History Department, Conservation and Restoration Department, Documentation Department, and Common Services Department. Four permanent exhibitions are arranged—the permanent exhibition of the Cultural and Historical Department, the permanent exhibition “World of Insects” at the Department of Natural Science, the Permanent Exhibition of “Old Masters” and “Croatian Masters of the 20th Century” within the Art Gallery. The museum organises thematic exhibitions and cooperates with numerous institutions on exhibition projects in Varaždin, but also elsewhere in Croatia and abroad. The museum also organises a number of other activities, such as educational activities within the “MIŠ2 project—Museum and School” for kindergarten children, whereas elementary and high school students attend “Wednesday at the Museum”, which offers various lectures, exhibitions, literary and professional publications, talks with wellknown people mostly from Varaždin who are experts in the fields of culture, art, science, and general social activities. Since 2017, the museum has also been publishing ‟Varaždin Museologist”, a printed newsletter in which the museum informs the public of programmes, events, and interesting things from its holdings. The museum attaches great importance to the audience. From a number of awards it has received for its work, the museum singles out professional awards and recognitions of the Croatian Museum Association for the exhibition, international cooperation as well as for the ‟Varaždin Museologist”. Varaždin City Museum is also the winner of the plaque of the City of Varaždin for successful continuous work on the occasion of 90 years of operation.

Online Presence Varaždin City Museum has a website which is updated by one person in addition to the work the person does as a documentarist. The website is updated regularly depending on the need for announcements of new events. The museum has a profile on Facebook and YouTube and uses social networks most commonly for announcements, prize games, online exhibitions, publications from the media, interesting

2

MIŠ is an acronym which in Croatian means mouse.

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facts, and publication of the online version of ‟Varaždin Museologist”. Questions and inquiries received via social networks are answered almost in real time, and for the event Museum Night, the museum organises the possibility of answering questions about the history of Varaždin live via the Zoom platform. Social networks are used as platforms for presentation, and there are also live lectures as part of “Wednesday at the Museum”, which are available on the museum’s YouTube channel. The museum uses digital technology for inventory databases since 2004, for secondary museum documentation since 2007, and for books databases since 2009. Digitisation of museum material is carried out in order to protect the physical objects themselves, for easier and faster search of material, as well as for easier accessibility, both to employees and users. Digital technology facilitates the daily work of museums primarily due to the amount of material that needs to be searched, its presentation and it is used for the purpose of providing ‟open access” to digitised museum collections, which has become a world trend. The museum states that digitisation should benefit the general public, regardless of their economic or scientific status and that users should be free to use digitised material for whatever creative or scientific purpose they wish. Asked about the implementation of digital technologies in the presentation and the placement of material with suggestions of “virtual walks, online exhibitions, the use of modern technologies in the presentation, large touch screens. . .”, the museum said that it ‟tries to apply interactive multimedia in presentation and communication with the audience” and that “digitised museum objects are presented as needed in the form of images, sound, video, 3D models, or holograms at occasional exhibitions, in permanent settings or web portals”. In some exhibitions, the museum also uses virtual reality or a hologram ‟for the purpose of expanding the meaning of the museum objects”. A virtual walk through the permanent settings of the ‟World of Insects” is available on the website, as well as a virtual exhibition about 1848 in Varaždin and a virtual exhibition ‟Hidden from View”. The website contains 3D models of objects from the Collection of Egyptian Material, a 3D model of a woolly rhinoceros, and an online edition of the “Varaždin Museologist”. The museum in one of the locations has a touch screen monitor through which the contents of exhibitions or occasional exhibitions are presented, and in the permanent exhibition ‟World of Insects” there is a possibility of scanning QR codes for individual exhibition items and the availability of audio guidance via mobile applications. The permanent exhibition of “Old Masters” has the possibility of playing various games on tablets. In the permanent installation in the Old Town Fortress there is a touch monitor through which you can find basic information about the museum and the Old Town Fortress, and there are planned tablets and virtual glasses which will give visitors a unique experience of a permanent museum exhibition by reviving several different stories based on historical facts and legendary connections to the Old Town Fortress. The museum plans to introduce a virtual guided tour, AR games (augmented reality) for children, multimedia guide, holographic silhouettes and 3D animated display of the fort construction. There are plans to create a new Varaždin City Museum website with digitised collections, online ticket purchase as well as booking appointments for

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group visits. The plan of the Historical Department is to present old photographs and postcards of Varaždin through online digital collection.

Collaboration The Varaždin City Museum is a member of ICOM (International Council of Museums) and HMD (Croatian Museum Society) and mostly cooperates with the Museum of Arts and Crafts, State Archive in Varaždin, Modern Gallery Zagreb, Croatian History Museum, Croatian Museum of Natural History, Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, and Croatian State Archive. For the past 5 years, the museum has collaborated with 15 museums in the presentation of material, and for the past 10 years with 20 museums. In the preparation of exhibitions for the past 5 years, the museum has collaborated with 14 museums, and for the past 10 years with 29 museums. Cooperation on technical assistance has been achieved with 2 museums in the last 5 years and 4 museums in the last 10 years. The organisation of the gatherings was 5 years ago with 4 museums, and with seven 10 years back. Educational actions, events along “Museum Night” and “International Museum Day” have been realised with one museum going back 5 years and five museums going 10 years back. The museum has organised gatherings with four museums for the past 5 years and seven for the past 10 years. Educational actions, events along Museum Night and International Museum Day have been realised with one museum going back 5 years and five museums going back 10 years. A total of 10 years of cooperation has been established with 11 international institutions from Maribor, 2 different institutions from Ormož, Celje, Paris, Vienna, Budapest, Bratislava, Sofia, and Graz and from the Japan Foundation.

Digital Connections The museum has digitised 95,000 items, of which about 100 museum objects are available online, about 100 years of newspapers (40 issues per year on average), about 100 books from the libraries of the Bombelles family and the Book of Burials from the Jewish Cemetery. Asked if museums have adapted to the digital age, the museum states that today ‟communication without the use of digital technology as aid is almost unthinkable and museums must keep up with new technologies if they want to attract new audiences and increase interest in the ‛oldʼ.” They also state that ‟younger generations of visitors cannot even imagine what the world looked like and could look like without digital technology and without its application in everyday activities” and that young people ‟without innovative shifts in the interpretation of the museum story, they perceive the museum as static and outdated”. The museum states that the aim is the availability of as much material as possible via digital

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platforms in searchable form, like Europeana, for example, but points out that metadata must be translated into at least one foreign language. The response also states that ‟never before has so much information about objects and documentation kept in the museum been easily accessible to the public” and that the Internet enables ‟greater dissemination of digital content and global availability and visibility of our collections”. As new models of cooperation are provided by a globally connected world, primarily through digital technology, the museum sees in the possibility of ‟better research of certain knowledge about museum objects, their comparability with collections in other heritage institutions”. Asked whether the need for museum physical places would be redundant under the impact of digital technology, the museum said “no” because ‟the presentation and availability of museums in the virtual world have become as important as they are in the real world, but the digital museum must not be constructed as a physical museum, it should present the best from the permanent exhibitions and occasional exhibitions”. It also added that today’s audience ‟is focused on the experience—an opportunity to spend time comfortably which is more important to them than the information they can get in the virtual space”, so “digital technology cannot replace the experience of meeting a real object in real place”. On question whether digital technology provides the possibility of networking all museums in the world, the museum answered that it is certainly ‟the goal to be pursued, but the prerequisite for global networking is that there must be networking at the national level of all completed digitisation of museum material stored in each museum”. For these reasons, the Varaždin City Museum joined the project e-Culture—Digitisation of Croatian Cultural Heritage initiated by the Ministry of Culture and Media. Also, it is stated that digitisation protects the original, but also enables its availability to a larger number of users, and that it should take the perspective of ‟users and should ensure free access to the material of heritage institutions to a greater extent”. Employees of the Varaždin City Museum are working on ‟standards for the processing of museum objects, but also archive and library material” and through the working group for museums are working on the preparation and maintenance of the Ordinance for the description and access to material in libraries, archives, and museums.

Statements The museum answered that the first, third, and fifth statements are partly true, while the second and fourth are incorrect. No further elaboration was added.

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Concept When it comes to the concept of the museum today and in 2030, the museum gives the answer that ‟the Varaždin City Museum is an independent and complex public institution in which museum and gallery activities are carried out in the City of Varaždin and Varaždin County”. The museum is ‟a place of preserved, centuries-long, cultural and historical memory of the community in which it operates, where the visitor is encouraged to learn something new, find out some interesting things or, simply, to ‘spend’ pleasantly and enjoyably their time and want to come back again”. For the collections, they state that the museum has ‟great regional and national significance, and certain collections and objects are European, even world rarities” and that with permanent exhibitions and occasional exhibitions they contribute to ‟recognition of Varaždin as a cultural centre”. They state that there is a growing trend of interest in museums and museum institutions and that this trend contributes to ‟increasing regional and local tourist attractiveness” and that the Old Town Fortress with surrounding buildings and ramparts is a ‟trademark of the city”. They also state that ‟the museum actively works in coexistence with the local community, including citizens in the preparation and presentation of museum programs and contents”. For the concept of the museum in 2030, the museum states that Varaždin City Museum will continue to be “focused on the visitor (user), but with a greater emphasis on environmental sustainability and will have a more active role, not only in the collection of heritage objects, but also in the cultural influence on the development of the environment in which it operates”. Regarding the “presentation of the history of Varaždin and Varaždin County, it will be done in the physical world on several different levels, emphasising the importance of Varaždin in local, regional, national and European history and with virtual exhibitions and the presentation of digital collections available in several world languages, most of the museum material and intangible cultural heritage of the Varaždin area”. The museum also points out that “globalisation and the growing influence of the media on the creation of the current image of everyday life are leading to the increasing occurrence of the so-called fake news” and that “museums will play a key role as ‘guardians of the truth’, thanks to the very material evidence” they have. To the question that was not applicable to the archive “What do you think about the material that is not originally from Varaždin, and is part of the museum? For example, is it interesting to show material that belongs to another culture and why?”, the museum responded that “the holdings of the Varaždin City Museum are based primarily on material donated and purchased and collected by field or archaeological research in the area of Varaždin and Varaždin County”. The museum elaborates on the collection policy that is “determined by its mission and task based on the area of Varaždin and Varaždin County, and is in accordance with the ICOM Code of Ethics”. It also said that “preserving local heritage contributes to shaping identity and raising awareness of the value of local culture, but it is also an incentive to preserve diversity. Also, heritage is a common good of the community, society, and

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humanity, so it also requires common care”. On heritage, the museum gave further description that “cultural and artistic creations and scientific facts created throughout history [...] belong to all people in the world as their heritage is inherited from previous generations and cultures”. Different cultures are “important for the further development of culture and civilisation as a whole. Getting to know foreign cultures allows one to overcome the fear of the unknown and focus on the common and universal”. The role of the museums is that “by collecting and preserving material of universal importance, the museum becomes a promoter of intercultural dialogue and interaction and inclusion for a wide and diverse range of people”.

Archives and Museums in the Digital World The research shows that the archives and museums think outside of the national border and identity; they are truly global in perspective. Human experience is global and in the global context the material collected and preserved has a general human value and similar or related artefacts or documents can be found in different archives and museums in the world. With an interdisciplinary approach it is possible to respond to the challenges facing all cultural institutions, especially archives and museums, which, in addition to the tendency to digitise their material, now live in the digital world. This does not mean that they have to give up the presentation of history and the development of what they represent on a national, regional, or local level, but in order to define the role of archives and museums in the global world, it is necessary to adopt new definitions. Metaphorically speaking, if institutions do not open, they can close themselves, so opening of the archives and museums, like all other public institutions, is a social and cultural imperative. Openness of institutions can be done in four ways, as elaborated in the previous paragraphs. The first is the openness to the new ways of presenting; the second is with the collaboration on local, regional, national, and international levels where similarities can be found on the organisational level or on the level of themes. The third includes accessibility of material through digital media and technology, and the fourth is openness regarding the global network of preserved material which makes the local part of the global space in which the local is transmitted through horizontal digital migration making local history part of the global history. The State Archive in Varaždin and the Varaždin City Museum are local, but they belong to the global network of human and natural existence. By collecting, storing, and maintaining Varaždin history through artefacts and documents, they connect it to the world network of historical artefacts making the local context global, preserving the local as the main identity. The State Archive Varaždin and the Varaždin City Museum are well aware of digital technologies and what benefits they bring. Both approach the topic of digital technologies from the perspective of the material and the users, but also for the reason of storing the material. The museum has no problems with the material created in the digital environment, while the archive cites this as a lack of equipment

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and people trained in equipment as the biggest obstacle to the further use of digital technologies. The archive, which was defined as a ‟closed” institution until recently, is making progress towards “openness”. The answer shows that over time there will be less and less need to visit the archives, while the museum counts on visits and recognises the feeling of the place as the main reason for coming. The need for physical archives and museums will not cease, thus proving that the archives and museums as localised buildings can be maximised with digital technology. The goal of the statements is to determine whether in a world without context, as in that world defined by Castells (2010b), one will lose the historical context. The answer is no. But those statements also aim at determining whether archives and museums, with the collections they have, can be seen as nodes within a networked society. For example, whether global heritage can be seen in layers, as in a global collection of swords, cannons, and trial records. The answers suggest that such a thing is possible, but even in such a constellation, objects and documents cannot lose their primary place in the community to which they belong. Authenticity and contextualisation are written in the subject, and though being digitally processed, the metadata is always there. In the context of distributive network theory, museums and archives can be seen as nodes, with all the artefacts, documents, and the whole collections forming a social network. Artefacts can be traced through time and places, like in a map of historical migration all over the world, in which time can be seen in a global map of connectivity before the global was nationalised. It would be also interesting to do an analysis, using the social network method, on collaborations of heritage institutions and see their relations and find out which ones have greater density and impact. Digital technologies with all possibilities of landscaping give the opportunity to look at world heritage as a whole.

Conclusion Today, besides challenges of implementing digital technologies in the work and presentation (Lewi et al., 2020), archives and museums are facing cultural, structural, and organisational changes. Reimaging archives and museums in the digital world must include how digitalisation affects the concept of archives and museums. Archives and museums are institutions that preserve our past; they are the treasures of our own selves and who we think we are. Since no culture is pure and with an essence (Eagleton, 2002; Thomas, 2016), all have been affected by the others. Physical migrations are always present, long before there was talk about what globalisation brings to the world (Bennett, 2018; Jay, 2010; Thomas, 2016). Digital migration is new. It makes new modes of migration, which are both horizontal and vertical. Networks of archives and museums as physical places in the world where they make global distributive networks have local manifestations and local, regional, and national identities, so they can be perceived only as local, as they cannot transform or migrate to the digital world on an abstract level. Collections are always

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‟digitally moving”, transcending the limitation of their physical local, and make themselves abstractly a part of the global map, historically, and geographically. This study proposes that the model for archives and museums should be related to today’s social model, that is the distributive network model and it should be connected to the global structures through digital migration which impacts the localities in the digital world, in the same way that localities and digital-ready societies impact the ability to participate in the network. This means to consider the global as part of the local and to define archives and museums as a network of connected collectors and custodians of global history with local manifestations. This does not mean that archives and museums should abandon the principles they have, but to accept new models by which they are defined as a part of society. New modes of representation in the digital world, where museums and archives reflect the distributive network diagram of society, affect organisational and representation strategies. In the digital world where contexts depend on the other nodes in the network, archives and museums with their collections make a distributive network of world knowledge, art, history, and nature. They preserve and present global contents in local areas making the local connected to the global through the joined history of mankind and making local components empowered. As it is stated on ICOM webpage “Museums have no borders, they have a network” (International Council of Museums, n.d.), so it only seems proper to reconceptualise them as such, as places and as collections.

Appendix: Interview Questions Does the museum/archive have a website? Do you have a person employed only for updating the website? How often is the website updated? Does the museum/archive have a social media profile? If so, on which social networks? What do you most often use social networks for (yes/no, describe briefly if yes)? (a) (b) (c) (d)

program information interaction with network users (asking questions, proposing, etc.) as a platform for presentation something else ______________

How many units of material does the museum/archive have? How many units refer to the history of Varaždin? What organisational units is the museum/archive divided into? How many locations does the museum/archive have? How much material has been digitised? How much digitised material is available online through websites?

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Are you thinking about introducing digital technology in the work and in the organisation of museums/archives (if so, describe briefly)? Are you thinking of introducing digital technology in the presentation/display of material? (virtual walks, online exhibitions, use of modern technologies in presentations, large touch screens, etc.)—if yes, describe briefly Which concept would best describe a museum/archive today? A specific (your) museum/archive and a museum/archive in Croatia in general? (write in a few sentences) Which concept would best describe a museum/archive in 2030? A specific (your) museum/archive and a museum/archive in Croatia in general? (write in a few sentences) Which museums/archives do you work with the most? How many museums/archives have you collaborated with in the last 5 years, and how many in the last 10? – – – – –

in presenting the material preparation of exhibitions technical assistance organisation of gatherings other _____________

How many of these are international? Are you a member of any association or organisation? If so, which ones? – national – international Do you think that the need for physical space will cease under the influence of digital technology? (Explain briefly) Do you think that museums/archives have adapted to the digital age? (If yes, how) In what ways digital technology is used in work and presentation? Does digital technology facilitate the daily work of museums/archives? Does the future provide new models of collaboration for a globally connected world primarily through digital technology? What you think of the statement: digital technology provides the opportunity for museums/archives to make a world connected in a network. What do you think about the statements? Related material kept by the museum/archive in Varaždin can be found in museums/archives around the world. A document mentioning a city’s name for the first time exists in countless archives and/or museums around the world.

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Records of trials of murder and theft from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries can be found in other museums/archives, but involving different actors. Swords and cannons kept in Varaždin can be found in museums/archives around the world, only in a different version. Old photographs kept by a museum/archive are common in museums/archives around the world. What do you think about the material that is not originally from Varaždin and is part of the museum/archive? For example, is it interesting to present material belonging to another culture and why? (Applies more to the museum) Finally, describe in a few sentences how the Varaždin City Museum was founded, i.e. how the State Archives in Varaždin was founded.

References Abungu, G. O. (2019). Museums: Geopolitics, decolonisation, globalisation and migration. Museum International, 71(1–2), 62–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/13500775.2019.1638030 Arrigoni, G., Schofield, T., & Pisanty, D. T. (2019). Framing collaborative processes of digital transformation in cultural organisations: From literary archives to augmented reality. Museum Management and Curatorship, 35(4), 424–445. https://doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2019. 1683880 Bennett, T. (2018). Exhibition, difference and the logic of culture. In T. Bennett (Ed.), Museums, power, knowledge: Selected essays (pp. 179–199). Routledge. Bollmer, G. (2018). Theorizing digital cultures. SAGE. Brown, R. H., & Davis-Brown, B. (1998). The making of memory: The politics of archives, libraries and museums in the construction of national consciousness. History of the Human Sciences, 11(4), 17–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/095269519801100402 Brstilo, I., & Jelavić, Ž. (2010). Culture as a field of possibilities: Museum as a means of social integration. Ethnological Researches, 15, 161–173. Permalink: https://hrcak.srce.hr/62376 Carr, N. G. (2010). The shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains. W. W. Norton. Castells, M. (2010a). The power of identity. Wiley-Blackwell. Castells, M. (2010b). The rise of the network society. Wiley-Blackwell. Chambers, I., De Angelis, A., Ianniciello, C., & Orabona, M. (Eds.). (2014). The postcolonial museum: The arts of memory and the pressures of history. Routledge. Eagleton, T. (2002). Ideja kulture (G. V. Popović, Trans.). Naklada Jesenski i Turk. Fraser, J. (2019). A discomforting definition of museum. Curator, 62(4), 501–504. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/cura.12345 Friedrich, M. (2018). The birth of the archive: A history of knowledge. University of Michigan Press. Galloway, A. R. (2004). Protocol: How control exists after decentralization. MIT Press. Gellner, E. (1995). Culture, identity, and politics. Cambridge University Press. Gere, C. (2008). Digital culture. Reaktion Books. Gilliland, A. J. (2014). Reconceptualizing records, the archive and archival roles and requirements in a Networked Society. Knygotyra, 63, 17–34. https://doi.org/10.15388/kn.v63i0.4011 Gilliland, A. J. (2021). Permeable binaries, societal grand challenges, and the roles of the twentyfirst-century archival and recordkeeping profession. UCLA previously published works (pp. 1–16). Permalink: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/90q5538g

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Hensley, N. K. (2015). Network: Andrew Lang and the distributed agencies of literary production. Victorian Periodicals Review, 48(3), 359–382. Permalink: https://www.jstor.org/stable/436633 88 International Council of Museums. (n.d.). Retrieved March 4, 2021, from https://icom.museum/en/ Jay, P. (2010). Global matters: The transnational turn in literary studies. Cornell University Press. Kakaliouras, A. M., & Radin, J. (2014). Archiving anthropos: Tracking the ethics of collections across history and anthropology. Curator: The Museum Journal, 57(2), 147–151. https://doi. org/10.1111/cura.12057 Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press. Lewi, H., et al. (2020). The Routledge international handbook of new digital practices in galleries, libraries, archives, museums and heritage sites. Routledge. Lien, Y.-N., et al. (2016). Mobilizing Digital Museums. In R.-H. Tsaih & T.-S. Han (Eds.), Managing innovation and cultural management in the digital era: The case of the National Palace Museum (pp. 149–166). Routledge. Marcum, D. (2014). Archives, libraries, museums: Coming back together? Information & Culture, 49(1), 74–89. Permalink: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43737382 Murphy, B. L. (Ed.). (2016). Museums, ethics and cultural heritage. Taylor & Francis. Spivak, G. C. (2003). Death of a discipline. Columbia University Press. Težak, S. (n.d.). Povijest i gradski grb. City of Varaždin. Retrieved March 6, 2021, from https:// varazdin.hr/povijest-gradski-grb/ Thomas, N. (2016). The return of curiosity: What museums are good for in the 21st century. Reaktion Books. Vitali, V. (2016). A museum is a museum is a museum is a museum: Museums and networks. In S. Holo & M.-T. Álvarez (Eds.), Remix: Changing conversations in museums of the Americas (pp. 100–103). California University of California Press.

Sandra Malenica graduated in Croatian Language and Literature and in Comparative Literature at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. She is currently working on her PhD in literature at the same university, in the Program of Doctoral Studies in Literature, Performing Arts, Film And Culture. She was one of the founders and Programme Director of VAFI – International Animation Film Festival for Children and Youth, a Programme Director of Varaždin city cinema and Director of city institution in Varaždin dealing with education, informal learning and audiovisual sector. She has been Deputy Mayor of the City of Varaždin working mostly in sections of culture, art, education, children, youth, NGO, inclusion, creative and cultural industries. Today she works as Culture Advisor in Varaždin County. She is interested in concepts, strategy thinking, making public spaces more usable and making sustainable city growth through thinking on all horizontal and vertical measures of development. Culture is her point of interest, as a sector which can make an impact on future development of a smart, digital, green, inclusive and sustainable future. In the academic area, she is interested in new perspectives of humanities where humanities give new global and local perspectives and are implemented in the digital world. Email: [email protected]; [email protected].

Chapter 4

Do Museums Still Need Objects? Politics of Museums Reconsidered in the Digital Era Wenrui Li

Abstract Following the question proposed by Steven Conn, this study discusses the politics of museum under the digital context from two aspects: the first part will go through the origin and early development of museums as cabinets of curiosities in the colonial period, as the birth of the museum deeply intertwines the decolonisation agenda and the ongoing digitisation. As Geismar points out, the digital is a new kind of materiality with its own features and cannot be taken for granted as immaterial (Geismar, Museum object lessons for the digital age. University College London Press, 2018, xvii); affordance of this digital materiality and its influences on museums will also be scrutinised. When museums in the age of digital reproduction seem to evolve in the progress of making themselves more participatory and accessible, the dilemma of museums still exists, and the digital is not a panacea. Therefore, in the second part, I look into two key features of the physicality of museums that cannot be replaced by their digital counterparts: firstly, museum architectures and spatial arrangements inside the museums create the aura of museum-visiting experiences; secondly, educational programs designed for multisensory experiences based on physical objects provide an ethnographic approach to better understand collections and cannot be replaced by virtual interactions through a digital screen. Keywords Digitisation · Objects · Decolonisation · Museum space · Multisensory museum · Politics of museums As Conn states, compared with museums in the last century, museums at our age have witnessed a change from object-based conservation institutions towards multifunctional organisations with a shrinking number of objects and a growing number of multimedia installations (Conn, 2010, p. 20). The trend can be seen in museums worldwide, involving both long-established Western museums and those which emerged not long ago. Though there are multiple reasons behind the W. Li (✉) Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Sight as Site in the Digital Age, Digital Culture and Humanities 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9209-4_4

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decreasing significance of physical objects, it is acknowledged that the intensified process of digitisation plays a significant role. For most museums, despite different social realities they are faced with, it seems to be true that collecting is no longer the primary purpose, and they are busy with other tasks such as decolonising praxis, public education, building a replica in the virtual world, and reaching out to a larger group of audiences, both on-site and online. If the centrality of objects in the museum has been taken over by their digital counterparts and new technologies, do we still need objects in museums in the future? The question provides us with an opportunity to re-examine the nature of the museum as a powerful institution and “secular temple” (Duncan, 1991, p. 91) in the digital world. The aim of this article is not to give a direct answer to this question but to interpret the socio-political entanglements behind museums of our age. The digital and analogue is a continuum rather than a divide (Geismar, 2018, p. xviii); the question “do museums still need objects” is not to emphasise the dichotomy between the physical and digital, but to reflect on both of their affordances and limitations for the establishment of a more diverse, accessible, and egalitarian museum.

The Birth of the Museum, Decolonisation, and Digitisation As Hooper-Greenhill argues, the public museum is an apparatus endowed with two conflicting functions; it was an “elite temple of the arts” as well as a “utilitarian instrument for democratic education” (Hooper-Greenhill, 1988, p. 63). While from the contemporary point of view, the public museum is a beneficial and educational institution devoted to spreading cultural and scientific knowledge and contributing to the process of disenchantment, its earlier prototype was not made out of the mercy of the wealthy owners. The genesis of museums was the early European cabinets of curiosities, where the objects were mainly accumulated during the colonial period through troops, travellers, and missionaries. The delicately decorated wooden masks, flawless porcelains coloured with exotic patterns, clothes, weapons, and even skulls of unknown people from continents thousands of miles away came all across the ocean to the magnificent houses in Europe, alongside the expansion of the empires. Compared with current public institutions, which are considered progressive, available to the public and aiming at the preservation of the community’s common heritage (Duncan, 1991, pp. 93, 102), earlier private collections were more of the glory symbols of personal status and empire power conquering across the globe. Though we have to admit that many of the objects we have in public museums today are legacies from these collections, at the time when they were collected, these objects were mainly to satisfy the imagination about the remote “primitive culture” and to build the evolutionary hierarchy where European culture is high on the top. In most cases, the access to these objects was confined to the owners; under some situations, the common people could still have the opportunity to pay a visit. However, this early form of “public education” aimed to emphasise the nation’s

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power and illustrate the superiority of their culture over other cultures where these collections were from. Pitt Rivers Museum, an archaeological and ethnographic museum located at Oxford donated by the General Pitt Rivers, is an exemplar for early museums of this type. When donating his collections in 1883, Pitt Rivers, who himself had great passions as a scientific amateur, demanded that the University of Oxford should appoint one lecturer to give lessons with his objects and display the collections in an anthropological rotunda following the typological sequence which could illustrate the evolution of human culture, from communities of “lower culture” to European culture (Chapman, 1985, pp. 38–39). These objects were detached cultural fragments excerpted from their original environment (KirshenblattGimblett, 1998, p. 18), labelled as the “primitive culture”, and only to fill in the blanks of human evolution history where their positions had already been decided. Also, the simplified way of display that only focused on their visual appeals neglected many other significant cultural aspects such as how they were practised in rituals or daily life, the story of their owners and the cultural biography they went through. Even after more and more private collections were turned into public museums, this traditional way of display remained, and many objects continued to stay in their original glass cases and were left with labels with problematic wording by early museum professionals. With many previous colonies gaining their independence and the fall of empires in the new era, the wave of decolonisation gradually rose and had an enormous impact across various disciplines, which not only brought about new theories but also influenced the practices in different fields, especially for museums, the previous cabinets of colonial trophies. Scholars from anthropology and museum studies began to reflect on the politics behind the existing ways of curation and display, which became the major issue for most Western museums that inherited objects from colonial collecting and inappropriate looting. After a brief glimpse into the history of museums, let us re-examine the three detailed questions further proposed by Conn when discussing the vanishing objects displayed inside museums: where did these objects go? What do museums do with fewer objects? If the centrality placed on objects have been removed, what replaced the role of objects in the new era (Conn, 2010, pp. 23–24)? Certainly, the advancement of technology and digitisation counts for the gradual disappearance of objects: the digitalised items could supplement the physical display and better deliver the educational message; for contemporary museums, a single object displayed in the commodious cubic white style exhibition hall with audiovisual media has become the new fashion instead of old wooden showcases crammed with items; moreover, the “visual and epistemological power” of physical objects embodied “during the first generation of museum building” (Conn, 2010, p. 56) is gradually replaced by the “primacy of experience” (Bautista, 2014, p. 10) in the digital age. Another dominant factor leading to the decreasing number of objects is the ongoing decolonisation debate. As Harris states, the museums at our age are transforming from collections of “goods inwards” to distributing institutions where goods go outwards (Harris, 2013a, p. 126). More and more museum professionals are aware of the ethical issues on the legitimacy of non-Western objects being collected in Western museums; they are figuring out ways to connect their collections back to

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their original communities and the cultural environment. This study will not discuss the two reasons separately, as the repatriation and digitisation are deeply entangled: the advancement of digital technology is the foundation to fulfil well-designed decolonisation projects; reversely, the demand from various decolonisation schemes encourages the burgeoning of application of digital methods inside museums. The museums have been changed by the digital technologies dramatically: digital screens and multimedia programs allow innovative ways of interaction between people and the collections; online visitors for virtual exhibitions and on-site visitors wandering inside the museums add to the diversity of the visitors; the historical appearances of heritage sites that were damaged or even disappeared due to the unexpected natural disasters or wars are able to be restored. Bautista also argues that museums are experiencing a fundamental shift in the digital age as the four primary constructs intertwined and underpin the museology, place, community, culture, and technology have also been altered (Bautista, 2014, p. 7). Gibson coins the term “affordance”, a substitute for value, referring to what things furnish and could provide according to their properties (Gibson, 1996, p. 285); the digital affordance in our context makes us reflect on the digital materiality and its possible impact on museums. The anthropological debate on materials/materiality (Ingold, 2007, pp. 1–16; Tilley, 2007, pp. 16–20; Miller, 2007, pp. 23–27) provides us with a theoretical framework to re-evaluate objects; one should not only look into the physical properties of materials, but also explore the social relations attached to them in the changing contexts and how their processual properties are related to human society. This framework provides an interpretation of digital materiality from both the material aspect and social aspect. Firstly, regarding the material qualities of digital assets, unlike physical items which we can easily place our hands on to feel and touch, the digital is always regarded as immaterial due to its quality of being intangible; however, to enable the operation of a digital object requires the precondition of well-established digital infrastructures, the construction of which consumes plenty of materials. A physical pottery cup may be made of clay, water, and paints while presenting a digital replica needs at least a screen, optical fibres, high-quality scanners, electricity, the Internet, and other digital facilities. In this way, the digital requires a higher level of materiality and technological support than the physical. Moreover, as Jannis Kallinikos et al. point out, the digital artefacts are determined to be “incomplete and perpetually in the making” (qtd. in Geismar, 2018, p. 23) and thus should be conceptualised more of a process with dynamic materiality rather than an entity confined with a clear boundary. Also, considering the change of social relations and power imbalances behind the politics of the digital, the digitisation is no longer an omnipotent technique. Though the digital cuts down the distance between the objects and people and make it one-click away, which enables visitors, who do not have physical access to these collections, to scrutinise them from all dimensions in detail, we have to notice the possible problems hidden behind. As mentioned above, setting up the digital infrastructure is demanding and involves the combination of information technology, electronic devices, specialist expertise, and most importantly, the internet access; to fulfil these preconditions is difficult in many

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regions. As a result, digital museums are still out of reach for some communities, especially for those in less developed regions from where the objects are from. The asymmetrical power relationship between the custodial institutions and the viewers is another issue. Museums largely represent the cultural authority who has the final say to decide which objects to digitise and what information to include in labels and information boards. In the Foucauldian idea, museums, like many other modern institutions, are metaphorically panopticons for discipline and punishment (Foucault, 1995, pp. 195–230), especially when the museums are places of knowledge production and where people get educated from object lessons they provide. Therefore, in the digital age where information transmission is enormously promoted and sped up overcoming the geographical limitations, their absolute power and control over knowledge are also enhanced and becoming more dominating. In this way, the digital may even exacerbate the power inequality and pose a threat to disadvantaged or underrepresented groups. The discussion above is not to deny the positive aspects of digital museums. Since the digital museum itself is a vague expression, to clarify the differences, there are two types of museums referred to as digital museums: on the one hand, brick-andmortar museums adopting digital technologies and multimedia installations to improve access, enrich learning resources, and enhance visiting experiences; on the other hand, some museums or objects are purely virtual and do not have counterparts in reality. The latter can be caused by various reasons, including the damage of the physical museums/objects, political reasons due to which a physical museum is not allowed to be built, or lack of funding. Museums in virtual forms only are more practical to create in terms of the cost, choice of location, and bureaucratic procedures that building a physical architecture has to go through. With an established database, curating a digital exhibition is easier, saving the trouble of transportation, maintenance costs, and access problems caused by political or economic restrictions. These new features are enabled by the digital affordance which physical museums could not provide and bring about new possibilities for museum and heritage studies. The digital also plays a crucial role in the decolonisation agenda, especially in terms of community engagement. As Duncan says, the museums are “powerful identity-defining machines” which “control the representation of a community and some of its highest, most authoritative truths” (Duncan, 1991, pp. 101–102). She further argues that this machine is always disguised as good, progressive and demonstrates “the state’s commitments to the principle of equality” (Duncan, 1991, p. 93). In their inception, the community that public museums would like to engage were the citizens of the state, whose aim was to nurture civic virtues and strengthen the bond of citizenship. It is believed that a democratic society is based on the active participation of its members, dialogues, and social interactions (Bautista, 2014, p. 14). While in this new age, the museum audiences also witnessed a massive demographic change. With improved economic conditions and digital access, museums are faced with the task of dealing with “an even more globalising and multicultural world” (Harris, 2013b, p. 10). The encounter between collections inherited from colonial cabinets and visitors from other cultures and geographical

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locations brings both new problems and opportunities. Suppose previous museum visiting is only interactions between people and objects whose meanings are defined by an external cultural authority; in the new situation, the museum-going in the digital age with wider target audiences is a mutual dialogue between people and people, where objects become the medium as materialised cultural knowledge, whose meanings are constantly challenged, contested, and interrogated. Especially when the source communities, referring groups who are the original creators of the objects and their descendants today (Peers & Brown, 2003, p. 2), are offered the chance to reclaim the right over their cultural properties, the interpretation of the objects becomes a negotiated process rather than an arbitrary definition. The source communities are no longer the vulnerable groups whose voices are suppressed and remain isolated; their values lie in the wisdom behind their creations as well as the capability to take part in the building of a more egalitarian and participatory museum. In this way, museums are made into a power-dynamic contact zone which might be able to remediate the relations among the curators, source communities, and visitors. In addition to the promoted digital access, the repatriation cases enabled by digital reproduction also contribute numerously to this decolonising process. Museums are always criticised for their imbalanced power relations behind the collecting, curating, and display. In repatriation projects, what is repatriated is not only the image or object but also the right to build an internal narrative and the ownership over the lost properties and documentations stored in an external institution for long. Though photos taken by early travellers may contain a Western gaze, Edwards points out the double lives and the parallel realities these photos offer (Edwards, 2003, p. 83): for anthropologists, the meaning of photos is generated through the anthropological interpretation within the systems of knowledge constructed by academia; for the people in the photographs, they gain another set of meanings, which constitutes a crucial part of their identity formation and is integrated into their local history. Peers and Brown look into the visual repatriation of photos of Kainai people and how they made use of the visual representation of their ancestors. Many of the photos featured a strong anthropometric characteristic; when the Kainai people got access to those photos, they sensibly noticed the anthropometric frame that they were viewed as research subjects; however, they also reclaimed the photos by interpreting them in the contemporary local context related to their own identity and history (Peers & Brown, 2009, p. 268). By reattaching names to the people in the photos and discovering how previous generations lived their lives, the Kainai people were able to reconstruct their lost history, memory, and family stories, decipher the cultural codes embedded in these photos, and integrate them into the collective memory of the community. The photos repatriated were also used to teach younger generations about their cultural practices and to recreate self-esteem. As one of them expressed: “For myself, I do not rely on the white man’s perception. I strongly rely on our own perception with respect to our view of our way of life” (Peers & Brown, 2009, pp. 269–277). Besides visual repatriation, there are also repatriation cases of physical objects which concern a higher degree of digital technology. In 2005, the Smithsonian National Museum of History repatriated the Killer Whale clan crest hat

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to the Tlingit native community of southeast Alaska as requested by the community leader. Clan crest objects are endowed with significant historical, cultural, and religious values in the Tlingit community, and the crest hat is used in local sacred ceremonies. To introduce the story of repatriation and educate the public audience about the specific meanings of the hat and the Tlingit culture, the community leader’s successor agreed to have the hat digitally documented by 3D laser scanning and allowed the museum to make a replica for the display in the museum (Hollinger et al., 2013, pp. 202–204). Consequently, the clan crest hat could remain its ritualistic functions in the local community; at the same time, a perfectly reproduced replica could stay in the museum, informing the visitors of the story of the hat and the collaboration between the Tlingit community and the museum in the repatriation process. It might be argued that digitisation is not a necessary precondition for repatriation, and a community might reclaim their object without permitting a museum to make a replica to retain its exclusiveness. Also, there might be ethical issues regarding the reproduction of certain objects, such as human remains. Moreover, producing replicas with digital technology rather than traditional skills brings about the debate over the authenticity of both the original object and its replica. But the point is that with the help of digital technology, the object is given new possibilities for its roles; its value does not lie in the authenticity in a traditional sense, but how it could generate new cultural meanings and new forms of social relations. For the Killer Whale clan crest hat, besides its ritualistic role in the Tlingit community and its original educational role in the museum before the repatriation, it also gained a new role as an intermediator between the community and museum, changing the power relationship in-between into a productive collaboration. Besides the local communities, the museums also benefit from the repatriation by making their long silent archives and objects enlivened again with new meanings and prolonging their social lives. Up to this point, we have looked into the brief history of museums and the affordance of digital materiality, especially when museums are faced with a demographic change in visitors. To summarise, digital technology enables museums to improve access and develop multiple narratives about the objects, which overcome the limitation of physical objects and re-establish museums as a contact zone in the decolonising progress. Compared with their digital counterparts, the physical objects are singularised, fragile, hard to care for, and limited in one location; however, tangible objects and museums with concrete buildings still have their irreplaceable roles in making future museums a better place.

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Holding onto the Physical Objects: Irreplaceable Roles Under the Digital Challenge Over the last half century, American museums have transformed from “an establishment-like institution focused primarily inward on the growth, care and study of its collections” to one with “its focus outwards to concentrate primarily on providing education services to the public” (Weil, 2002, pp. 28–29). The shrinking number of objects inside the museums are closely related to the recent turn in museums’ functions; compared with the traditional museums identified as a storeroom for objects, current museums are coping with multifaceted roles as an educational space, a research institute, and most importantly, a tourist attraction. When visiting experiences have become the priority (Bautista, 2014, p. 10), museums are gradually transformed into tourism sites that offer the consumption of culture. The tangible, concrete documents/archives/objects are converted into pieces of information that can be transferred, shared, duplicated, and modified by machines. There is almost no difference between an object and its digital representation regarding the aspect of information transmission (Tang, 2005, p. 53). The centrality on the physicality of museum objects and their “epistemological power” (Conn, 2010, p. 56) have given their way to other museum activities: one can access the full catalogue of objects online and immediately find out the object through a search engine; the modelling technique allows people to scrutinise the digital objects from all dimensions and appreciate the tiny patterns in detail with easily zooming in and out; interactive media installations enable visitors to immerse themselves in the virtual heritage sites and explore freely. However, I would like to argue that the relationship between museums and the audiences is turning more and more tenuous rather than intimate. There are many key experiences lost in this virtual interaction, some of which are the most primal incentives why people would like to go to a museum. In the article “Museums as a Way of Seeing”, art historian Alpers recalled her childhood memory when seeing a giant crab specimen inside a museum: “I could attend to a crab in this way because it was still, exposed to view, dead. Its habitat and habits of rest, eating, and moving were absent [. . .]. The museum had transformed the crab—had heightened, by isolating, these aspects encouraged one to look at it in this way. The museum had made it an object of visual interest” (Alpers, 1991, p. 25). By proposing the term “museum effect”, Alpers criticises museums for their making everything into an object, a piece of artwork with visual appeal through a nurtured, tentative way of looking. She further argues that objects from certain cultures are not created to be of visual interest and to satisfy our insatiable “crafted visibility” (Alpers, 1991, p. 27). This way of seeing detaches objects, whose value should be defined by their makers and users rather than connoisseurs, from their original context of production. It might be a little confusing that I call for attention to physical “objects” but at the same time quote Alper’s statement that criticises museums for making things into their “objects”. To clarify, the objects here refer to two different meanings. The former means tangible items in the museum collections, while the

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latter denotes what is passive with no agency and exists only to be gazed at by people. In material culture studies, objects, things, materials, or other words that refer to something we normally regard as lifeless are considered animated and as lively and vigorous as human beings. Appadurai argues that things also have social lives and social biographies (Appadurai, 1986, pp. 3–64); they have what Gell terms as agency (Gell, 1998, pp. 16–19) and could act back at and influence people. However, this power is diminished in the way of seeing described by Alpers, which is even exacerbated by the recent flourishing of digital museums. To provide a possible alternative to the problem, Alpers advocates that museums should allow visitors the “freedom and interests” so that they could “wander through and look without the intimidating mediation between viewer and object that something such as the ubiquitous earphones provides” (Alpers, 1991, p. 30). To realise this purpose, museums should consider how an object should be placed, how to orient audiences to walk, stand, or sit around it, how to design the light, and many other practical issues (Alpers, 1991, p. 31). These suggestions are applicable for museums with physical objects, which is understandable considering that the essay was published in 1991 when the internet and information technology had not reshaped our lives in an unprecedented way. Becoming a museum that allows more “freedom and interests” demands even more efforts in the digital era. In the object-centred museums, there are still many possible interactions between objects and people: even though most objects are collected in the showcases and gazing at them seems to be the only way that how we can engage with them, one can still adjust the positions to see the object from different angles and distances. While the digital screen is much more powerful; if the museum is transforming culture into its objects, the digital screen is transforming the object into a paragon of immortality, which is perfect, flawless, and even unreal. The digital screen simplifies the humanobject engagement and specifies only one form of attention and interaction. Therefore, walking inside and wandering around museums are crucial sensory experiences that any forms of technology cannot replace. In the following part, I would like to elaborate on why museums still need objects from two aspects: firstly, the museum architecture itself is an irreplaceable and major object which is always neglected; secondly, tangible objects that could be held and touched are key to the establishment of a multisensory museum which promotes the understanding of various cultures.

Architectures and Space as Objects Architectures are always the most conspicuous component of a museum, though their significance is always neglected. It seems that we go to museums to see objects while the museum exists only because a building is needed to store things. On the contrary, the functions and meanings of museum architectures are much more complicated than being a warehouse. Most museum architectures are endowed with aesthetic values; there are also museum architectures that are heritage sites

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with historical and political values, such as the Louvre or the Forbidden City, which were palaces of royal families before being turned into museums. The inner structures and facilities of these historic architectures may not be suitable for the adaptation into a museum, as modern museums require well-designed exhibition spaces, lighting, and ventilation. However, the transformation was made not only because of their historical and aesthetic values as a spectacle, but also because of their existence as a political symbol representing the fall of the regime and the birth of a new democratic order (Duncan, 1991, p. 93). Harris argues that when ritual objects are moved into the museum, the museum effect would eliminate their spiritual power and make them ordinary objects for visual pleasure (Harris, 2012, pp. 4–5). When the royal objects are made into museum collections, and when the emperors’ residences were made available to the public, their political power has been dissolved and gradually diminished. It is more than the objectification of objects inside the museum, but the objectification of the museum architecture itself. Duncan gives museums a paradoxical title of a secular temple. It is interesting to note that the modern museum was born from the Enlightenment, which set apart the religious world and the secular world, with the former referring to subjective beliefs cherished by certain groups while the latter referring to the universal truths which are “rooted in experiences and empirically verifiable” (Duncan, 1991, p. 90). The dichotomy between the religious and secular emerged due to opposing rivals between the rule of religious doctrine and the power of newborn nation-states. The establishment of museums and many other modern inventions such as courts, capitals are all set to deliver the educational message of democracy and equality and ultimately to counteract the influence of religious authority and build up citizenship (Duncan, 1991, p. 90). The cause of the dual nature of the museum is because though the lessons taught in the museum lead to reason, logic, and scientific thoughts, but the process of acquisition of this knowledge is akin to ritualistic practices that are often performed in the religious world. The design of museum architectures is one of the reasons. Think of a museum in your mind and zoom in to the temple-like facades, marble stairs, splendid Greek architectural orders, and the large square in the front of it. The museum is always marked off to create a sense of “liminality” (Duncan, 1991, p. 91), giving visitors a hint that by walking into the museum, they are going through a transformation both physically and mentally to another sacred space, analogous to pilgrims on their way of worship to the holy place step by step. Besides the architectural reference to monumental constructions, the visit inside museums also adds to the sacred feeling of these experiences. To protect the objects from damage and ensure a comfortable environment, there are always museum etiquettes that visitors are required to conform to: no touch, no flashlight, no food or drinks, no loud talking, no chasing or running. We are so accustomed to these requirements that they are almost internalised in our behaviour. These prohibitions are like the commandments that one ought to comply with to adjust ways of acting in religious practice. Moreover, like ritual performance which consists of different procedures or events, there are always navigational paths that guide visitors to move around the museums and see different exhibitions in a certain sequence. These taboos and regulations reinforce the museum as a site of solemnity, which

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resembles the temple where only certain behaviour is permitted and must be done in a certain way. The liminality and spiritual feelings could only be evoked by encountering the physicality of museum architectures in a bodily way and cannot be replicated digitally. Besides the function of navigating visitors as discussed above, the agency of spatial arrangement also generates “new relations, new ideas and new encounter patterns” (Tzortzi, 2007, pp. 72–120). They lead to new forms of knowledge production and convey the educational message just as the objects do. Psarra investigates how the spatial characteristics affect the movement of visitors and the transmission of the educational message. The designed route creates a narrative and establishes a kind of “thematic coherence” by multiple spatial links, indicating the relationship between exhibitions. In Psarra’s study, the Museum of Scotland, like most history museums, adopts a dual spatial sequence representing two different views on history: one the one hand, it follows a smooth and coherent flow, usually marked by location proximity and similar visual links, representing a diachronic view; on the other hand, the permeability and inter-visibility offer a synchronic perspective which concentrates on the core matter of the age (Psarra, 2005, p. 91). In the space syntax analysis of museum space, Wineman and Peponis also argue that despite how subtle it may be, the spatial arrangement and how exhibitions are physically connected or separated influence visitors’ movement and how they engage with the exhibit elements (Wineman & Peponis, 2010, p. 87). The scale and the temporality of each exhibition also show additional information and influence audiences’ perceptions of it. In searching for how to communicate equality and diversity within museums by the intentionally constructed space, Sandell points out a current problem that the educational exhibitions on equality are always placed at peripheral locations: some are temporary exhibitions that do not last long, some are part of the large permanent exhibitions but are of small scale (Sandell, 2005, p. 205). Roger Silverstone also points out that permanent exhibitions with temporal stability are more likely to hold greater cultural authority (qtd. in MacDonald, 1998, p. 5). Moreover, as Tzortzi argues, the accessibility of each gallery reflects a kind of spatial hierarchy, which further demonstrates the curatorial choice, behind which is the cultural hierarchy of the works displayed (Tzortzi, 2007, pp. 72–78). Objects considered to be more valuable would normally be placed in the gallery of direct accessibility so that the tourists could easily find them. The bodily experience is another factor that establishes the aura of visiting a physical museum. Though the multisensory museum will be further discussed in the next section, I would like to point out the bodily experience in this part as it is especially related to the space. Following Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy which places the centrality on the human body and senses, architect Juhani Pallasmaa explores the entangling relationship between body and architecture: I confront the city with my body; my legs measure the length of the arcade and the width of the square; my gaze unconsciously projects my body onto the façade of the cathedral. . .I experience myself in the city and the city exists through my embodied experience. The city and my body supplement and define each other. I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me. (Pallasmaa, 2012, p. 40)

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Pallasmaa believes that “all the senses are the extensions of tactile sense” (Pallasmaa, 2012, p. 10); instead of viewing the space, we are experiencing and encountering it in a bodily way. Sensory experiences of a museum add to a new form of understanding and engagement. Pan Yuliang: A Journey to Silence was an exhibition devoted to a Chinese female artist, and it explored issues such as the absence of artists from the Global South in the art history and the suppressed female voices in contemporary art. In this exhibition, artist Wang Zhibo created a series of oil paintings in memorial of Pan, and the installation of the paintings added extra meanings to her paintings: the works were hung low on the walls of a long, narrow corridor, and the floor of the corridor was built uneven and lumpy intentionally. When visitors came to this section, one had to bend down (as the works were located below the average eye level) and walked very carefully; otherwise, they might stumble and fall over. The specially designed space turned the visiting experience into an uncomfortable one intentionally to force the visitors to experience the difficulty and struggle marginal artists underwent in a bodily and metaphorical way (Yu, 2020).

Towards a Multisensory Museum If viewing architectures and space as objects justifies the existence of physical museums compared with that of virtual museums, this section will investigate museums’ sensescape that argues for the necessity of physical objects inside the museum. In Western culture, being reasonable and sensuous is conflicting, as the latter also indicates being irrational and illogical. The senses are accordingly classified into the Western sensory hierarchy: vision is the dominant sense which is linked with reason; while other senses such as touch, smell, or taste are associated with the body and belong to people whose life is measured by the body, rather than mind (Classen & Howes, 2006, p. 206). In the Western imagination, the non-Western cultures are stereotyped as full of sensory pleasure rather than being civilised and rational like themselves. In the discussion of the museum as a secular temple, it is mentioned that the sensory experience is highly suppressed, as only appropriate ways of looking are permitted. However, in the early stage of museum development when there were primarily private collections, touching was common and even regarded as one significant way of appreciating the objects (Classen & Howes, 2006, pp. 201–202). With the gradual opening of the public museums, to better protect the objects from possible damage, touch was banned in the museum, and seeing became the only way how audiences could interact with the objects. However, Edwards et al. point out that multisensory interactions still exist in museums but “became part of the privileged access accorded to a new priesthood of curators and museum professionals” (Edwards et al., 2006, p. 19). This demonstrates that multisensory engagement with objects will provide a more comprehensive understanding than merely viewing and gazing. The feeling of holding an object is still different from viewing a 3D model virtually. The touch itself brings new experiences

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and extra knowledge: the texture, weight, hardness or softness, narrow seam where two parts are connected, minor corrosion or scratches on the surface, reflections under different lighting all provide additional information of the object which could only be felt rather than be seen. In the digital age when there are fewer tangible objects and more multimedia installations in museums, the despotism of eyes is exaggerated. Aware of the emerging field of material culture studies in the 1960s and 1970s, more and more scholars have paid attention to object-centred approaches to reconstruct museums into a multisensory space, to enhance museum experiences, and to convey more cultural knowledge. In the early 1970s, the Hall of Pacific Peoples at the American Museum of Natural History was finally opened after years of planning; the curator was anthropologist Margaret Mead, who identified herself as a public intellectual and was devoted to communicating her anthropological research to a broad and diverse public audience (Losche, 2006, p. 228). At the beginning of her planning, she aimed to create a specific ambience inside the gallery, relying not only on objects but also on space, light, and sound; she hopes to create a different exhibition where visitors could immerse themselves with various sensory elements. Losche investigated the process of Mead’s planning and found out that she was particularly concerned about creating the “impression of islands and sea” and “a feeling of lightness and distance” (Losche, 2006, p. 232); she was also supportive of using sound effects in museums to create the ambience despite all the difficulty in the sound design (Losche, 2006, p. 235). Set aside all the comments and criticism about the hall considering multiple factors influencing the final exhibition, Mead’s blueprint of a multisensory exhibition was a meaningful trial considering the financial and technical restrictions at that time. This revival of senses is not only to make museums more interesting and engaging, but also an integrated part of an ethnographic approach in the decolonisation agenda. The Western sensory hierarchy is reinforced by the sightdominated museums, where objects as cultural fragments have been detached from their original communities. However, from an ethnographic perspective, many scholars have proved that each culture has its order of senses; what we have in the vocabulary, such as vision, smell, touch, and taste, are created in the Western context and could not describe many significant senses in non-Western cultures. Rigidly applying a Western model to non-Western cultures that do not share the same sensory systems is meaningless. Geurts and Adikah look into the distinctive feelings in Western Africa: In the Anlo-Ewe society, when drinking water, one should use a calabash with both hands, and this is associated with a special feeling of pleasure and rejuvenation; drinking water with a manufactured glass, in contrast, is regarded as unstable and awkward (Geurts & Adikah, 2006, p. 36). The wearing of traditional underwear godui, which functions as panties for Anlo-Ewe women, is closely connected with one’s womanhood and viewed as the extension of the body; wearing godui is believed to have spiritual significance, and the loss of it may cause unease and anxiety (Geurts & Adikah, 2006, pp. 40–42). Ahanonko, specific greeting nicknames are powerful and multisensory, involving a set of etiquettes such as eye contact, handshake, and representing one’s disposition and idiosyncrasy (Geurts &

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Adikah, 2006, pp. 44–48). All of these are distinctive and crucial senses for local communities which do not have the corresponding vocabulary in non-local languages. Moreover, besides the different sensory systems among cultures, many objects are not made for visual pleasure. Instead of artworks in Western imagination that are made to be gazed at and protected, many of them are created to be used, interacted with, handled, and even made to decay and deteriorate. As summarised in Classen and Howes’s research, Navajo sandpaintings are regarded by Western connoisseurs as primitive visual art with exotic aesthetics, while in Navajo communities the sandpainting is a method of healing practised by a shaman to transfer the positive energy of the painting to the patient. During the healing ritual, the sand will be rubbed onto the body of the patient, and the sandpainting will be cleaned at the end of the performance. To better appreciate and conserve the paintings, the sands would normally be fixed on canvas like Western paintings for display by connoisseurs; however, in the Navajo community, staring at the sacred image will cause blindness as a punishment (Classen & Howes, 2006, pp. 214–215). The Western ways of seeing and the art market transform the paintings with ritualistic and medical functions into a commodity; the aura of the sandpainting originating from the shamanic practice gradually fades. The statement that things have social lives believes that things have their own life trajectories and could assume many identities just as people do; to dig out their multiple life stories, we should ask a set of questions that we would normally ask people: What, sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in its “status” and in the period and culture, and how are these possibilities realised? Where does the thing come from and who made it? What has been its career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things? What are the recognised “ages” or periods in the thing’s “life”, and what are the cultural markers for them? How does the thing’s use change with its age, and what happens to it when it reaches the end of its usefulness? (Kopytoff, 1986, pp. 66–67). The changing roles of objects’ social lives vividly illustrate the different life stages of museum collections. Set in local and non-local contexts, the answers to the questions above may be dramatically different. The sandpaintings in the Navajo community are produced by Shaman in healing rituals to soothe the pain of the patients, while the sandpaintings as foreign artworks in art markets are intentionally created by complicated networks of collectors, art criticism, and art dealers. French sociologist Morin further distinguishes between a biographical object and a standardised commodity: the former is given an identity that is localised and individual; the latter is globalised, generalised, and is mechanically reproduced (qtd. in Hoskins, 2006, p. 78). This is not to say that the sandpaintings are massproduced, but to focus on the ways how they are displayed, and the meanings generated by different ways of display. In the first stage of their social lives, when it functioned as a healing tool, the sandpainting involved bodily engagement, multisensory experience, and Navajo identity; what matters most is the process of how the shaman practised the ritual. In the next life stage, when a piece of sandpainting became an artwork displayed in the museum, what is valued is the painting

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itself as an outcome rather than the process of how it was produced. In this way, the cultural knowledge embedded in sandpaintings is also deprived when they are looked at by the audience in a Western way of seeing instead of being operated in the local ritual. When an object enters a museum, it seems to gain immortality and will be forever new. One significant reason that touch and other senses are circumscribed in museums is due to the consideration of possible damage caused by excessive physical exposure. This concern is rooted in the frozen preservation principle, which is also the mainstream way of conservation. Behind this principle is the belief in material authenticity, which insists that the authenticity of an object is maintained only if the object is kept in its original condition and materials. In this sense, anything that makes objects lose their original appearance is a damage to their authenticity. In contrast, DeSilvey proposes another approach to reconsider the object and the decay. In her experience of curating a derelict homestead in Montana, she realised that the disintegration most conservation practices and technology aimed to forestall, viewed from an interpretative perspective, could produce new meanings. She argues that we should rethink the object itself as a process, not as a still condition or a discrete entity (DeSilvey, 2006, pp. 324, 326). Decay, instead of a negative factor, is an opening, or in her term, “entropy” (DeSilvey, 2006, p. 318), which brings about more possibility in the dynamic transformation. This is echoed with Colloredo-Mansfeld’s idea that the fleeting nature and ephemerality of objects, the decay, and the consumption of them also represent the materiality of objects. He argues that the “rather than undoing the materiality of social life in favour of spirituality though, the using up of matter represents its own materiality, though not one dependent on permanence” (Colloredo-Mansfeld, 2003, p. 252). The physical objects that embrace decay and dynamic change are distinguished from the digital ones born with imperishability; the devices and facilities preserving the digital objects may break down one day, but the data and information stored will not decay like the physical materials.

Conclusion: To Be or Not to Be Through a close examination of the affordance of digital materiality and the irreplicable role of the physicality of museums, we have looked into the birth of the museum against the colonial background and its development: from European cabinets of curiosities to progressive and educational institutions aiming at the promotion of decolonisation, equality, and diversity. In this process, both the object lessons brought by physical collections and new ways of learning and encounter brought by digital technology play a fundamental role in different aspects. When compared and discussed together, the physical and the digital seem to be a pair of opposing rivals, with the former representing the aura of authenticity, while the latter representing the new possibilities of museums in a new age. The dichotomy between them is especially conflicting when it comes to the question of whether museums still

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need objects. If the answer is yes, then it seems that the physical objects will take advantage and remain their dominant roles as they did in the past few centuries; if no, then these objects should be replaced by their digital counterparts, and the real ones should be repatriated back to their original communities or kept in the storerooms. However, Conn’s question is neither a single choice between the digital and physical, nor one in need of an answer of an absolute yes or no; the relationship between the digital and the physical should be complementary instead of contradictory. The physicality of objects may constitute a crucial element in the foundation of a museum, while digital technology could help to improve the delivery of the educational message and augment the multisensory experiences through audio/video installations, contributing to the process of decolonisation. Museum anthropology is a self-reflective discipline in search of possibility and diversity. We acknowledge the advantages of both digital and physical museums and are aware of the potential threats of conservatively insisting on the physical objects or going completely virtual. What we embrace and expect in museums is not a divide, but more possibilities brought forth by technologies.

References Alpers, S. (1991). The museum as a way of seeing. In I. Karp & S. D. Lavine (Eds.), Exhibiting cultures: The poetics and politics of museum display (pp. 25–32). Smithsonian Institution Press. Appadurai, A. (1986). Introduction: Commodities and the politics of value. In A. Appadurai (Ed.), The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective (pp. 3–63). Cambridge University Press. Bautista, S. S. (2014). Museums in the digital age: Changing meanings of place, community, and culture. AltaMira Press. Chapman, W. (1985). Arranging ethnology: A. H. L. F. Pitt Rivers and the Typological Tradition. In G. W. Stocking Jr. (Ed.), Objects and others: Essays on museums and material culture (pp. 15–48). University of Wisconsin Press. Classen, C., & Howes, D. (2006). The museum as sensescape: Western sensibilities and indigenous artifacts. In E. Edwards, C. Gosden, & R. Phillips (Eds.), Sensible objects: Colonialism, museums and material culture (pp. 199–222). Routledge. Colloredo-Mansfeld, R. (2003). Introduction: Matter unbound. Journal of Material Culture, 8(3), 245–254. Conn, S. (2010). Do museums still need objects? University of Pennsylvania Press. DeSilvey, C. (2006). Observed decay: Telling stories with mutable things. Journal of Material Culture, 11(3), 318–338. Duncan, C. (1991). Art museums and the ritual of citizenship. In I. Karp & S. D. Lavine (Eds.), Exhibiting cultures: The poetics and politics of museum display (pp. 88–103). Smithsonian Institution Press. Edwards, E. (2003). Introduction. In L. Peers & A. K. Brown (Eds.), Museums and source communities: A Routledge reader (pp. 83–99). Routledge. Edwards, E., Gosden, C., & Phillips, R. (Eds.). (2006). Sensible objects: Colonialism, museums and material culture. Routledge. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline & punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans). Vintage Books. Geismar, H. (2018). Museum object lessons for the digital age. University College London Press.

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Wenrui Li is currently working on her MSc in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. She has an MSc in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology from the University of Oxford and a BA in Archaeology (Studies in Connoisseurship of Chinese Cultural Relics) from Nanjing University. Email: [email protected].

Chapter 5

Museums and Archives in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Post-representation Yael Eylat Van Essen

Abstract Analog archives and collections management practices used by museums in their traditional forms are currently being replaced by digital technologies. These technologies redefine the relationship between the collection and the archive as well as the ways in which concepts such as representation, interpretation, truth, and objectivity are perceived within the museum context. As a result, the museum archive is being considered not only as a storage space but as a knowledge generator and as an arena of cultural discourse and interpretive space for the content it preserves. Based on contemporary archival theories, this study argues that the changes in archival practices presented by digital platforms impact curatorial conceptions in museums as the museum archive becomes a potential space for curatorial practices. It further claims that the new archival practices have the potential not only to change how knowledge is represented, stored, and retrieved but also to generate a self-reflexive examination of the way in which meanings are being created in the museum. Special attention will be given to exploring how AI (artificial intelligence) applications influence the ways in which knowledge is documented and organised in the museum’s archives: It addresses the methods by which AI applications take place in the digitisation processes of museum collections, imposing “machine intelligence” on cultural analyses. In addition, it will refer to potential future implications of AI on curatorial practices and on the visitor’s experience and refer to the societal and political consequences of the use of AI-driven self-customisation practices. Keywords AI · Archive · Art · Big-data · Contemporary · Cultural marker · Cultural structure · Database · Democracy · Derrida · Digital age · Digital technology · Foucault · History · Yuk Hui · Hybridity · ICOM · Latour · Machine learning · Museological approach · Museum · Politics · Power · Records continuum · Reflexivity · Representation · Time

Y. E. Van Essen (✉) Design Faculty, Holon Institute of Technology, Holon, Israel © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Sight as Site in the Digital Age, Digital Culture and Humanities 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9209-4_5

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The heated debate around a renewed definition for the museum within the International Council of Museums (ICOM), approved in 2022,1 reflects the complexity of the cultural and political transformations that the museum institution has been experiencing in recent decades. This has confirmed the real need to rethink museums in the wider contexts in which they operate. The inability to reach a consensual definition of the museum in the organisation’s 25th General Assembly, held in Kyoto, Japan in September of that year, presented ideological differences regarding the role of the museum and its conceptual and sociopolitical premises. The many disputes that arose during the pre- and post-conference debates related mainly to the over-politicisation of the museum and the strong ideological line reinforced by this new definition, derived from the acknowledgement of the museum as an institution which should maintain its relevancy and touch upon contemporary issues. In addition, opponents of the new definition also claim that it fails to distinguish between a museum and a cultural centre, library or a laboratory, and thus it forsakes the museum’s unique qualities (Noce, 2019). The discourse regarding the museum’s relevance and its duty to respond to the present reality is not new. Throughout the twentieth century, there were voices claiming that the museum had become anachronistic and that it no longer represented the spirit of its time: It was claimed that the museum had gradually ceased to function as a leading cultural marker and had become “a kind of an archive”, inhabited by works of art or historical exhibits that were irrelevant to the present time. The changes that characterised the field of museology in the second half of the twentieth century were reflected in the need to make clear distinctions between the museum and the archive, in order to disprove the obsolete image of the museum. In one of the canonical texts dealing with museum criticism, entitled “On the Museum’s Ruins”, Douglas Crimp (1980) refers to the claims regarding the collapse of the status of the museum in the postmodern era and points at the loss of validity of the modernist assumptions on the basis of which the museum was originally established. He sees them as formations of mounds of testimonies originating in a previous era, generating pathetic illusions of timelessness based on worthless nostalgia. In this context, he quotes Eugenio Donato (1979), who claims that such an assumption results from the uncritical belief in the idea that a cataloguing system can lead to a representative understanding of the world. In fact, there is no basis for assuming that the real can be replaced by its substitutes—the totality by its fragments, the object by its label, and still generate an image that will represent in one way or another a non-linguistic universe. This assumption refutes the validity of the idea underlying the museum: “Should the fiction disappear, there is nothing left of the Museum but ‘bric-a-brac’, a heap of meaningless and valueless fragments of objects which are incapable of substituting themselves either metonymically for the original objects or metaphorically for their representations” (Donato, 1979, p. 223)

See the approved definition at: “ICOM Approves a New Museum Definition.” ICOM, 24 August 2022. Accessed 9 September 2022. https://icom.museum/en/news/icom-announces-the-alternativemuseum-definition-that-will-be-subject-to-a-vote/.

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In this study, I will argue that some of the changes in contemporary museology, which have re-enabled museums to again attract visitors, are the result of changes in the modes in which knowledge is organised and represented within them. I will argue that this shift is inextricably linked to the changes that the concept of the archive has undergone in recent decades due to archival computerisation. That has led to the development of new archival practices that have gradually blurred the traditional boundaries between archives and museum collections and have presented new practices for both museums and archives. Following museum researcher Ross Parry, I will claim that the logic of the archive is actually embedded in the ways in which museums operate and manage their collections which, therefore, becomes the museum’s metonym (Parry, 2007, pp. 51–52). This process paradoxically strengthens the museum’s relevancy when the archive evolves to be an essential engine for the museum’s renewal process. It results in generating new connections between collection items from different historical periods and contexts, with contemporary phenomena and discourse, enabling the transformation of the museum into a dynamic institution which has the capabilities for constant renewal. Special emphasis has been employed in this text on the abilities of contemporary archives to link different sources of knowledge to leverage the curatorial processes. In her book Radical Museology, Claire Bishope (2013) claims that museums which possess historical collections are the kind of institutions that can stimulate valuable contemporary activities: They have become the most fertile sites for examining the notion of “the contemporary”. Therefore, only a reference to the past can validate the future approach that contemporary museology requires. She further claims that the current challenge facing art museums is to update their museological approach towards the organisation of their collection through direct reference to history. In this context, “the contemporary” develops as a dialectical method, both in relation to history and art, as well as a museum practice (Bishope, 2013, pp. 23–27). With the new competencies of digital archives, museums do not necessarily have to possess historical collections but should develop the ability to link ideas from different sources as a structured property, which could be manifested, either through physical objects or virtually. An additional reason for the ability of contemporary museums to connect to the actualities of the present relies on restructuring the role of the museum building, as the virtual space of the museum becomes more prominent. Following art historian Hal Foster’s article “Archives of Modern Art” (2002), I would suggest that a major process characterising museums from the beginning of the twenty-first century onwards is the reduction of the role of museum physical space in the organisation of knowledge, a role which was an inherent part in the design of museum space in the past. Instead, the visual function of the museum, which used to focus on works of art2 and their modes of presentation, is now centred on the museum building as a spectacle, as can be seen in many of the recently built museums. Therefore, with the advent of virtual spaces, the organisation of

2 Foster refers to art museums, but his analyses can be implemented on other types of museum as well.

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Fig. 5.1 (a, b) Photos from Kolumba Museum in Köln in which the number of objects in the exhibition is minimised in order to increase the visitors’ experience. (Photo by Yael Eylat Van Essen)

knowledge in museums is gradually being transformed into the electronic spaces of museums, while the physical spaces are aimed more at enhancing the museum “experience” (Fig. 5.1a, b). In addition, cultural memory, which in the past was mediated by visual works presented in the museum’s exhibition halls, has been transferred to the electronic archive, which has increasingly adopted functions that assist the museum’s mnemonic task and the organisation of knowledge within it (Foster, 2002, p. 95). Thus, I would suggest that transferring the function of the museum’s knowledge organisation into electronic space, as argued by Foster, enables the empowerment of its contemporary dimensions, thanks to the possibilities embedded within digital systems to cross-reference knowledge from different periods and content fields. I will further suggest that artificial intelligence (AI) based systems, especially in the fields of image recognition and deep learning, as I will demonstrate in the last part of this text, can deepen this process by opening up new patterns for knowledge organisation.

The Concept of the Archive and the Impact of New Technologies on Its Renewed Conceptualisation The theoretical discourse concerning the concept of the archive has gained considerable attention in postmodern thought. This discourse has transcended the boundaries of knowledge literacy and is expanded towards other fields such as philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, cultural studies, and computer science. Foucault’s discussion of the archive was central to the development of this discourse but has also been very influential in the context of museological studies. In his book The Archaeology of Knowledge (2002), Foucault refers to the archive as a system that reveals the rules of practice by which statements can exist and change as needed—a comprehensive system of formation and transformations of statements. As such, it defines the possibilities and impossibilities of discourse at any given time and reflects the ideological and cultural conception behind it. The documenting

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system and its interpretive mechanisms are characterised by the boundaries and essence of the discourse by which they have been generated, and the different contexts created by all the objects and documents that have supported them. In addition, Foucault contributed to the understanding of the meaning of the archive in the museum context. In his article “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” (1967/1997), he points to the museum as the heterotopia associated with the notion of “time accumulation”. According to this conception, the idea of the museum is related to the construction of a kind of total archive, which includes all times and periods, fashions, and tastes. The archive, in this context, should, on the one hand, represent what is external to time, and on the other hand become a signifier of “all times”. In his reference to the concept of the archive, Jacques Derrida added another dimension. He examined the way the archive takes part in shaping and fulfilling the concept of the state, and argued that, besides its important role in shaping the national identity and its collective memory, the archive has served throughout history, as a tool for maintaining state control over its citizens (Manoff, 2004). In his book Archive Fever (1998), Derrida argued that political power cannot exist without control over the archive or over any other form of expression of collective memory. In his view, effective democracy can be measured by citizens’ access to the state’s archives, the way they are constituted, and their modes of interpretation. The power given by the archive, both at the political level and at the degree of control over knowledge sources and their validity, places its holders in positions of control and influence. Thus, the archive is not only perceived as a system where knowledge is preserved and where historical sequence can be traced, but also as a place where institutional construction is carried out. Therefore, the archive is not an objective place where knowledge is acquired, but an object of research by itself that requires an exploration of the mechanisms through which knowledge is organised and stored. In this respect, practical and political considerations for the inclusion and exclusion of documents and objects in constituting historical narratives based on complex power relations and control technologies are examined. Many of the debates concerning the postcolonial histories of museums in the West touch upon these issues. An additional perspective in rethinking the concept of the archive stems from the new practices of archiving that originate in new technologies. Recognition of the importance of new solutions for storing bodies of knowledge as well as for data retrieval arose as early as at the end of the first half of the twentieth century. This recognition is expressed by Vannevar Bush, who headed the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in the United States during World War II. In his seminal text, “As We May Think” (1945), Bush argued that since there is an exponential increase in scientific knowledge, special effort should be directed to making this knowledge accessible, for if it was not accessible in the place and time it was required, it would become meaningless. He further claimed that science had for many years greatly increased the physical power of man, but not human cognition as a whole. In this article, he laid the foundation for a machine called “Memex”, which was to serve as a kind of universal library and would offer an innovative way to link

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between information and ideas. At the heart of Bush’s idea was the concept of connectivity which he considered as central to the process of scientific development. Based on the understanding that indexing methods could no longer be effective in a situation where there was an abundance of information, Bush came up with the idea of creating reflexive mechanisms within the archive itself. His ideas stemmed primarily from the recognition of the need to establish new linking mechanisms between the various scientific disciplines, which could equally be applied in the cultural field considering the development of interdisciplinary methods. His understanding of the primacy of retrieval mechanisms and the notions of connectivity and reflexivity has had an enormous influence on the development of digital archives either in their online or offline forms. In his article “Database as a Symbolic Form” (1999), new-media researcher Lev Manovich makes a comprehensive argument about the status of the database in the digital age. He claims that the database should not be conceived only a tool for cultural analysis that can be applied to different periods, as Foucault presented the archive, but rather as an essential concept representing the current era. As Renaissance researcher Erwin Panofsky (1997) saw in the linear perspective, a form that symbolises the modern age, so, in the database, we can see a new symbolic form of the computerised age. Manovich claims that we are in an age of computer ontology which is projected onto culture. In this ontology, the world is condensed into two complementary types of software objects: databases and algorithms. The database as a symbolic form and the archive that is a cultural derivative of this form do not only function as cultural structures that change as a result of the new technologies, but also express the essence of a new cultural condition. This new perception requires examining the new meanings of the archive and the possibilities of using it as a method of rationalisation in the contemporary world, as a form of thinking and not just as a tool for preservation and organisation of knowledge. Furthermore, he claims, “[. . .] it is also appropriate that we would want to develop poetics, aesthetics, and ethics of this database” (Manovich, 2001, p. 219). Indeed, digital technologies, mostly those developed from the 1990s onwards, have changed the ways archives are being structured. The ability to store vast amounts of data, process them, and make them accessible in real-time through the internet has turned contemporary archives into dynamic systems based on “live connections”. These systems do not necessarily rely on past patterns but rather realise a cultural state of contemporary relevance. Their value is not embedded in the content stored or the logic of its insertion, but rather in the ways this content can be retrieved and can be contextualised or connected to other sources. As opposed to the apparent objective and eternal qualities of the archive (and the museum) as they were previously perceived, digital archives draw their transience and their fictional character from the new technologies, derived from the ways data is being produced and manipulated. In this way knowledge becomes mobile, comprehensive, and cross referential. The change is substantial because it eliminates prior references to knowledge within closed systems and allows the existence of open and contextdependent systems. The ability to access information through the Internet and the

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option of using open source collaborative tools, which the general public can use, adds an additional and significant dimension to archives and to their functionality. In his book, Digital Memory and the Archive (2013), Wolfgang Ernst explores the transformations imposed by digital technologies on the concept of the archive. He claims that within digital archives, there is no delay between memory and present time, but rather “the technical option of immediate feedback, turning all present data into archival entries and vice versa” (p. 98). With this change in the character of the archives which are no longer perceived as a repository space for static data, he sees them as differential. Since media can be immediately archived, streaming media and storage become increasingly entwined and can hardly be separated. Therefore, he claims: “With the supremacy of selection over storage, addressability over sorting, there is no memory in the emphatic sense anymore; archival terminology—or rather the archive itself—becomes literally metaphorical, a function of transfer processes” (p. 98). Ernst proposes to refer to the archive in terms of “vector dynamism” which is replacing the static notion of the traditional archival classification system. Borrowed from analytical mathematics, he addresses this term of “vector fields” as representing the cross-referencing of the two ontologies of matter and energy. As a result, the dynamism of the archival field is replacing the known archival order. In its new digital media-based environment, the archival field is mastered by cybernetic logics resulting in electronics and tends to move towards an economy of circulation, based on “permanent transformation and updating”. The cybernetic space does not record memory in its cultural context, but rather as a performative way of communication (p. 99). As archives are transformed to be cybernetic systems, repositories turn into “frequently access sites”. In this context he claims that “[t]he aesthetics of fixed order is being replaced by permanent reconfigurability. Digital economy nowadays operates with terms such as reframe or re-load” (p. 99). Therefore, in the framework of new technologies, the distinction between media transmission and storage becomes obsolete (p. 100). Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, to which they refer in their book A Thousand Plateaus (2013), offers a spatial dimension for understanding the characteristics of the digital archive, as it is also based on a networked structure resembling the typologies of digital networks. Deleuze and Guattari see the rhizome as a non-hierarchical method of constant de-territorialisation, randomly linked to the chaotic arbitrariness of the world, a structure without a disciplined centralised infrastructure or a memory that can always be returned to. In contrast with the arbolic structure, on which the traditional analogue archive was constituted, rhizomatic thought is multi-valued and multiple, where metamorphoses with no precise location are taking place. Since these metamorphoses have no recovery or self-recycling capability, the rhizome constitutes a potential site for release and change and for the re-creation of power relations and hierarchical arrays. Archives have data retrieval systems, based on a logic different than that of inserting the data. They thus produce de-territorialisation of the digital objects, texts, and queries by extracting basic meaning units. The creative potential of such data mining systems enables the creation of unexpected connections by multiplying the interpretive potential of the data, often leading to the production of new knowledge. With such

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systems, an archive can be perceived as a space for interpretation, functioning as a network that can theoretically produce all possible connections. It can offer alternatives to cultural interpretation set up by institutions that operate according to predetermined patterns, as museums have done in the past. With regard to the digital archive, it should be noted that what enables the dynamism of the archive is not only its new properties such as the blurring of the boundaries between the flow of information and storage, and its ability to generate diverse connections. The dynamism of the archive also relies on the different ways the archived object is defined and formed with the expansion of the range of what can be considered as an object—whether digital-born or digitised for archiving (Grau et al., 2017, p. 9).

Hybridising the Museum and the Archive Although issues related to the effects of digital technologies on the museum are not reflected directly in the museum’s new definition approved at the ICOM general assembly in Prague (2022), new technologies have a strong impact on the transformations of the museum institution in recent decades: They have substantially altered the way things are experienced and perceived in the museum and the modes of communication within it. They have modified the interaction between the individual and the world, and the cultural and political spheres in which the museum plays an important role. A central concept in the current discourse regarding the cultural implications of new technologies is the concept of hybridity (Eylat Van Essen, 2016). The centrality of this concept in digital culture derives from the possibilities presented by these technologies to merge diverse ontological fields, by reducing content to binary language and developing systemic approaches based on interdisciplinary methodologies. Hybridity is manifested in new kinds of platforms that facilitate diverse functions and multi-uses operating in hybridised physical and virtual spaces. The new forms of archives, as a product of new technologies, have undertaken an ontological shift that has led the archival discourse far beyond its traditional disciplinary borders: From being connected to building a repository, based on functions such as collecting, ordering, classification, and description, it has also gained metaphoric qualities, representing concepts such as memory, identity, truth, legacy, power, authenticity, and authority, which are basic attributes of the museum (Haylett, 2019). Thus, the hybridisation between the archive and the museum touches upon the most fundamental attributes of both. In referring to the history of archival practices in museums I suggest seeing the evolution of the digital archive in museums as a gradual process of hybridisation between them.

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Both archives and museums are complex concepts constituted of three components with different ontological meanings: space, information, and system.3 Unlike “regular” archives, the space of the museum is not only a functional storage space of objects, but also a space for their display. The information that the museum conveys is transformed mainly through these objects. However, the museum as an archive contains two more components, each of them having a long history of different practices formed over the years: Records of the collection by analogue and digital means, including metadata for each object, and documents related to the conduct of the museum, which includes events, financial statements, donations, purchases, protocols of board meetings, and more. The “system” through which museums have archived their collections is described in detail in Ross Parry’s book Recoding the Museum (2007). In this book, Parry explores the managing and registering practices of the collections and describes how the museum’s collections were managed before and after the beginning of computerisation processes in museums. Referring to the pre-computer systems era, he claims that, although the item’s record was based on the categorisation system of accepted conventions for the registration of objects, the registration process was also personal and unique, dependent on the inclinations of each curator. The ability to link different items in the collection and produce thematic cuts and unique categorisations based on specific characterisations of the objects depended largely on the curators’ familiarity with the collection and their personal interests. There were no additional methodological tools that allowed for deviation from the categorisation system, appearing on the paper cards used for registration. In the 1960s, museums began to organise their collections with computational tools, enabling much more efficient management of the collections. In the first phase, computerised perforated cards replaced the paper cards prepared by the registrars in the museum, but despite the similar output, the replacement generated major changes in the way the curators worked. The many and varied fields through which the collections could be sorted made it possible to find common denominators and comparative axes that were previously more difficult to locate and thus also enabled generation of a research process within the museums. In contrast to the old cataloguing methods, in which large collections made it very difficult to cross-reference various parameters required for museum research, computerised indexing methods opened new possibilities for examining phenomena that had previously required enormous resources (IBM & Ellin, 1969). In the 1970s, computerised collection management expanded, and its implications went far beyond its function as a “support system”. The methodology that they represented led to practices that largely reflected the systemic scientific approach, which was based on taxonomic analysis, and illustrated how the new culture of

3

This can be compared to Thibodeau’s analysis of digital images which possess three levels—the physical the logical and the conceptual—and can be significantly different at each of them (Thibodeau, 2002, p. 6).

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standardisation—the code culture appropriate to the natural sciences—also permeated humanistic museums. The 1970s actually marked a turning point that can be seen in what Parry refers to as a new epistemological structure imposed on collections: the epistemic of industrial knowledge production, of automated processes, of computer logic and of scientific disciplines that led to systematic and sometimes rigid documentation (Parry, 2007, pp. 49–50). Computing has been a key factor in the development of collaborative standards for documentation systems and museum archives. In most cases, the automation that resulted from the use of computers was a product more than a need to develop improved access to information. The new platforms that assisted in optimising the system have gone far beyond their initial functionality and have become a significant factor in museum design. The first generation of databases in museums tended to allow only models based on hierarchical logic.4 In the 1980s, the next generation of databases was developed, and these enabled complex (and sometimes even more efficient) data architecture to represent collections. The new systems were based on the principle of “relative information” and the management of separate information folders, which could be cross-referenced with other information and create more open and free connections among them. As a result, instead of placing the information within one large grid, or tree of fields, these systems made it possible to create new links that are not built into the conventional categorising systems (Will, 1993). From the beginning of the 2000s, an intensive process of digitisation of museum collections began. Yet despite this extensive process and the knowledge that has accumulated as a result, it is estimated that today most of the items in museums around the world have not yet been professionally digitised (NEMO, 2020).5 In parallel with the digitisation process, museums have begun to include a growing number of digital objects in their collections. This has led to a change in the composition of the archives: As a result, the archives similarly contain display objects (works of art/items of historical value, specimens from nature, and others), documentation materials, and archival materials related to the museum activity. This has led to the blurring of the boundaries between the three different categories of the archive (collection items—collection item records—museum records) in a way that has caused collection information to change their locations over the years and move between the collection and the archive (Huyton, 2019). The digitisation of museum collections and archives is central to the hybridisation process that museums undergo in connecting their physical and virtual spaces. As a result, many museums display a large number of items from the collections they possess on their websites and produce a “parallel” (and sometimes extended) display of their physical exhibits in the museum’s virtual spaces. Yet, the expansion of 4

However, despite the great contribution of such models to the streamlining of collections, their use did not always suit museums whose collections did not conceptually require taxonomic divisions as in the natural sciences. Applying these methodologies did not suit the needs of these museums and did, in some cases, create some disruptions for the curators. 5 In Europe, which has invested extensive resources in digitising its collection, only 43.6% of their collections are digitised (Final report, 2020).

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museum activities to the virtual space does not solely result in the “representation”6 of the physical objects presented in the museum, in virtual formats, but rather offers new experiences to the museum visit, based on the unique possibilities and opportunities made possible by virtual platforms.

The Archive as a Curatorial Space and as a Mechanism of Self-Reflection: The Museum Explores Itself The recognition of the importance of accessibility to the items included in the archives has influenced their design, their visibility, and the experiences they provide. Contrary to the image of the historian who rummages in dusty archives, the newly designed archive, from which the information is extracted at the click of a button, has become, like the museums themselves, spaces in which pleasure, seduction, and illusion play a significant role (Bradley, 1999). Like museums, archives are areas of “greater” existence than the “everyday”. The desire to connect to another time span and to a comprehensive body of knowledge evokes the feeling of the “great” and the inconceivable. Many museums, in recent years, have been not only representations of their collections in their virtual sites, but have also showcased digital representations as objects on display in their physical space.7 Some of them contain more items than those subsumed in the museum exhibition halls, including objects which have never been shown before. Such platforms can expand and shrink virtually to represent the entire collection as a whole providing the visitors with a new extensive experience of the museum.8 Digital archives in museums allegedly share the revelation of the “secret” behind the museum’s founding process and place the visitor in a position that in the past was the unique privilege of the curator who was the only one authorised to access the collection and to organise it in different ways. Referring to the archive as a curatorial platform has a clear manifestation in many museums where visitors are literally invited to curate their own collections, either in the museum physical space, like in the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York and the Cleveland Art Museum, or in the museum’s virtual spaces. This approach derives not only from the acknowledgment that archives are sites for interpretation, which is the core of any curatorial act, but also from new approaches towards the museum objects. Following Bruno Latour, who proposes in his Actor-network theory (ANT) (2005), to address objects as entities that have agency, Lucy Bayley refers to the museum object through its

6 In my discussion of the digital object I will refer to the additional meanings that an object can acquire while being transformed into digital form. 7 As you can see, for example, in Gallery One in Cleveland and Kunsthalle Mannheim in which the digital archives are part of the display and function as potential curatorial space for the visitors. 8 An example of an archive on display that contains documents which have never been exhibited in the exhibition halls is the Churchill War Room Timeline at the Imperial War Museum in London.

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performative aspects. In her article “Curating and Collecting” (2019) she argues that the question regarding how the object “lives, unfolds, oozes out, decomposes, recomposes, becomes invisible, is forgotten or takes centre stage in the museum collection” must be reflected in the way the museum system operates. Yet the way an object operates should not necessarily rely only on its agreed and predetermined features, but rather on its performance in relation to the museum space and beyond. The digital archive is an ideal platform for expanding the degree of agency of the museum object. As mentioned, searching in digital archives makes it possible to find documents/objects, which do not necessarily correspond to the preliminary categorisations in the registration process. Digital archives make it possible to create links, based on non-linear and irreversible connection systems that rely among others on fuzzy logic, semantic networks and statistical estimates. Such modes of data mining resemble neural networks, which are not “aware” of the semantics of memory pathways but are able to adapt themselves to previous trajectories while creating coherent structures and cultural continuity. Thus, the advanced technologies of data retrieval in many of the archives are in fact based on fragmentation and differentiation, which allow a deviation from the accepted classifications that traditionally formed the basis of many curatorial models. On the one hand, it allows a comprehensive view of the entire archive and, on the other hand, offers links that can form the foundation for alternative curatorial concepts and interpretive statements. Referring to archives in contemporary artistic contexts, Rudolf Freiling wrote already in 2004, “Text and image are not inserted into the archive only as documents (Akte), but become actors (Akteure) in their own right. It is misleading to talk about a knowledge store when in fact we are dealing with a knowledge generator” (Freiling, 2004). The ability to merge data from different sources in the digital archive poses a great opportunity for museum research and activities. In her article “Archives and Record Management” (2019), Sara Haylett presents the “records continuum” model9 which is an integration of records management and archival practices. The purpose of this model is “to ensure the preservation of context and a record’s authenticity”. Unlike previous archiving models, which establish clear boundaries between a record’s activity, use and management, this model does not make any distinction between the value of a record at its creation and its archival historical value. In their integration, she sees an alignment “with the postmodern shift in archival practice and the archivist’s transition into a more proactive, engaged role, but also the need to act quickly to preserve digital information”. As the collection records and archival data share the same digital platforms, the preservation of context and a record’s authenticity can be ensured. Furthermore, including the data regarding the activity of the museum enables a self-reflexive approach to the museum, using the museum’s archive not only as a curatorial platform, but also as a source for exploring the museum’s own mechanisms.

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The records continuum model was developed at Monash University already in the 1990s.

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While referring to the concept of the record, Haylett quotes Barbara Reed’s definition of this concept: “A good record is accompanied by waves of context and connections. A record is never a single object; it is always an object with connections. A record cannot be separated from the events that precipitated it nor the person who created it or was involved in it” (McKemmish et al., 2005, p. 221). She claims that in order to contextualise an object within the museum space, we have to acknowledge different aspects influencing the way objects perform. In this context, Bayley also claims that applying contextuality to museal archive is of great importance. To demonstrate her claim, she refers to the kind of connections that activate an object in the Tate museum and poses questions such as: “[. . .] What effect did the canonising of ‘landmark’ exhibitions, from the early 1990s onwards, have on attribution practices at Tate? Are we still feeling the effects of an ‘educational turn’ in curating around 2008? What might the expansion and critique of Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, or the current alignment between activism and curating, have brought to Tate’s collecting priorities and curatorial approaches?” (Bayley, 2019). This attitude offers an extensive contextualised analysis of the museum’s activity. It takes into account the broad envelope that is related to the ways museums perform in general and the performative aspects of their objects and their degree of agency, in particular. As the archive becomes a “living” and dynamic space, it can also be granted with “experiential” attributes. It can respond to events in real time, and, thus, can evolve to function as a generative factor. In addition, it can become a display object within the physical spaces of the museum, either by the “materialisation” of its virtual representation in real space, or alternatively, by the ability to produce its spatial representations in the virtual space. The perception of the archive as having “dynamic” qualities is also related to the fact that the transferring of knowledge within the museum is perceived as a process of a social nature in itself. However, the museum does not only link human beings to each other, but links “humans and non-humans, or people and things, subjects and objects” (Soares & Smeds, 2016, p. 44).10 In order to generate reflexive processes reflecting the full complexity of the museum apparatus, the museum’s archive as a comprehensive concept has to include all relevant factors within the museum’s activities. In addition to curatorial manifestations of a reflexive approach, the new archival practices open the door to potential museological research projects that provide wider cultural as well as political contexts to the ways in which museums operate.

10 Soares, Bruno Brulon and Kerstin Smeds (2016). “Museology exploring the concept of MLA (Museums-Libraries-Archives) and probing its interdisciplinarity.” 44, pp. 29–33. Museology exploring the concept of MLA (Museums-Libraries-Archives). https://journals.openedition.org/ iss/654.

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The Archive and Artificial Intelligence (AI) The process of archiving, which consists of the registration of collection objects, requires extensive professional knowledge. The information attached to objects as metadata includes both factual and interpretive information that influence curatorial decisions. Recent developments in the field of AI, in general, and deep learning and computer vision, in particular, mark the beginning of a new era of museum archiving. The use of AI-based processes can accelerate the digitisation processes in museums and make them significantly more efficient and cost-effective. This study argues that integrating AI systems in the archival process not only has the potential to deepen the archival aspect of the museum, but can also contribute to extending its reflexive potential and to strengthening its connection to present and future times, thereby increasing its relevancy. The use of AI in order to automate the process of attributing metadata to museum objects has been employed in different projects in recent years. The Harvard Art Museum makes use of multiple tools of machine vision to generate metadata for the 250,000 works in its collections, aiming at providing its professional staff as well as its visitors with AI-generated descriptions as keywords or search terms (Yao, 2018). The Cleveland Museum of Art’s “Art Explorer” is powered by Microsoft’s Cognitive Search, which uses AI algorithms to enrich the metadata for the artworks (2018). 11 The Auckland Art Gallery makes use of AI-generated tags for more than 100,000 items from its collection (2018). Google Arts experiments have recently led a series of AI-based projects that allow for serendipitous exploration of collections indexed by the Arts and Culture project (Moriati, 2018). Training the Archive (2020–2023)12 is a research project aiming at combining AI and museum collection data through machine learning and object recognition. It aspires to explore the potential implications of using automated structuring of data with AI systems as a support for both curatorial practice and artistic production. The DAD (Dust and Data) project13 examines the use of AI in reference to conceptual aspects of the object, focusing on harnessing AI for curatorial practices. Unlike previous projects which incorporate image recognition technologies, this project is based on linking objects through semantic relationships, forming the foundation for creating curatorial narratives which are not based on aesthetic criteria. These projects explore the different ways AI can make collections accessible through new thematic and conceptual trajectories by patterns, connections, and links generated by machine logic.

11

The Art Explorer, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Microsoft Corporation. https://www. clevelandart.org/microsoft-corporation. 12 This is a research project based at the German Ludwig Forum for International Art Aachen and the Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV) in Dortmund, Germany. https://github.com/ DominikBoenisch/Training-the-Archive. 13 See the project’s website: “Dust and Data: The Art of Curating in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” Dust and Data Exhibition at Volkskundemuseum announced March 12, 2021. http://www. dustanddata.at/author/abkadmin.

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The extensive digitation processes which have taken place in recent decades have made the use of AI for identification and cataloguing purposes of museum objects, viable. The ability to use large datasets for training data through deep learning algorithms has dramatically improved the ability to generate reliable metadata. However, their capabilities are different in relation to diverse aspects of the metadata: Alongside very good results regarding attributes such as periodic and style identification, there are many bias problems resulting from items constituting these databases and the ways they are being trained (Ciecko, 2020). Many of the biases are based on gender or related to non-European cultures. In addition, there is also dissent regarding the quality of the description of the objects and their labelling methods: Some see computerised labelling as “mak[ing] you miss out on all of the sublime” (Grady, 2017), and therefore lacking in the ability to represent the complexities and poetic aspects that some of the archived objects possess, while others argue that they provide objects with a “fresh” look that opens the door to new references (Ciecko, 2020). In any case, it is evident that AI systems make it possible to produce broader connections between various archived objects and to contribute to curatorial processes in ways that do not rely solely on professional perceptions of curators and registrars who hold periodic or disciplinary specialisations. Yet since deep learning systems are based on trained datasets, they inherently rely on feedback mechanisms and therefore might be trapped within a conceptual and cultural conventions from which they cannot break free. Philosopher Yuk Hui’s analysis of the concept of metadata can be useful in exploring the potential role of AI in digital archives. In reference to the properties of digital objects, Hui argues that the value of these objects is not limited to the information they contain but rather to their ability to make connections with other objects. “The digital object opens up worlds, unifies them, and discloses to the users of the other possible worlds that objects are not passive syntheses but refer you to somewhere else, out of anticipation [. . .]” (Hui, 2012, p. 388). He further argues that what reinforces the connections between one digital object and another are logical inferences. The networks that operate and link the various objects are actualised through parametric definitions and algorithms and through different computer protocols and standards (Hui, 2016, p. 25). By referring to digital objects, he makes a distinction between data and metadata. For Hui, metadata is the way digital objects form relations to other objects. “Data become objects and also the source of relations; this means the objects can join together materially through transmission networks, codes, and so on” (Hui, 2012, p. 393). Therefore, digital objects cannot be perceived only as data, but as the overall system that makes it possible for the object to connect with other objects. In the case of artificial intelligence, the distinction between data and metadata might in some instances become unclear. The contribution of AI systems is not only reflected in their ability to generate links on the metadata level by enriching its content, but also in its success, in the case of visual objects, in generating links at the data level. This is not only through the capabilities of image recognition systems to translate visual information into textual information and thereby expand the metadata based on the standardised labelling systems, but also through their ability to

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present links based on relationships between non-textual elements (as in the context of images). These kinds of relationships do not necessarily have previous definitions and might not have been identified before. Although it can be argued that they too are eventually formulated using codes that are reduced to textual representations, and translated into metadata, these codes, generated by machines, cannot always be “transcribed” in human language. Hui makes another assertion that can help understand the meanings of the new archival mechanisms that are made possible through AI. He argues that the ability to produce connectivity between the various objects relies on the ability to distinguish an object from other objects and thereby define its individualisation. He relies on Gilbert Simondon’s distinction between the concepts of individualisation and individuation (Simodon, 2009). If individualisation is the “progression of form”, an evolution towards a fixed form, then individuation is “a transformation in the operation of relations and structures” (Hui, 2016, p. 109). Yet, individuation is the continuously becoming subject, individual. In this respect, the digital object is given the same somatic potential as a person and is concretised continuously, through individuation (Rozenberg, 2021, p. 7). Deep learning and image recognition systems used extensively in contemporary archival practices have a dual purpose, on the one hand, to grant each object the ability to differentiate itself from other objects in its digital milieu through a process of individualisation, and on the other hand, to generate an ongoing dialectical process which helps define similarities and linkage axes within multi-layered databases. Differentiations and comparisons are at the heart of deep learning systems, and datasets are evolving entities reflecting cultural processes. Thus, museum archives based on these systems are attributed with dynamic dimension. The results of such processes cannot be known in advance and are not exclusively conditioned by pre-labelling in generating the metadata for complex objects. Various uses made of AI at present, such as finding similarities between personal photographs of visitors14 or relating contemporary news events15 to museum collection objects, actualise the museum for visitors in both personal and collective contexts. The use of AI signifies a reality which abandons the reliance on the known and the expected and provides a contextual reading of a changing reality that can be sensed and monitored at any given moment. The application of artificial intelligence to museums makes it possible to apply these principles to the museum space as well.

14

See, for example: Art Selfie project as part of Google Art & Culture project. https://artsandculture. google.com/camera/selfie. 15 See, for example: Recognition, winner of IK Prize 2016 for digital innovation, which is an artificial intelligence program that compares up-to-the-minute photojournalism with British art from the Tate collection. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/ik-prize-2016recognition.

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Final Notes The COVID-19 crisis and the necessity for museums to expand their activities beyond their closed walls led to detachment from the museum’s perception as an autonomous physical space, towards its hybridisation with the virtual.16 Thus, this crisis, in an unprecedented way, has reinforced and accelerated the perception of the virtual space of the museum not just as a site providing information about the museum and reflecting its activities in its physical spaces, but rather as a space with unique qualities for additional and alternative kind of activities. During the corona period, museums have created a series of extensive events in their virtual spaces that have enabled the public to contact with them when they could not open their doors during lockdowns and public gathering restrictions. The activities that have taken place in many of the museums have been documented on their websites which have gradually evolved into the archives of their activities. This process meets Ernest’s observation regarding the blurring of boundaries between storage and media transmission and links different aspects of the museum’s activities in new ways. The virtual space of the museum does not only provide a new space for the museums’ activities but redefines the nature of the museum’s physical space and the role it has to play. The assimilation of the logic of the computerised archive into the museum makes an important contribution to maintaining the relevancy of the museum as a cultural institution. It is manifested in various ways that contribute to the hybridisation processes in the museum. With the increased use of AI in museums in the coming years, this process is expected to be even more prominent. The use of deep learning algorithms makes it viable to identify patterns based on information, such as origin of works, periodical trends, economic value of works at time of purchase, gender distributions, funding sources, leading policies, and more. The cross-referencing of information derived from distinct semantic and axiological systems as well as through image recognition technologies enables examination of the museum’s activities not only through the contents they present, but also through the strategies by which meaning is being produced, or through their appearances. It allows exploration of the various power mechanisms that have influenced the building of collections and the curatorial concepts derived from them, offering a reflexive view of the museum’s diverse performances. This can also be applied to the analysis of museum visitors who have recently also become objects of museum data collections. With the use of AI systems, it becomes possible to identify visiting and viewing patterns and to connect them with the comprehensive museum data systems. As a result, the scope of what becomes the subject of archiving is expanding, while changing the museum towards higher degrees of contextualisation.

16

This issue has been discussed in a large number of conferences and lectures held during the corona period in relation to the transformation that museums have undergone as a result of their closure during the lockdown periods. See, for example, ICOM Europe Seminar 30 March 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsHUyTnB1Gk.

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Fig. 5.2 Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, MVRDV, 2020. (© photo: Ossip van Duivenbode) (Permission by MVRDV)

Furthermore, AI systems are potentially capable of linking together different phenomena in order to generate predictions that can optimise the museum performance. In this way, weather conditions, displayed objects, spatial navigation possibilities, visitors’ behaviour, interpretation mechanisms, and pricing strategies, among others, can all potentially be components in a hybridised system. However, while the implementation of digital systems has already become normative and obvious (Parry, 2013), the integration of artificial intelligence and other automated systems in museums are still in their early stages and do not yet have a sweeping cultural influence. Therefore, defining the relationship between the museum’s automated mechanisms and the analogue processes will also be essential for museums: As automation processes in museums become more prominent, the search for the museum’s unique identity and differentiating mission will be more substantial and will require taking a stand. In this context, with the reflexive mechanisms that are enabled by new technologies, museums will also be subject to the question of the politics of technology, which is developing into an inseparable part of the museum. Analysing new and potential future approaches to museum archives cannot be complete without the reference to the new phenomenon that exposes archives physically in new buildings dedicated for their display. The most prominent representatives of this approach are Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (MVRDV) (Figs. 5.2 and 5.3), launched in September 2021, and the building for

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Fig. 5.3 Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, MVRDV, 2020. (© photo: Aad Hoogendoorn). (Permission by MVRDV)

the Victoria and Albert Museum’s storehouse (Diller, Scofidio & Renfro) expected to open in London in 2024. This new kind of exhibition space maintains the spectacular character of contemporary museum buildings Fig. 5.4, as described by Hal Foster and mentioned at the beginning of this study but marks a metamorphosis of the concept of the archive in its museal context. This new approach can apparently be considered as a counter-reaction to the transformation of knowledge organisation in museums into their virtual spaces, as noted by Foster. The display of the objects in these buildings does not only manifest the criteria for their organisation in space but, in some cases, is derived from their physical attributes, such as size, temperature, humidity, and light, required for their preservation. Based on the analysis of the current approach to museal archiving presented in this study, I would like to claim that this new kind of display should be seen as a materialised manifestation of the fluidity, subjectivity, and contextuality in the organisation of knowledge in the museum’s virtual spaces. In this context, the “museumification” of archives is a manifestation of the hybridisation process between the museum and the archive as characterised by its virtual attributes.

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Fig. 5.4 V&A Collection and Research Centre at Here East. (© Diller Scofidio + Renfro, 2018). (Permission by Diller Scofidio + Renfro)

References Bayley, L. (2019). “Curating and collecting,” published as part of the research project “Reshaping the collectible: When artworks live in the museum, tate.” Retrieved April 9, 2021, from https://www.tate.org.uk/research/reshaping-the-collectible/research-approachcurating-collecting-mus Bishope, C. (2013). Radical museology: Or what’s contemporary in museums of contemporary art? Koenig Books. Bradley, H. (1999). The seduction of the archive: Voices lost and found. History of the Human Sciences, 12(2), 107–122. Bush, V. (1945, July). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly. Ciecko, B. (2020). AI sees what? The good, the bad, and the ugly of machine vision for museum collections. In MW (MuseWeb) Conference. Museums and the Web, 2020. Retrieved April 9, 2021, from https://mw20.museweb.net/paper/ai-sees-what-the-good-the-bad-and-the-uglyof-machine-vision-for-museum-collections/ Crimp, D. (1980). On the museum’s ruins. October, 41–57. Retrieved April 9, 2021, from https:// monoskop.org/images/4/4e/Crimp_Douglas_1980_On_the_Museums_Ruins.pdf Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2013). A thousand plateaus. Bloomsbury Academic. Derrida, J. (1998). Archive fever: A Freudian impression. University of Chicago Press.

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Donato, E. (1979). The museum’s furnace: Notes toward a contextual reading of Bouvard and Pecuchet. In J. V. Harari (Ed.), Textual strategies: Perspectives in post-structuralist criticism (pp. 213–239). Cornell University Press. Ernst, W. (2013). Digital memory and the archive. University of Minnesota Press. Eylat Van Essen, Y. (2016). Rethinking the museum. Hakibutz Hameuchad. “Final report, Digitisation and IPR in European Museums”. (2020). Retrieved April 9, 2021, from https://www.ne-mo.org/fileadmin/Dateien/public/Publications/NEMO_Final_Report_ Digitisation_and_IPR_in_European_Museums_WG_07.2020.pdf Foster, H. (2002). Archives of modern art. October, 99, 81–95. Foucault, M. (1997). Of other spaces. In N. Leach (Ed.) Rethinking architecture: A reader in cultural theory (pp. 330–336) (Lotus, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1967). Foucault, M. (2002). Archaeology of knowledge. Routledge. Freiling, R. (2004). The archive, the media, the map and the text. Media Art Nets. Retrieved April 9, 2021, from https://www.medienkunstnetz.de/ Grady, C. (2017, July 17). How the SFMOMA’s artbot responds to text message requests with personally curated art. Vox. Retrieved April 9, 2021, from https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/ 7/11/15949872/sfmomas-artbot-send-me-text-messag Grau, O., Coones, W., & Rühse, V. (2017). Museum and archive on the move, introduction. In W. Coones, V. Rühse, & O. Grau (Eds.), Museum and archive on the move: Changing cultural institutions in the digital era (pp. 9–22). De Gruyter. Haylett, S. (2019). Archives and record management. Published as part of the research project “Reshaping the collectible: When artworks live in the Museum.” Retrieved April 9, 2021, from https://www.tate.org.uk/research/reshaping-the-collectible/research-approach-archives-recor Hui, Y. (2012). What is a digital object? In Special issue: Philoweb: Toward a philosophy of the web metaphilosophy (Vol. 43). Wiley. 4 vols. Retrieved April 9, 2021, from https://www.jstor. org/stable/24441843?seq=1 Hui, Y. (2016). On the existence of digital objects. The University of Minnesota Press. Huyton, S. (2019). Registration and collection management. Reshaping the collectible: When artworks live in the museum. Retrieved April 9, 2021, from https://www.tate.org.uk/research/ reshaping-the-collectible/research-approach-registration-collection-management IBM Federal System Division, & Ellin, E. (1969). An information system for American Museums: A report prepared for the Museum Computer Network. International Business Machines Corporation: Smithsonians Institution Archives. Latour, B. (2005). Third source. In Reassembling the social: An introduction to Actor-Network Theory (pp. 63–86). Oxford University Press. Manoff, M. (2004). Theories of the archive from across the disciplines. Libraries and the Academy, 4(1), 9–25. Manovich, L. (1999). Database as a symbolic form. Millennium Film Journal, 34 (Fall). Retrieved April 9, 2021, from http://tinyurl.com/pee4pf8 Manovich, L. (2001). The language of new media. MIT Press. McKemmish, S. M., et al. (2005). Archives: Recordkeeping in society. Centre for Information Studies, Charles Sturt University. Moriati, A. (2018, July 23). AI and museum collections. Medium. Retrieved April 9, 2021, from https://medium.com/amlabs/ai-and-museum-collections-c74bdb724c07 Noce, V. (2019, August 19). What exactly is a museum? Icom comes to blows over new definition. The Art Newspaper. Retrived April 9, 2021, from https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/ what-exactly-is-a-museum-icom-comes-to-blows-over-new-definition Panofsky, E. (1997). Perspective as symbolic form (C. S. Wood, Trans.) Zone Books. Parry, R. (2007). Recoding the museum, digital heritage and the technologies of change. Routledge. Parry, R. (2013). The end of the beginning: Normativity in the postdigital museum. In Museum worlds (Vol. 1, pp. 24–39). Retrieved April 9, 2021, from https://figshare.le.ac.uk/articles/ journal_contribution/The_End_of_the_Beginning_Normativity_in_the_Postdigital_ Museum/10202888/1

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Rozenberg, S. (2021). Digital records as relational objects–Yuk Hui’s concept of digital objects applied to archival science. Archival Science. Retrieved April 9, 2021, from https://doi.org/10. 1007/s10502-021-09357-0 Simodon, G. (2009). The position of the problem of ontogenesis. Parrhesia, 4–16. Soares, B. B., & Smeds, K. (2016). Museology exploring the concept of MLA (Museums-LibrariesArchives) and probing its interdisciplinarity. In ICOM study series (pp. 29–33). Retrieved April 9, 2021, from https://doi.org/10.4000/iss.654 Thibodeau, K. (2002). Overview of technological approaches to digital preservation and challenges in coming years. In The state of digital preservation: An international perspective. Council on Library and Information Resources. Will, L. (1993). The indexing of museum objects. The Indexer, 18(3). Retrieved April 9, 2021, from www.theindexer.org Yao, S. X. (2018, October 30). A probe into how machines see art. The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved April 9, 2021, from https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/30/how-machinessee-art/

Yael Eylat Van Essen, PhD, is a curator and a researcher specialising in the interface between art, design, science, and technology. She received her PhD from Tel-Aviv University followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She curated many exhibitions in Israel and abroad, among them the Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Biennale for Architecture in 2016 and in Ars Electronica in Austria. Her last book Rethinking the Museum was published in Israel. Her research interests include among others: digital culture theory, new-media art, philosophy of technology, theory of the Anthropocene, complexity and smart systems, digital heritage and museoloy, post-photography, post human theories, resilience studies, and speculative design. Currently, she is a senior lecturer (assistant professor) at the design faculty of the Holon Institute of Technology, and also lectures at Tel Aviv University’s art faculty. She has participated in many academic conferences on these topics. Email: [email protected].

Chapter 6

Implicit Heritage Values in Online Collection Databases: Assessing the Presentation of Egyptian Artefacts in Art Museum Contexts Eli E. McClain

Abstract The digitisation of museum collections continues to alter how objects are presented and how digital visitors and researchers interact with collections. Drawing on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework of value, this study seeks to critically assess the contemporary presentation of Egyptian artefacts in public facing online databases through a systematic multi-sited case study examining two collections connected to the American Presbyterian missionary Reverend Chauncey Murch (1856–1907). This sample is composed of 6095 object records across the British Museum (London, UK) and Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, USA). I argue that by highlighting and analysing patterns in the presentation of object record data not apparent through casual browsing one can interpret effects of the digitisation shift. In addition to contributing to the critical discourse on the reception of ancient Egypt, heritage values, digitisation, and museological presentation, this research provides a contemporary model for further investigations into the implicit values embedded in museum databases. Keywords Artefacts · British Museum (BM) · Chauncey Murch · Database · Digital museum · Digital space · Digitisation · Egypt · Heritage · Implicit value · Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) · Online · Site · Visual culture · Visual memory The expansion of digital museum collections databases in the twenty-first century continues to alter the means through which audiences interact with museums and their collections (Beaulieu & de Rijcke, 2017; Cameron & Kenderdine, 2007; Geismar, 2018; McTavish, 2006; Mulrooney et al., 2016; Newell, 2012; Stevens, 2017). Museum professionals are opening greater portions of the collections to the public through digitisation projects, publishing object information and image reproductions of the artefacts through online platforms (Thomas, 2016, p. 67). As the means of presentation have shifted, scholars have begun to critically analyse how E. E. McClain (✉) Independent Researcher, Ann Arbor, MI, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Sight as Site in the Digital Age, Digital Culture and Humanities 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9209-4_6

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value and meaning are constructed and reinforced in digital spaces (Cameron & Robinson, 2007; Geismar, 2018; Manovich, 2010; Parry, 2010). Digital museum collections have been heralded as opportunities to expand access to the collections (Frieman & Wilkin, 2016; Heitman et al., 2017; Phillips, 2011), democratise cultural heritage (Nancarrow, 2016; Rivera, 2013), change how research is conducted (Heitman et al., 2017; Newell, 2012), break down master narratives of history, art, culture, and science (van den Akker & Legêne, 2017; Newell, 2012), and allow for new connections to be made and stories to be told (Trant, 2010; Stevens, 2017; Stevenson, 2019, p. 237). Müller notes that “digital heritage programmes will place hundreds of thousands of images and other data on the Web, altering our visual memory and cultural perception in unknown ways” (Müller, 2010, p. 302). As a result, it is necessary to reflect on how this is occurring. In this study, I argue that systematic collections-based methods of analysis are needed to identify patterns in value-laden object-level data not apparent in casual browsing experiences. As digital heritage platforms increase in size and scope there is a possibility for new understandings of “the past” to be constructed; however, this is not inherent to the shift in format and needs careful intentional action. There is also the possibility for a reaffirmation of hegemonic, limited, and outdated conceptions. In this process, the database, its structure and its information, should not be viewed as neutral sources of knowledge, but rather interpretive and influential in attributing value. Moreover, the process of digitisation should be considered within the larger scope of museum presentation as new technologies often draw on more traditional forms of display (Geismar, 2018) and pre-existing frameworks of value can influence digitisation efforts and priority. To analyse this phenomenon, I have selected as a case study two collections of primarily ancient Egyptian objects totalling 6095 object records held in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, USA) (MET), and the British Museum (London, UK) (BM). At one point in time, each object passed through the hands of Reverend Chauncey Murch (1856–1907), an American Evangelical Presbyterian Missionary, during his tenure in Egypt (1883–1907). His collections located at the MET and BM are some of the largest individual collections of Egyptian materials held at each museum. In this study, I will show that contemporary digitisation efforts have created shifts in the scope and breadth of visually accessible portions of the collections which can affect object valuation and conceptualisations of the past. Through this work I call for a critical reflection on the digitisation of ancient Egyptian museum collections and contribute to larger conversations about the future of digital presentation in museum spaces.

Digitisation, Presentation and Value Museum-based digitisation projects continue to quickly expand both in size and scope, and the digitisation of collections remains one of the central projects for many museums (Rivera, 2013). At the same time, there are increased calls for scrutiny and

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investigation of museum collections and their provenance both in scholarly and public circles. These calls spread to various corners of the art market and museum sectors, asking where have these things come from and why are they here. And yet, public facing museum collections databases are largely not structured around these questions and provide very limited information about an object’s movement between creation and acquisition. Like in the physical gallery spaces, this creates a “purification zone” similar to that described by Wingfield (2013, pp. 31–32) in his discussion of the presentation of London Missionary Society collections at the BM. Scholars studying museum collection databases have approached the topic from various perspectives including cultural and media studies, library and archival sciences, museum computing and programme languages, archaeology, material culture, visitor studies, and anthropology, among others. Beaulieu and Rijcke have found that “institutional decisions on how to pursue digitisation affect how the user is able to see and learn from an image” (2017, p. 82). I argue that, in similar ways, decisions on the organisation of the database interface and the structuring of objectlevel data affect the way that users interact with the system and use the information to construct an understanding of the past. While the creation of digital collections databases and other digital heritage platforms continues to expand, Akker provides a much needed reminder to not automatically associate digital technology with new and its absence with old, “as if the refusal to change the medium prevents innovation” (2017, pp. 60–61). While new technologies can assist in presenting information in new ways and telling new stories, they can also reinforce traditional ways of viewing and conceptualising the past. As Geismar argues, “as much as digital media brings new ways of looking at and understanding collections, it also represents, and refracts, earlier representational techniques” (2018, p. xvii). Cameron and Robinson have noted that “the speed of the digitisation process has not generally been reciprocated by a review of data quality” (Cameron & Robinson, 2007, p. 165). Despite the long-held assumption that item-level documentation and descriptive criteria are not interpretive, Cameron and Robinson argue that “it constitutes an ideologically and culturally drenched form of text in its own right” (Cameron & Robinson, 2007, p. 168). This critical perspective on object-level documentation provides a productive foundation for assessing the rapid development of digital presentation in the sector. The foundation of literature on value in Heritage Studies has largely focused on conservation: for example, organising frameworks to compare monuments and sites and create a standard from which future applications can be considered for preservation (Lipe, 1984; De la Torre, 2002; Australia ICOMOS, 2013; Carman, 2014). Heritage values, defined by Díaz-Andreu as “the meanings and values that individuals or groups of people bestow on heritage” (Díaz-Andreu, 2017, p. 2), are, as noted by Torre, “attributed, not intrinsic; mutable, not static; multiple and often incommensurable or in conflict” (de la Torre, 2013, p. 157). This view of values as changeable and socially constructed, builds on the post-processual concept of the “object biography” first proposed by Kopytoff (1986) and further developed by Gosden and Marshall (1999). They posit that objects develop histories through their

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“life-cycle” and that re-constructing these histories can highlight the relationships between humans and objects over time (Gosden & Marshall, 1999, p. 170). The authors propose that “objects gain value through links to powerful people and an individual’s standing is enhanced through possession of well-known objects; therefore, there is a mutual process of value creation between people and things” (Gosden & Marshall, 1999, p. 170). Joy (2009, p. 544, 552), in his research on prehistoric European artefacts with limited context, builds on Gell (1998) by suggesting that the biography is comprised of the sum of the relationships that constitute it and, therefore, non-linear biographies can be created for objects with limited associated information (Joy, 2009, p. 552). Joy’s contributions resonate with the oftenfragmented documentation and context of legacy collections in museums as discussed by King (2016) and Wingfield (2017). Stevenson, Libonati, and Williams apply these concepts directly to the study of Egyptian artefacts excavated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, clearly highlighting the different socio-political contexts for negotiating value within and outside of Egypt. They argue that, within Egypt, the majority of objects excavated had to be “actively constructed as something ordinary and unexceptional” and “of no particular value” to “circumvent legislative controls and the interests of the Services des Antiquités” (2016, pp. 286–287). Stevenson et al. explain that “on import to Britain these same artefacts, [. . .] had to be deployed within fresh regimes of value that amplified their status as objects worthy of museum collection and media attention” (Stevenson et al., 2016, p. 287). This discussion illustrates not only the multitude of ways in which objects were valued but also the instability of these ascribed values as artefacts passed through different contexts. Regarding collections in the twenty-first century, Stevenson et al. warn that there is a “danger of [objects] reverting to being culturally and intellectually unexceptional” if they lose their connection to their historical contexts, and that this risk is especially high for “material kept out of museums” (2016, p. 290). While these concerns are valid, I believe that they should not be as confined to non-museum collections as the authors propose given the continued financial strain on museums and their staffs in managing legacy collections. Within the discussion of value applied specifically to legacy collections in museums, the debates over conservation are less focused on identifying objects as valuable for preservation, but rather what to do with them once deemed valuable enough to enter into a museum context (Redmond & DuFresne, 2018). Museum professionals are faced with prioritising time and funding on incredibly limited segments of the collection in what has been termed the “curation crisis” (Flexner, 2016; Marquardt et al., 1982; Thomas, 2016). The digitisation of collections adds another layer to this crisis as Conway notes “organisations are rearranging budgets, raising money, and anticipating income streams to make digital projects happen” (2010, p. 366). In light of this context, the institutional decisions of what to prioritise reflect shared and individual decisions about the value of objects and collections. Like the category of heritage itself, as described by Sørenson and Carman, digital heritage is defined through the act of declaration, whether explicit or implicit. Cameron argues that “to be validated, digital heritage must take its place alongside

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what has “been authorized as ‘valuable’” (2008, p. 173). This process reinforces pre-existing dominant discourses and conceptions of heritage through “systems of significance” (2008, p. 172). Conway argues that given the cost of digitisation and digital preservation alongside limited funding, it is necessary to assess the value of objects in their original form before deciding whether or not to digitise them (2010, p. 368). This perspective underlines the physical/digital relationship, highlighting the continuity in valuation between the two mediums.

Egyptian Artefacts and the Chauncey Murch Collections In her monograph, Scattered Finds: Archaeology, Egyptology and Museums (2019), Stevenson argues that Egypt continues to hold a unique place “in world archaeology and in many museum displays globally” (2019, p. 253). She posits that this position results from over two centuries of interactions between individuals and material culture, patterns of collecting and trading, and geographically and temporally situated socio-political contexts, in what she terms “object habits.” This placement continues to affect how the idea of ancient Egypt and its material culture are drawn-upon and utilised across the world in the twenty-first century for political, social, and cultural pursuits. This echoes Said’s argument that the Orient has had and continues to have a “special place in European Western experience” (1995, p. 2) as a Western product of imperialism and cultural domination constructed and reaffirmed through representations (1995, p. 21). While Said’s analysis examined literary works, the role of material culture in this project should not be forgotten. Views of Ancient Egypt since Napoleon Bonaparte (Jeffreys, 2003) and Consuming Ancient Egypt (MacDonald & Rice, 2016) highlight a multitude of ways ancient Egypt has been conceptualised and appropriated across time and space for political, artistic, economic, and ideological gains. Specifically discussing the American context, Roth highlights how Egyptian symbols and tropes are embedded into the United States culture and society, as ways to claim ancient Egypt (1998, p. 218). She identifies three main segments of the US population interested in “propagating a vision of Egypt’s past”: mystical and symbolic adherents; Afrocentric groups; and Egyptologists (1998, pp. 218–219). Roth categorises claims of the former two as inaccurate, and at times dangerous, but argues that professional Egyptologists in universities and museums have largely ignored alternative claims to ancient Egyptian pasts, focusing inwards and isolating themselves from others (1998, pp. 227–228). The presentation of ancient Egyptian material culture in museums has been widely discussed (refer: Colla, 2007; Eldamaty et al., 2002; MacDonald & Rice, 2016; Moser, 2006; Riggs, 2010; Stevenson, 2019; MacDonald, 2005). MacDonald notes that burial objects, tombs, and human remains (2016, pp. 89–90), and monumental sculptures and structures (2016, p. 91), make up a large proportion of gallery displays with a strong focus on dynastic periods and the power of the pharaoh (2016, p. 92). MacDonald highlights a number of key “mythic themes” associated with

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ancient Egypt identified through focus groups with visitors at the Petrie Museum (UK): “death, power, wealth, treasure, extinction, creativity, and religion” (2005, p. 167). She notes that these themes are strongly held beliefs that create a concept of ancient Egypt through the convergence and interaction of various influences including museum displays, popular culture, educational documentaries, and Bible stories, among others (2005, p. 167). Stevenson notes that there is a conspicuous absence of modern Egypt in museum displays, citing the BM’s Modern Egypt display as an exception (2019, p. 234), and MacDonald states that it is part of a larger phenomenon of disconnect in predominantly white European discourse between the concept of ancient Egypt and the modern nation (2005, p. 170). Moreover, Stevenson observes that some prominent museum professionals (refer: Cuno, 2011) continue to argue that there is no relation between contemporary Egyptians and ancient Egyptian objects; a position “deeply rooted in the appropriation of ancient Egypt to perpetuate narratives of European modernity” (2019, p. 230). This isolation and purification of ancient Egypt in time and space is, as Stevenson underscores, the result of historical and contemporary processes of scholarship, discourse and display. This isolation creates a “lack of public interest in alternative topics beyond very set ideas of what Egypt should look like” (2019, p. 242) which feeds back into decisions for display and discussion, creating a cyclical pattern of reinforcement. Reverend Chauncey Murch (1856–1907) (Fig. 6.1), an American Evangelical Presbyterian Missionary, spent the majority of his adult life (1883–1907) with his wife Amelia working in Egypt. While in Alexandria, Cairo, Luxor, Benha, and Tanta, he collected over 7000 artefacts, largely Egyptian in nature. Murch worked during a period of increased excavations and collecting in Egypt facilitated by imperial British and French control in the region, and synergistically linked to a wave of Egyptomania in Europe and the USA (“A Committee of Two”; Lupton, 2016; Stevenson, 2019; Vivian, 2012). For most of this period Chauncey and Amelia were stationed in Luxor, with Chauncey making regular trips to other settlements along the Nile using the mission’s riverboat. A digital exhibition at the Stanford University Archaeological Collections describes Murch as “An antiquarian, collector, and middleman in the trade, he supplied Egyptian antiquities to museums and assisted private collectors during their time in Egypt” (Stanford University Archaeology Collections, 2019, p. 27). Murch was known by travellers interested in collecting as someone to contact while in the region (Hilliard, 2010; Alexander, 1994, 2012; Bierbrier, 2012, p. 392). The collection, as I conceptualise it here—through the collation of data on its objects and the structuring of its history—is a contemporary one. It has never existed as “a whole” and no single point in time can be selected to represent it in its fullest. This framework draws on the work of Wingfield (2013, 2017) and Stevenson (2014, 2019) who have both investigated dispersed collections, the former through the lens of re-assemblage, and the latter through a “multi-sited” frame of analysis. Additionally, I find Thomas’ discussion of the volatility of the collection, and the multiplicity of its conceptualisation, useful in this process. Moreover, I employ the concept of “object biography” (Gosden & Marshall, 1999; Kopytoff, 1986) to understand both

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Fig. 6.1 Photo of Reverend Chauncey Murch (first row, second from the right) 4 months before his death with the rest of the Egyptian delegation to the world’s fifth sunday-school convention, May 1907 (Howard 1907, pp. 228–233)

the multiplicity and mutability of value, but also to trace the movement of these objects through different social contexts across time and space. Murch primarily collected small objects. The collections contain large numbers of scarabs, beads, amulets, and pendants composed of steatite, faience, and glass; however, there is a wide variety of object types and materials present. Roughly a third of the objects analysed are dated to the New Kingdom with substantial portions of the collection from the Late Period, Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate period. Murch’s collecting habits were likely influenced by a lack of funds, a desire for portability, and the composition of accessible artefacts at the time. Murch may have also developed a personal taste for these objects throughout the period, reflecting the interconnectedness of individuals, institutions and the broader sociopolitical, economic, and cultural contexts of the “object habit” (Stevenson et al., 2017). Discussing Flinders Petrie’s EEF sponsored excavations, Stevenson et al. argue that plausibly it was the materiality of “small, portable, multiple’ objects ‘that permitted them to circumvent legislative controls” (Stevenson et al., 2017, p. 286). Alexander notes that Murch supported his family through his collecting and dealing, which strengthens this interpretation of his collecting practices as influenced by this social context (1994, p. 23).

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Despite all passing through Murch’s hands, the collection has never existed together in a singular space nor previously as a conceptualised object of study. Murch sold thousands of pieces to the BM from 1891 until his death in 1907. Additionally, Murch sold or gave away pieces from his collection to other individuals and organisations during his lifetime, including the Art Institute of Chicago (Alexander, 1994) and the British Library (Alexander, 1994, p. 24; “Our Dark Materials”; Hagen & Ryholt, 2017, p. 65; Lythgoe, 1910). Sparse documentation of Murch’s interactions continues to obscure the full scope of his dealings; however, these examples provide a glimpse into his habits and the space he occupied. After Chauncey’s death in 1907, his widow, Amelia, placed the collection in storage in the United Kingdom before moving back to the United States with their son. In the autumn of 1909, Amelia began conversations with museums regarding the donation of her late husband’s collection. These conversations continued into the first months of 1910 with Amelia reaching out to Helen Miller Gould about the possibility of donating the collection to the MET. Amelia and Helen met for the first time in the summer of 1907 during Helen’s travels to Egypt, only a few months before Chauncey passed away (McClain, 2019, pp. 32–34, 37–38). There is no documentation of continued communication after this visit but Amelia’s letter to Helen in February 1910 suggests that she saw Helen as a valuable contact in this endeavour. Little negotiation ensued between the three parties as by 2 March 1910 an agreement was settled in which Helen bought the collection of 3370 artefacts from Amelia for $15,000 as intermediary before donating the collection to the MET (McClain, 2019, pp. 38–39). Describing the collection to the Acting Director of the MET, the Curator of Egyptian Art, Albert M. Lythgoe, wrote that it was “one of the best, privately-formed collections of certain classes of Theban materials” of which he was aware (Lythgoe, 1910). This brief reconstruction of Murch’s activities between 1883 and 1907 and Amelia’s work after his death illustrates, in part, the social context of this collecting, dispersal, and acquisition, and highlights the role of individual actors in these processes. The transition from private collections into the art museum context in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not only valued for the aesthetic qualities and representativeness of these objects but also for the cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) bestowed on museums through the ownership of these collections, especially in a period of competition for Egyptian artefacts (cf. Gosden & Marshall, 1999, p. 170). There are various gaps in the collection history as told here due in part to the restrictions of archival research during the COVID-19 pandemic and limited source materials from the Murches in repositories referenced before the pandemic. These gaps provoke new lines of inquiry into the presentation of this narrative and its effects on understandings of the past. Despite the fragmented nature of this collection history, I argue, in line with Joy, that this approach remains useful for interpreting relationships between objects and humans across time. Albeit brief, this collection history provides a basis from which the contemporary presentation of the collections can be analysed.

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Methodology I have grounded my research in a social constructivist paradigm, in line with Smith’s conceptualisation of heritage as a social process of meaning making. Additionally, I have drawn on aspects of semiotic theory (Cameron & Robinson, 2007; Manovich, 2017), feminist theory (Levin, 2010), and critical museum theory (Kratz, 2011; Lindauer, 2006) previously applied to the study of digital heritage and museum presentation which argue that value is actively constructed and negotiated in museum spaces, object-level documentation, and digital platforms. I have chosen a multi-sited case study approach, as it has been shown to be useful in the investigation of dispersed legacy collections of Egyptian origin by Stevenson et al. and allows for comparison of presentation across geographic contexts. In taking museum collections as an object of inquiry, I draw on Thomas’ “museum as method” (2016) and Byrne et al.’s “unpacking the collection” (2011) approach, to conceptualise the Murch collections as an object of study, and critically analyse the contemporary presentation of the Murch collections in digital form. To collect data on the digital presentation of the Murch collections, I adopted a systematic approach to encompass the breadth of the collections and highlight patterns not apparent through casual browsing of individual records. First, I developed a list of 30 data categories to be collected based on the organisation of object record pages with examples of expected variables drawn from preliminary searches (Table 6.1). This selection of categories was largely modelled off the MET’s object Table 6.1 Data categories and descriptions Category OBJNO OBJNA DESC DTEXT DATE PERIOD DYN REIGN SITE DIMS MED CREDIT MEANS PROV1 PROV2

Description Object accession number/ BM number Object name/title Presence of description text (Y/N) Full description text Date, date range Historical/archaeological period Dynasty listed Reign listed Geographic location listed Object dimensions in cm Object medium Credit line Means of acquisition Original owner information Secondary owner information

Category PROV3

Description Tertiary owner information

PROVF TIME

Full provenance text Timeline of art History categories (MET) Related object (MET) categories Number of object digital images On view in museum

RELAT PHOTO VIEW PUB CITE TAGS DEPT INSCRIP CURATOR EXHIBIT COND NOTE

Referenced publication categories Full referenced citation text Object record tags/ associated subjects, names, places Curatorial department Inscription and translation text Curatorial interpretation/comments Exhibition history Object condition (BM) Additional notations

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record page which caused some challenges as discussed below. I created a database in Microsoft Excel with a key and individual worksheet for each museum. For the MET collection, I entered all data points manually for 2656 object record pages, working systematically by acquisition number. Additionally, I employed detailed journaling throughout the data collection process to document my assumptions, identification of patterns, and questions. In the BM database, I searched for the person term “Rev Chauncey Murch” and downloaded complete record data for all 3439 query results in a csv file. I eliminated all empty data categories not referring to the Murch collection and matched correlating BM categories to their counterparts. This required the condensation and expansion of certain categories to create the category list displayed in Table 6.1. This process reflects the multiple ways in which museums organise object data. I then transferred the cleaned dataset to the project Excel file in a separate worksheet to allow for collection-based investigation. In total, the sample size of 6095 object records is representative of Murch’s collecting practices and provides a relatively even distribution to allow for both institutional and cross-institutional analysis. After constructing the Excel database, I first examined the distribution of data across each museum worksheet as well as within the entire dataset. This process allowed me to create a better sense of the scope of the collection and identify patterns in object records not apparent though casual browsing. I selected two elements to analyse comparatively—associated sites and bibliographic references—and one element particular to each museum—provenance in the MET and object condition in the BM. To visualise these patterns, I constructed a number of bar graphs, pie charts, and tables in Microsoft Excel.

Broader Database Structures Both databases are designed with a preference for objects with images, presenting them to the user as more valuable. This preference is apparent in the presence of “Object with Image Only” toggles in both databases, yet the lack of an “Object without Image Only” option. Additionally, it is achieved spatially in the case of the BM search results page in which records without images take up less space therefore making them easier to scroll past. Moreover, the presence of images in the object record pages of both databases alters the composition and distribution of space, privileging the visual over the textual. Following Beaulieu and Rijcke’s conception of the image as an active interface for engagement with other forms of data, not just a digital representation of the physical object, the lack of an image may signal to the user that an object record has less data or may be less useful. While this may not be true, given the cost and time involved in photographing an object, there is the implication of effort embedded in the display of images. Search and filtering functions largely reaffirm a focus on the material qualities of objects and the period of production and early use, guiding visitors to traverse the databases in specific ways. Additionally, the order of data categories in object

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records reinforces this focus on the material and visual aspects. Despite this focus, the inclusion of the person/organisation search function in the BM database suggests an increased value placed on collection histories which is not present in the MET. While the collections are still incredibly limited in scope outside of the Pharaonic period, both databases at least partially transcend rigid temporal boundaries reinforced by departmental foci through the utilisation of hyperlinked terms and broad keyword searches. While hyperlinked terms increase capabilities for searching and browsing, their implementation can also devalue objects that do not fit within strict categories and conceal them from the user’s view. At the same time, the presentation of hyperlinks creates a hierarchy of value built on quantity of linked terms.

Object-Level Data, a Systematic Approach The collections contain 6095 objects [BM(3439); MET(2656)] with large numbers of scarabs (2661), beads (599), amulets (502), and pendants (220) along with a wide variety of other object types. The majority of object names/titles utilise standardised object categories in English and few records contain any translation information for Egyptian hieroglyphs. Common materials include steatite (2429), composition/ faience (975), and glass (653), although various metals, stones, and animal and plant materials are also present. A third of the objects are dated to the New Kingdom (2012), with substantial portions of the collection from the Late Period (670), Middle Kingdom (622), and Second Intermediate Period (330). While the majority of these objects (5819) are located within the Egyptian Art (MET) and Egypt and Sudan (BM) Departments, small portions of the collection reside in other curatorial departments (see Tables 6.2 and 6.3). Currently 62 pieces of the BM collection (1.2%) are on view in galleries, compared to 1802 at the MET (67.84%). Meanwhile, 474 of the BM records (13.78%) and 768 MET records (28.91%) contain at least one image. For records with at least one image the mean is 2.7 for the BM and 2.2 for the MET.

Table 6.2 Overview of BM collection online presentation

BM departments Britain, Europe, and prehistory Egypt and Sudan Greek and Roman Middle East Totals

Total Murch object records (MOR) 4

MOR with image 2

MOR on view 0

MOR with referenced publication 3

MOR with description 4

3430

470

62

639

3430

4

1

0

1

4

1 3439

0 474

1 62

1 644

1 3439

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Table 6.3 Overview of MET collection online presentation

MET departments Ancient Near Eastern Art Antonio Ratti Textile Centre; Islamic Art Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas Egyptian Art European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Greek and Roman Art Islamic Art Medieval Art Totals

Total Murch object records (MOR) 4

MOR with image 4

MOR on view 0

MOR with referenced publication 3

MOR with description 0

1

1

1

1

1

29

11

0

27

0

2389 1

611 0

1790 0

406 0

308 0

53

22

7

10

52

161 18 2656

101 18 768

1 3 1802

10 0 457

43 3 407

I interpret the presence of data within the records as a reflection of engagement that considers the effort involved in the work. This use of objects, displayed textually and visually, provides a marker of attributed value. Comparing the number of objects on view in galleries to the number of objects with photographs, there is a 12.55% increase in visibility in the BM, but a decrease of 38.93% in the MET. This is not to say that records without images are not useful and cannot be used in other ways, but rather it acknowledges the preference given to records with images in both databases and the broader sensorial focus on the visual in museums (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992; Kratz, 2011). This comparison serves as a proxy for discussing access to the collections, in a limited sense of the term referring to the ability to observe visually. While the digital BM visitor may be able to see more of the Murch collection than they would visiting the physical museum, the opposite is true for the digital MET visitor. I have chosen four key elements of the dataset to analyse more in-depth, each focusing on a different aspect of the object, its history, and its uses. Associated sites connect to the conceptualisation of space and the idea of Egypt while bibliographic references provide insight into the presentation of object- and collection-based research. I will then discuss the presentation of provenance in the MET collections to understand how the collection’s past is constructed, and the inclusion of object conditions in the BM to analyse the relationship between presentation and contemporary states of artefacts. I acknowledge the multitude of other possibilities for foci including material, object type, descriptions, as well as a more comprehensive analysis of the relationships between these categories; however, I believe that my selections provide a fruitful discussion on the presentation of the Murch collections.

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Murch Collection: Associated Sites Of the 6095 records, 6000 (98.4%) are published with associated sites, ranging both in specificity and certainty from individual tombs to “Attributed to possibly Egypt.” Associated sites provide information about the geographic origin of artefacts highlighting two moments in an object’s timeline: that of creation, and of collection/excavation. Associated sites can be documented and conferred through stylistic analysis. Within the BM collection there are 48 unique site attributions while in the MET collection there are 44. I have organised these into four broad groups with each object record allocated to one: • Egypt (Group A): Includes all site attributions only referencing Egypt, with varying levels of certainty expressed through qualifiers (Attributed to; Possibly) • Egypt and/or Other Country/Region (Group B): Encompasses site attributions spanning modern and historical geographic boundaries or expressing uncertainty of origin. (e.g., Attributed to Egypt or Palestine; Egypt and Sudan, Nubia) • Other Country/Region/City (Group C): All attributions outside of and with no reference to Egypt. (e.g., Made in: Mediterranean (eastern Mediterranean); Made in Iraq); and • Specific Region/City/Site in Egypt (Group D): Includes all attributions referencing specific locations/areas within the modern geopolitical boundaries of Egypt. (e.g., Egypt, Upper Egypt, Thebes; Deir el-Bahri (Thebes) (said to be from); Tomb of Washka). The distribution of objects within these groups and those without listed sites across the two collections can be seen in the first row of Fig. 6.2. As shown in these charts, 94% of BM records and 91% of MET records have only general Egypt associations (Group A). These observations are in line with statements regarding the presentation of Egyptian artefacts in museums and the lack of specific information regarding context in legacy collections (2016, pp. 5–6; 2019, pp. 237). This relative lack of objects with specific associated sites contributes to what MacDonald (2016, pp. 88–89) and Stevenson (2019, p. 242) describe as a continued conceptualisation of ancient Egypt as non-geographical. Before examining the relationship between associated site data and the presence of images, I thought that the proportion of records in Group A would stay stable or increase; however, this position assumed that every object would have an equal opportunity for digitisation. When filtering for object records with at least one photo, the proportion of objects in Group A decreased to 84% (BM) and 85% (MET) (see second row of Fig. 6.2). The proportion of records in Group D increased from 6% to 15% in the BM collection along with a slight increase in proportion for Group B (from 0% to 1%). In the MET collection there was an increase in proportion for records in Groups B (from 2% to 5%), C (from 1% to 2%) and, “No Site Listed” (from 3% to 6%), along with a slight decrease Group D (from 3% to 2%). This shift in proportional distribution can be explained, in part, by the relationship between value and digitisation. Taking King’s (2016, pp. 6–7) argument that objects

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All BM objects by Associated Site 5; 0%

207; 6%

All MET objects by Associated Site Egypt (Group A)

Egypt (Group A)

1; 0%

2; 0% Egypt and/or Other Country/Region (Group B)

3224; 94%

80; 3% 94; 3% 15; 1% 57; 2%

Egypt and/or Other Country/Region (Group B)

Other Country/Region/City (Group C)

Other Country/Region/City (Group C)

Specific Region/City/Site in Egypt (Group D)

Specific Region/City/Site in Egypt (Group D) 2410; 91%

No Site Listed

BM Objects with Photo by Associated Site

No Site Listed

MET Objects with Photo by Associated Site Egypt (Group A)

Egypt (Group A) 73; 15%

1; 0%

19; 2% 15; 2%

1; 0% 2; 1%

Egypt and/or Other Country/Region (Group B)

45; 6%

Egypt and/or Other Country/Region (Group B)

35; 5%

Other Country/Region/Cit y (Group C)

Other Country/Region/City (Group C)

397; 84%

Specific Region/City/Site in Egypt (Group D) No Site Listed

Specific Region/City/Site in Egypt (Group D) 654; 85%

No Site Listed

Fig. 6.2 Distribution of objects by associated sites. Clockwise from top left: (1) All BM objects, (2) All MET objects, (3) BM objects with photo, (4) MET objects with photo. Microsoft Excel pie charts by author

(and collections more broadly) with more contextual information can be more easily used for research and Conway’s (2010, p. 368) claim that value should be assessed before digitation, objects documented with more specific associated sites are more likely to be photographed. In the case of the BM collection, 35% of objects records in Group D have been photographed in comparison to only 12% of those in Group A. In the MET collection 61% of objects in Group D contain photos, in comparison to only 27% of those in Group A.1 While this proportional change is not drastic it is relevant to the presentation of the Murch collections as it creates a shift in the conceptualisation of space for the user.

1

47% of MET objects with no site listed have been photographed; however, this may be due to the distribution of objects across other departments and different departmental policies for marking associated location.

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Records with References in Collection Totals 3500 3000 2500 2000

2795 2199

1500 1000 500 644

457

0 BM

MET

Contains Reference

No Reference

Fig. 6.3 Relationship between records with references and total collections. Microsoft Excel bar graph by author

Murch Collection: Bibliographic References The presence of citations provides the user with an understanding of how the object has been used and in what contexts researchers have believed it to be a valuable object of study. In effect, they reflect what stories have been told with this object and may influence how others conceptualise its importance. Across the two museums 18.35% of records contain at least one bibliographic reference (see Fig. 6.3).2 Sixtyfive and fifty-six unique sources are cited in the BM and MET records, respectively. They range in publication date from 1904 to 2020 with the largest number of cited references published between 1990 and 2009 (Fig. 6.4). This pattern suggests an increased focus on sections of the collection within this period; however, it could also be partially explained by an increased accessibility of digital publications. All but one of these individual references are art historical/archaeological in nature, focusing on the objects’ early contexts. Mace’s (1911) Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin article entitled “The Murch Collection of Egyptian Antiquities” is the only publication to focus on the MET collection as a whole and briefly discuss its history. This reference, despite its applicability to the entire MET collection, is only included in 74 records (2.79%). This incredibly limited use of the publication conveys the sense that its ability to provide collection history information has not been valued.

2

This total excludes references included in the Curatorial Interpretation/Comments section.

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Number of Referenced Publications by Decade 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

1900s

1910s

1920s

1930s

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

2020s

No Date Listed

Fig. 6.4 References by published decade. Microsoft Excel bar graph by author

BM Records with Images (474)

MET Records with Images (768)

Contains Reference 22%

No Reference 38% Contains Reference 62%

No Reference 78%

Fig. 6.5 Proportion of records with references. BM records with images (left), MET records with images (right) Microsoft Excel pie charts by author

Additionally, the conception of the collection as an entity within the broader museum collection (cf. Thomas, 2016) is greatly diminished. Examining the relationship between the presence of references and object images there is a significant difference in user experience across the two museums. Filtering the collections by records with at least one image, 62% of the remaining BM records include at least one reference compared to 22% of those at the MET (Fig. 6.5). While these proportions are not explicitly presented to the user, they may affect perception of the collection and its use by researchers. The considerable increase in the proportion of records with references in the BM may translate into an assumption that this pattern is maintained throughout the collection. The MET results more closely reflect the overall proportion of records with references. This pattern could

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also, in part, result from differences in digitisation programmes, for instance, the privileging of records previously utilised by researchers.

Murch Collection: Provenance in the MET Despite the fact that the collection entered the MET as a single acquisition in 1910, the records contain 19 distinct provenance statements as well as 48 records without provenance (Table 6.4). Many of these statements contain similar elements; however, variations across these types create different understandings of the collection, its history and the principle actors involved in the process. The most common provenance statement across the collection (2388 [89.91%]) provides a useful departure point for discussion: “Formerly in the collection of the Reverend Chauncey Murch (died 1907). Collected between 1883 and 1906 while Murch was a missionary in Egypt. Collection purchased by the Museum from the Murch family with funds provided by Helen Miller Gould, 1910.” Here Murch is connected to his position as both a Reverend and a missionary while his collecting is presented as a secondary pursuit rather than an integral part of his time in Egypt as Alexander suggests. An additional 15 records reference Murch’s profession, while 199 records refer to Murch by only his given and surname. No records in the collection reference an owner before Murch, which may be in part because of the posthumous acquisition and a lack of documentation; however, this presentation reinforces an image of the solitary collector and obscures the role of Murch’s local contacts and sources including Mohammed Mohassib (McClain, 2019). This also works to isolate Murch from the broader object habit (Stevenson, 2019), and present the collection with no reference to Murch’s other collecting and selling activities. The presence, or lack thereof, of Amelia Murch, in the provenance statements provides a useful case to discuss the role of agency as it is presented in the data. Using documentation from the MET archives, I have previously illustrated Amelia’s active role in transporting the collection from England to New York and negotiating with museum professionals and Helen Miller Gould. In the provenance statement above, Amelia’s work in this process is diffused and anonymised behind “the Murch family.” Moreover, only 170 records (6.40%) reference Amelia Murch as an individual. Amelia’s work in this process is undervalued and cast aside in the digital record. When compared to the presence of Gould who funded the acquisition (2599 [97.85%]), this pattern suggests donor relations and financial motives as root causes of the discrepancy. Overall, this provenance presentation reinforces an isolated perspective of both the collection and Chauncey Murch’s work. It devalues Amelia Murch’s vital role in the acquisition process while simultaneously reinforcing the preferential placement of Gould as the donor. The lack of a cohesive statement across the collection’s records creates an uneven understanding of its past and suggests both a lack of engagement with the collection as a whole and a haphazard patchwork approach to

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Table 6.4 MET provenance statement distribution Provenance statement Formerly in the collection of the Reverend Chauncey Murch (died 1907). Collected between 1883 and 1906 while Murch was a missionary in Egypt. Collection purchased by the Museum from the Murch family with funds provided by Helen Miller Gould, 1910 Chauncey Murch, Luxor, Egypt (until d. 1907); Mrs. Chauncey Murch (1907–1910); Helen Miller Gould, New York (1910; gifted to MMA) No Provenance Statement Chauncey Murch (d.1907), Scotch Ridge, OH, collected in Egypt, 1883–1906; by descent to his family, until 1910; Helen Miller Gould, New York, until 1910 Chauncey Murch, Luxor, Egypt (until d. 1907); Mrs. Chauncey Murch (1907–1910); Helen Miller Gould, New York (1910) Formerly in the collection of the Reverend Chauncey Murch (died 1907). Collected between 1883 and 1906 while Murch was a missionary in Egypt. Collection purchased by the Museum from the Murch family with funds provided by Helen Miller Gould, 1910 Chauncey Murch, Luxor, Egypt (until d. 1907); Mrs. Chauncey Murch (1907–10); Helen Miller Gould, New York (1910; gifted to MMA) Chauncey Murch, Luxor, Egypt (d. 1907); Mrs. Chauncey Murch (1907–10); Helen Miller Gould, New York (until 1910) Said to be from Egypt Chauncey Murch, Egypt; Helen Miller Gould, New York (until 1910) Chauncey Murch (d.1907), Ohio, collected in Egypt 1883–1906; by descent to his family, Ohio, until 1910 Chauncey Murch, Luxor, Egypt (d. 1907); Helen Miller Gould, New York (until 1910); Mrs. Chauncey Murch(l907–10) Chauncey Murch, Luxor, Egypt (until d. 1907); Chauncey Murch (1907–10); Helen Miller Gould, New York (1910; gifted to MMA) Chauncey Murch, Luxor, Egypt (until d. 1907); his wife, Mrs. Chauncey Murch (l 907–10); Helen Miller Gould, New York (1910; gifted to MMA) Formerly collection of the Reverend Chauncey Murch (until d. 1907) who acquired it between 1883 and 1906 while he was a missionary in Egypt: Acquired by the Museum in 1910, purchased from the Murch family with funds provided by Helen Miller Gould. Chauncey Murch Chauncey Murch, Luxor, Egypt; Helen Miller Gould, New York (until 1910)

Number of records 2388

Percentage of collection 89.91

128

4.82

48 29

1.81 1.09

17

0.64

12

0.45

7

0.26

6 5

0.23 0.19

2

0.08

2

0.08

2

0.08

2

0.08

2

0.08

1 1

0.04 0.04 (continued)

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Table 6.4 (continued) Provenance statement Chauncey Murch (d. 1907), Egypt; Helen Miller Gould, New York (until 1910) Formerly in the collection of the Reverend Chauncey Murch (died 1907). Collected between 1883 and 1906 while Murch was a missionary in Egypt. Collection purchased by the Museum from the Murch family with funds provided by Helen Miller Gould, 1910. Previously in the collection of J. Ward. Kharga Oasis, Bagawat; Chauncey Murch, Luxor, Egypt (d. 1907); Mrs. Chauncey Murch (1907–1910); Helen Miller Gould, New York (until 1910) Total

Number of records 1

Percentage of collection 0.04

1

0.04

1

0.04

2656

100%

data maintenance. As the only data category solely presenting this type of information, this pattern also instils unimportance in the collection’s past.

Murch Collection: Object Conditions in the BM The Condition Statement, one of the data categories published only in the BM database, provides users with the contemporary state of the objects. 3340 (97.12%) of the records contain condition statements totalling 456 unique statements ranging between one and 92 words. I grouped the statements by condition level— poor, incomplete, fair, and good—with some individual records allocated across two groups.3 Across the entire collection 70% of objects are marked in good condition, with 22% in fair, 4% in incomplete, 1% in poor, and 3% without a condition statement (Fig. 6.6). Before examining the distribution of condition levels for objects with images and objects on display, I hypothesised that the proportion of records marked in good condition would remain stable or increase, suggesting that condition would influence curatorial and collections decisions. When filtering for objects on display and records with images, the results (Fig. 6.6) show that in contrast with my hypothesis, the proportion of records marked in good condition decreased significantly to 56% and 47%, respectively. The largest increase came from records marked in fair condition (to 28% and 36%, respectively); however, there were also increases across all other categories except poor condition. These patterns suggest that object condition is less of a determining factor in both curatorial practice and digitisation than other object categories. The increased prevalence of objects in fair and incomplete condition shifts what parts of the Murch collections visitors engage with in the online database compared

3

I employed this double categorisation in cases where statements discussed the condition of individual object parts. This has created totals in Fig. 6.6 that do not match collection totals.

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All BM Objects

BM Objects on Display

99; 3% 35; 1% 140; 4%

0; 0% 3; 5%

7; 11%

784; 22% 18; 28% 36; 56%

2468; 70%

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Incomplete Fair

Good

Blank

Poor

Incomplete Fair

Good

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BM Objects With Images 6; 1% 30; 6%

47; 10%

230; 47%

Poor

Incomplete Fair

180; 36%

Good

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Fig. 6.6 Distribution of BM objects by condition statements. Clockwise from top left: (1) All BM objects, (2) BM objects on display, (3) BM objects with images. Microsoft Excel pie charts by author

to in the physical museum. This new sample of objects presented as representatives of the broader collection is set to change as museum professionals continue to visually digitise portions of the collection and should at some point return to reflect the overall proportions. In the meantime, this sample creates new ways of imagining the Murch collection, as well as his collecting practice more broadly.

Overarching Themes and Future Steps Museum databases can transform the ways in which users engage with collections and think about the past; however, they can also reinforce pre-existing frameworks of value and significance. Decisions about object value are embedded not only in the

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construction of the BM and MET collections databases but also through the organisation and presentation of object-level data. Page layouts, search and filter tools, and the organisation of space on object record pages largely reinforce a visual engagement with the collections and guide users to think about artefacts mainly through their material and aesthetic qualities and obscure periods of an object’s biography after its initial creation and use. Hyperlinked terms can partially transgress temporal and spatial boundaries common in physical museum displays as well as disrupt pre-existing frameworks of value both for objects and associated people. Despite calls for museums to accept and present ambiguity and the fragmented nature of knowledge (Cameron & Robinson, 2007, p. 172), both databases largely project a sense of completeness in their records through the suppression of empty data categories. Although the BM acknowledges the limitations of the database and requests feedback on its records, the former is done in the periphery of the platform and the latter is partially undermined by a lack of transparency. While MacDonald argues that museums are interested in drawing attention to what they have “rather than to what is missing” (2016, p. 88), this is greatly counterproductive in the quest for a more holistic understanding of objects. Finally, almost all of the object-level data is presented as unauthored and undated, reinforcing an anonymous universalising institutional voice and the assumption that object documentation is objective. Digitisation has shifted the scope and breadth of visually accessible portions of the Murch collections. I have highlighted various patterns apparent in the organisation of object record data and discussed how the patterns in associated sites, bibliographic references, provenance statements, and object conditions affect the presentation of ancient Egypt and histories of collecting. While some hierarchies of value are reinforced in the digital platform, including the preference for visual and material qualities, new ones are also created in which value is attributed through hyperlinks and quantity is privileged over quality. In line with Manovich’s discussion on the shifts in experiencing visual culture (2017, p. 3), I argue that a collectionbased level of analysis provides insights into patterns of presentation not apparent at the single object level. Moreover, these patterns affect both browsing experience and the perception of value. This research both highlights the need for a reflective approach to digitisation efforts and raises questions about the future of museum collections databases. I believe that museums need to invest in developing database interfaces that highlight a wider array of data on the objects, promote queries beyond artist/title searches, and provide transparency about unknown information or unfinished work. This also means investing both time and money on quality metadata tagging and/or opening up processes to allow for user based tagging. In this, both the knowns and unknowns become clearer and more tangible.

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References Alexander, K. B. (1994). A history of the ancient art collection at The Art Institute of Chicago. Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, 20(1), 6–13, 94. Alexander, K. B. (2012). From plaster to stone ancient art at the Art Institute of Chicago. In K. Manchester & Art Institute of Chicago (Eds.), Recasting the past: Collecting and presenting antiquities at the Art Institute of Chicago (1st ed., pp. 15–39). The Art Institute of Chicago. Australia ICOMOS. (2013). The Burra charter: The Australia ICOMOS charter for places of cultural significance. Australia ICOMOS, p. 12. Beaulieu, A., & de Rijcke, S. (2017). Networked knowledge and epistemic authority in the development of virtual museums. In C. van den Akker & S. Legêne (Eds.), Museums in a digital culture: How art and heritage become meaningful (pp. 75–91). Amsterdam University Press. Bierbrier, M. L. (Ed.). (2012). Who was who in egyptology (4th revised ed.). : Egypt Exploration Society. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (p. 2410258). Greenwood Press. Byrne, S., Clarke, A., Harrison, R., & Torrence, R. (Eds.). (2011). Unpacking the collection: Networks of material and social agency in the Museum. Springer. Cameron, F. R. (2008). Object-oriented democracies: Conceptualising museum collections in networks. Museum Manag Curatorsh, 23(3), 229–243. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09647770802233807 Cameron, F., & Kenderdine, S. (Eds.). (2007). Theorizing digital cultural heritage: A critical discourse. MIT Press. Cameron, F., & Robinson, H. (2007). Digital knowledgescapes: Cultural, theoretical, practical, and usage issues facing museum collection databases in a digital epoch. In F. Cameron & S. Kenderdine (Eds.), Theorizing digital cultural heritage: A critical discourse (pp. 165–191). MIT Press. Carman, J. (2014). Heritage value: Combining culture and economies. Arts and Humanities Research Council. http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Funded-Research/Funded-themes-and-programmes/ Cultural-Value-Project/Current-and-Past-Research-Activities/Documents/EW%20Carman% 20-%20Heritage%20Value%20Combining%20Culture%20and%20Economics.pdf Colla, E. (2007). Conflicted antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian modernity. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390398 Conway, P. (2010). Rationale for digitization and preservation. In R. Parry (Ed.), Museums in a digital age (pp. 365–378). Routledge. Cuno, J. B. (2011). Who owns antiquity? Museums and the battle over our ancient heritage. Open WorldCat. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400839247 De la Torre, M. (2002). Assessing the values of cultural heritage (p. 125). The Getty Conservation Institute. de la Torre, M. (2013). Values and heritage conservation. Heritage & Society, 6(2), 155–166. https://doi.org/10.1179/2159032X13Z.00000000011 Díaz-Andreu, M. (2017). Heritage values and the public. J Commun Archaeol Heritag, 4.1, 2–6. https://doi.org/10.1080/20518196.2016.1228213 Eldamaty, M. M., et al. (Eds.). (2002). Egyptian museum collections around the world. Supreme Council of Antiquities; Distributed by The American University in Cairo Press. Flexner, J. L. (2016). Dark and bright futures for museum archaeology. Museum Worlds, 4(1), 1–3. https://doi.org/10.3167/armw.2016.040101 Frieman, C. J., & Wilkin, N. (2016). ‘The changing of the guards’? British prehistoric collections and archaeology in the museums of the future. Museum Worlds, 4(1), 33. https://doi.org/10. 3167/armw.2016.040104 Geismar, H. (2018). Museum object lessons for the digital age. University College London Press. Gell, A. (1998). Art and agency: An anthropological theory. Clarendon Press.

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Gosden, C., & Marshall, Y. (1999). The cultural biography of objects. World Archaeology, 31(2), 169–178. https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.1999.9980439 Hagen, F. N., & Ryholt, K. (2017). The antiquities trade in Egypt in the time of Rudolf Mosse. In: J. Helmbold-Doyé, et al. (Eds.), Mosse im Museum: Die Stiftungstätigkeit des Berliner Verlegers Rudolf Mosse (1843–1920) für das Ägyptische Museum Berlin (1. Auflage, pp. 59–74). Hentrich & Hentrich. Heitman, C., et al. (2017). Innovation through large-scale integration of legacy records: Assessing the ‘value added’ in cultural heritage resources. Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 10(3), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3012288 Hilliard, C. (2010). A committee of two. Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, 36(1), 46–67, 89–90. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1992). Museums and the shaping of knowledge. Routledge. Howard, P. (1907) Sunday-schools of the world around: The official report of the world's fifth sunday-school convention in Rome, May 18–23, 1907. The World’s Sunday-School Executive Committee. Jeffreys, D. G. (Ed.). (2003). Views of ancient Egypt since Napoleon Bonaparte: Imperialism, colonialism and modern appropriations. University College London Press; Cavendish Pub. Joy, J. (2009). Reinvigorating object biography: Reproducing the Drama of object lives. World Archaeology, 41.4, 540–556. https://doi.org/10.1080/00438240903345530 King, J. A. (2016). Comparative colonialism and collections-based archaeological research: Dig less, catalog more. Museum Worlds, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.3167/armw.2016.040102 Kopytoff, I. (1986). The cultural biography of things: Commoditization as process. In A. Appadurai (Ed.), The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective (pp. 64–92). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819582 Kratz, C. A. (2011). Rhetorics of value: Constituting worth and meaning through cultural display. Visual Anthropology Review, 27(1), 21–48. Levin, A. K., (Ed.). (2010). Gender, sexuality and museums: A Routledge reader. Taylor & Francis. Open WorldCat. http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p= 557304. Lindauer, M. (2006). The critical museum visitor. In J. Marstine (Ed.), New museum theory and practice: An introduction (pp. 203–225). Blackwell. Lipe, W. D. (1984). Value and meaning in cultural resources. In H. F. Cleere (Ed.), Approaches to the archaeological heritage (pp. 1–11). Cambridge University Press. Lupton, C. (2016). ‘Mummymania’ for the masses- is Egyptology cursed by the Mummy’s curse. In S. MacDonald & M. Rice (Eds.), Consuming ancient Egypt (pp. 23–46). Routledge. Lythgoe, A. M. (1910). Letter to Robinson from Lythgoe. The metropolitan museum of art archives. New York: Gould, Miss Helen Miller, 1894–1896, 1910, 1912, 1942, Office of the Secretary Records. MacDonald, S. (2005). Stolen or shared: Ancient Egypt at the Petrie Museum. In J. Hackforth-Jones & M. Roberts (Eds.), Edges of empire orientalism and visual culture (pp. 162–180). Wiley. Open WorldCat, http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:101:1-201412036024. MacDonald, S. (2016). Lost in time and space: Ancient Egypt in museums. In S. MacDonald & M. Rice (Eds.), Consuming ancient Egypt (pp. 87–99). Routledge. MacDonald, S., & Rice, M. (2016). Consuming ancient Egypt. Routledge. Mace, A. C. (1911). The Murch collection of Egyptian Antiquities. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 6(1): 1, 3, 5, 7–28. Manovich, L. (2017). Visual semiotics, media theory, and cultural analytics. Teorii Soft-Kul’tury. Krasnaia lastochka. Manovich, L. (2010). Database as symbolic form. In R. Parry (Ed.), Museums in a digital age (pp. 64–71). Routledge. Marquardt, W. H., et al. (1982). Resolving the crisis in archaeological collections curation. American Antiquity, 47(2), 409–418.

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McClain, E. (2019). Filling the met with scarabs: Helen Miller Gould and the Chauncey Murch collection of Egyptian antiquities. Undergraduate thesis, Hunter College, City University of New York. McTavish, L. (2006). Visiting the virtual museum: Art and experience online. In J. Marstine (Ed.), New museum theory and practice: An introduction (pp. 226–246). Blackwell. Moser, S. (2006). Wondrous curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British museum. University of Chicago Press. Müller, K. (2010). Museums and virtuality. In R. Parry (Ed.), Museums in a digital age (pp. 295–305). Routledge. Mulrooney, M. A., et al. (2016). Integrating research and collections management: The ho‘omaka Hou research initiative at the bishop museum. Museum Worlds, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.3167/ armw.2016.040105 Nancarrow, J.-H. (2016). Democratizing the digital collection: New players and new pedagogies in three-dimensional cultural heritage. Museum Worlds, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.3167/armw.2016. 040106 Newell, J. (2012). Old objects, new media: Historical collections, digitization and affect. Journal of Material Culture, 17(3), 287–306. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183512453534 Parry, R. (Ed.). (2010). Museums in a digital age. Routledge. Phillips, R. B. (2011). Museum pieces: Toward the indigenization of Canadian museums. MQUP. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cam/detail.action?docID=3332476. Redmond, B. G., & DuFresne, A. S. (2018). Dealing with museum legacy collections in the twentyfirst century: Three case studies from Ohio. Occasional Papers (Midwest Archaeological Conference), 3, 7–20. Riggs, C. (2010). Ancient Egypt in the museum: Concepts and constructions. In A companion to ancient Egypt (Vol. 2, pp. 1129–1153). Wiley-Blackwell. Rivera, L. W. (2013). The museum 2.0 divide: Approaches to digitisation and new media. Museum International, 65(1–4), e1–e8. https://doi.org/10.1111/muse.12042 Roth, A. M. (1998). Ancient Egypt in America: Claiming the riches. In L. Meskell (Ed.), Archaeology under fire: Nationalism, politics and heritage in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East (pp. 217–229). Routledge. Said, E. (1995). Orientalism: Western conceptions of the orient (Revised ed.). Penguin. Stanford University Archaeology Collections. (2019). Chauncey Murch. Our dark materials: Rediscovering an Egyptian collection. Retrieved August 9, 2020, from https://scalar.usc.edu/ works/our-dark-materials/chauncey-murch. Stevens, M. (2017). Touched from a distance: The practice of affective browsing. In C. van den Akker & S. Legêne (Eds.), Museums in a digital culture: How art and heritage become meaningful (pp. 13–29). Amsterdam University Press. Stevenson, A. (2014). Artefacts of excavation. Journal of the History of Collections, 26(1), 89–102. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fht017 Stevenson, A. (2019). Scattered finds: Archaeology, egyptology and museums. University College London Press. Stevenson, A., Libonati, E., & Baines, J. (2017). Introduction—Object habits: Legacies of fieldwork and the museum. Museum History Journal, 10(2), 113–126. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 19369816.2017.1328780 Stevenson, A., Libonati, E., & Williams, A. (2016). ‘A selection of minor antiquities’: A multi-sited view on collections from excavations in Egypt. World Archaeology, 48(2), 282–295. https://doi. org/10.1080/00438243.2016.1165627 Thomas, N. (2016). The return of curiosity: What museums are good for in the twenty-first century. Reaktion Books. Trant, J. (2010). When all You’ve got is ‘the real thing’: Museums and authenticity in the networked world. In R. Parry (Ed.), Museums in a digital age (pp. 306–313). Routledge.

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van den Akker, Chiel (2017). “Curiosity and the fate of chronicles.” In Chiel van den Akker and Susan Legêne, eds., Museums in a digital culture: How art and heritage become meaningful. : Amsterdam University Press, 57–73. van den Akker, C., & Legêne, S. (2017). Introduction museums in a digital culture: How art and heritage become meaningful. In C. van den Akker & S. Legêne (Eds.), Museums in a digital culture (pp. 7–12). Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048524808-002 Vivian, C. (2012). Americans in Egypt, 1770–1915: Explorers, consuls, travelers, soldiers, missionaries, writers and scientists. McFarland & Co. Wingfield, C. (2013). Reassembling the London missionary society collection: Experimenting with symmetrical anthropology and the archaeological sensibility. In R. Harrison et al. (Eds.), Reassembling the collection: Ethnographic museums and indigenous agency (pp. 61–88). School for Advanced Research Press. Wingfield, C. (2017). Collection as (re)assemblage: Refreshing museum archaeology. World Archaeology, 49(5), 594–607.

Eli E. McClain holds an MPhil in Heritage Studies at the University of Cambridge and a BA with Honours in History and Sociology from the Macaulay Honours College at Hunter College, CUNY. His research interests include the politics of physical and digital museum presentation and the relationship between digitisation projects and valuation of museum collections. In conjunction with his studies, he has gained valuable experience creating and facilitating programming for various audiences at Emma S. Clark Library, Fraunces Tavern Museum, New York Hall of Science, and Macaualy@Hunter. He enjoys pursuing cross-disciplinary research and practice and his work has been supported by fellowships at the New York Botanical Garden, Roosevelt House Institute for Public Policy, and Stanford University. Currently Eli explores questions of economic value and impacts of the tourism and recreation sectors as a Research Project Manager at the University of Michigan Economic Growth Institute. Email: [email protected]

Chapter 7

Large Datasets and the Particularity of Art: Will There Be Any Art in the Deep Learning Age? Ana Peraica

Abstract The idea that machines can make and understand art originated in Modernism. With the advancement of computer technologies, initially linear algorithms, and recently nonlinear generative art, the number of attempts at producing and analysing art grows. Neural networks, capable of deceiving the artefact’s origin, are making the most significant advancement. Systems such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) can compute reproductions of paintings and photographs, producing new ones, while convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can analyse artefacts for their styles and originality. CNN systems can also rank and chose art, sorting it into predefined categories. Yet, averageness resulting from these processes is precisely what art criticism has despised for centuries. This study analyses the possible status of an acknowledged piece of art—Dorothea Lange’s photograph “Migrant Mother” (1936), comparing the human qualitative and machine quantitative analysis. Besides pointing to a current gap, the study also points to possible future developments. Keywords AARON · AI art · Artefacts · Artificial creativity · CNNs (convolutional neural networks) · Computational art · Computer-generated · Deep learning · Digitisation · Dorothea Lange · GANs · Human intelligence · Machine · Modernism · Pattern recognition · Photography Computational art is here with us since the 1970s (Eliens, 1988; Franke, 1971). With the advancement of processors and machine memory, today exceeding the human speed of thoughts and memory capacity, many of our activities have undergone robust digitisation, and as such are feeding machines so to be able to acquire new knowledge. This advancement in learning was possible only after a shift from linear algorithmic repetition and replication to nonlinear deep learning processes. Contrary to algorithms, neural networks do not mimic human intelligence, working on induction and deduction logic, but create an environment for a new one. While A. Peraica (✉) Department of Art History, Danube University, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Sight as Site in the Digital Age, Digital Culture and Humanities 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9209-4_7

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algorithms were merely calculating, deep learning processes empower standard logical procedures, induction, and deduction. Human sciences are founded, proceeding to steps beyond them to recognise patterns. Pattern recognition is somehow what humans cannot be successful at the scale machines are. Machines today can process much more information in a shorter time than humans do. Speeding up the time needed to process the same amount of data, these processors also bring some unpredictable knowledge or the knowledge that would take decades for human sciences to arrive at. As a result, we are faced with new data insights and interpretations into all human life sections that are incomparable to the knowledge we have produced ourselves. Yet, while many human activities migrate into new systems, some also fail. The reason may lie in that some areas of human activities cannot be digitised and then automated. Such areas of our production continuously confuse us, humans, and machines, for their unpredictable behaviour. Creativity, consequently its interpretation, is often pointed to as fields that belong to an authentically human, unprogrammable human activity. Pointing to the incapacity to produce art by machines, many authors challenge the very concept of “artificial creativity” (Elton, 1995). In many ways, such writings are prophetic, announcing criticism that is yet to come (Manovich, 2022). There are three major objections to the possibility that machines can create art autonomously or without humans; aesthetic, logic, and social. The first one sets the debate in the field of traditional aesthetic preconceptions (dealing with concepts as; the myth of creation, the mystery of metaphysical origin, romantic genius, etc.), which allows no place for machines as it stratifies the value of art production above all other exhibits, crafts, and engineering included. The second points at the logical error, a sort of a vicious circle, in our expectance that machines produced by us produce something creative and unpredictable for us, out of the assigned set and the pre-programmed logic. Finally, the third demand brings debate to the paradoxical unpurposive function of art by claiming that machines are process-oriented and art is not. This particular argument was introduced already at the beginning of the debate on artificial creativity, so for example, A. Eliens conducted an early thought experiment. He imagined having programmed artificial intelligence that can compute as an artist. At the end of this modal argument, he concluded: “Art cannot be automated [. . .] art is not an objective a computer can have, nor is a progression in art an objective a computer can have” (Eliens, 1988, p. 24). One of the reasons Eliens gives, in addition to not having a purpose, is also a social function of art, defined in his passage saying; “Since art might have as a theme not only the form of an art product but also the function of a work of art in society, art by an artefact can be fully appreciated only in a community of artefacts” (Eliens, 1988, p. 24). Thus, it is what is institutionalised as art. Yet, while theory debates machine’s capacity to create art autonomously, artists such as Harold Cohen exercised it.1 Cohen constructed AARON, the longest-

1

See Harold Cohen homepage http://www.aaronshome.com/aaron/index.html.

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running algorithmic generative art that was capable of learning and producing art. Initially, those were monochromous drawings, and in later phases also including colours, these were coloured graphics. Running from 1973 until the authors died in 2016, the system went through various stages and styles. In different periods, AARON was drawing landscapes, animals, humans, and it may be said they also had some particular and recognisable style. Drawings were sketchy, linear, and angular, as AARON could not smoothly draw a rounded form. Consequently, most of the compositions were flat and without any illusion of depth of the field. In later phases, the colours were vivid. Yet, colour fills were equal and without nuances. For such stylistic characteristics, AARON was thus much more successful with non-figural works. What Cohen was constructing in his 40 year-long career of artificial computing creativity today is almost embedded into the development of institutional arts and its interpretation. This development has been described by Whitelaw (2004) and in a collection edited by Romero and Machado (2008, 2021).

Generative Art/Neural Networks Today’s development of computer-generated art go in two directions: autonomous production of art and its critical analysis. One focuses on the computation of the most exclusive human activity—creation, while the other is evaluated. Two different systems are used in these realms: generative adversarial networks (GANs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs).2 The difference between the two neural networks is minor, yet they define different machine learning roles—creativity and analysis. While GANs use predefined concepts of the style-period, individual style, and relying on the filtered dataset, CNNs can independently recognise patterns beyond these predefined human sciences concepts.3 GANs can compute a new artefact out of the given dataset. In practical use, they have been implemented in creating different and unique pieces according to a predefined style, as in a highly successful project titled The Next Rembrandt generating a brand new portrait from ones factually painted by an old master.4 A specific version of GAN named StyleGAN, precisely for its capacity to compute in particular styles and manners, was used by other artists. The best-known example of artistic implementation is AICAN, trained by Ahmed Elgammal from Rutgers University (2017), which uses many classical portraits to compute a new one. Yet, the more famous piece is the one computed from more than 1500 portrait paintings

2

Both of which are actually implemented into the very process of generative adversarial networks, distinguishing two competing systems; Generator and Discriminator, in which one proposes (creates) an image while the second denies/accepts its aesthetic role (criticises). 3 Although both being neural systems, CNN and GAN have a difference in architecture, as GAN use the system with generator and discriminator (the second of which may be convolutional network). 4 Rembrandthuijs (2016). The Next Rembrandt. https://thenextrembrandt.com.

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since the fourteenth century onwards, Portrait of Edmund Bellamy (2018) created by the Paris-based collective Obvious, which was sold in Christie’s auction for half a million dollars.5 Neither distinctively made by the artist nor by humans, pieces as those made by AICAN and Obvious collective provoke typical aesthetics questions of creativity and authenticity, thus consequently fakes and forgeries, re-awakening the early debate on the reproducibility of arts. Furthermore, it is not created with a particular representative goal (to resemble, flatter, or appraise a specific person) but an exact generative process; they do not understand the purpose of portraiture and forms but work on them the level of textures instead. Namely, both AICAN and Bellamy portraits have a specific liquid texture appearance, which dissolute the shape of a human face that was supposed to be represented, producing a formally unrecognisable texture that only vaguely resembles a human portrait. Such an idea of liquid portraiture is the centre of the artwork of Mario Klingemann as well. In addition to painting, GANs are trained to produce not indexical photographs or represent any reality. Such projects generate images of people that do not exist from pictures of existing ones, as Portraits of Imaginary People by Mike Tyka (2017)6 or This Person does not Exist (2019) by Philip Wang.7 While the use of GANs in rendering paintings from the given set often produces errors in terms of adequate representation, in photography, it reaches perfection. Although some more minor mistakes made by massive computation, such as image glitches, still occur, the system gets perfected. GANs in the computation is the theme in the recent book AI Art by photography theorist Zylinska (2020). In this study, I would like to extend Zylinska’s detailed analysis of AI as an art producer to AI’s capacity of making an autonomous aesthetic and critical judgement, analysing the use of the second type of neural network: convolutional neural networks (CNNs).8 CNNs are networks that can process a vast number of images in search of specific criteria. They can, for example, organise pictures according to style-period, individual artist style and sort them by their quality. Such programmes are not mimicking the artist’s work but that of the critic, producing an aesthetic choice.9 If GANs can be said to be artificial creators, CNNs are instead critics and curators. Contrary to GANs, CNNs can analyse and create patterns, which makes them helpful in analysing the informational status of objects, for example, their facticity. They are remarkably successful in filtering originals from fake artworks and in organising

5

Christies. A collaboration between two artists, one human and the other a machine. https://www. christies.com/features/A-collaboration-between-two-artists-one-human-one-a-machine-9332-1. aspx. 6 Mike Tyka, Faces, 2017. https://miketyka.com/?s=faces. 7 Wang (2019). This person does not exist. https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/. 8 AICAN+Ahmed Elgammal, Statement. HG Contemporary. http://www.hgcontemporary.com/ artists/aican-ahmed-elgammal. 9 Frank (2020).

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styles. An example of such a practical implementation of the CNN network in distinguishing sources from fakes of paintings attributed to Rembrandt van Rijn, trained by researchers Frank J. Frank and Andrea J. Frank.10 Rembrandt’s work gained significant attention from art historians for its supreme aesthetics, originality, and authenticity.11 Being over-productive and having many pupils, Rembrandt’s canvases were also frequently finished but also forged by his pupils. In centuries succeeding, Rembrandt’s followers and independent market forgers continued producing spurious artworks due to high market values. For many decades, art historians were suspecting that many pieces attributed to Rembrandt were not genuine, yet they had fewer tools to demonstrate these suspicions. But, once the neural network got trained to analyse the artworks in their slightest details, comparing tiny sections of paintings, it became possible to distinguish between authentic paintings from fake ones, and even more; to go into further information analysing segments of paintings painted initially by Rembrandt and ones made by his pupils and forgers. While the criteria according to which machines were supposed to look for discovering fakes, as well as dataset to look at, were decided by programmers based on earlier, published art-historical writings, the computer was utterly autonomous in analysing the quality of the artwork the way humans would not be capable, sequencing and performing a multitask of comparing. In addition to analysing the originality of paintings or their sections, CNNs are trained in simple tasks such as organising images in predefined art genres, like painting, graphics or sculpture, and photographs. They are also used for analysing and ranking doubles. And, similar to the implementation of GANs in photography, where the difference between the training set and the result was minor, the situation with the photographic genre becomes critical. Namely, as we live in times in which the production of images exceeds the human capacity to see and thus reflect onto all pictures made, most images recorded by our cameras are not seen at all. To reflect on them, we need any assistance in the preselection of ideas that brings only quality images to our attention, and machines are trained to do this basic preselection. As the production of images grows, we can easily imagine a day when the number of images produced would need heavier assistance from machines. One day machines will work in selecting databases, deciding if something is technically problematic, or presenting something that might not be socially acceptable. And as it happens with Facebook algorithms deciding on images with nudity, their decision is wrong. However, would giving up the selection of technically inappropriate, aesthetically, or even ethically and legally indecent images to machines bring us to another technical level of censuring the archive? And, could it happen that a digital piece of art, or non-fungible token, becomes erased for the reason of being blurred, suspected of blasphemy one day?

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Steven and Andrea (2020). van de Wetering (2017).

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To monitor the development of such a process in this study, I will approach few essential questions; how contemporary debates on the specificity of art are lead in the context of neural networks and training datasets, as to how they are currently being used in the active production of exhibitions. In the first part of this study, I will overview some standpoints of traditional art criticism and compare it to a selection process made by neural networks behaving as art critics. In the second, I will perform both types of analysis on the case of an iconic photograph, Migrant Mother (1936), by a master of photography Dorothea Lange. In the concluding part of this study, I will point to paradoxes and possible developments of this method.

Art Criticism Today While art history defines what we used to describe as art, art criticism is oriented to the present moment, deciding what art is and what is not art at all. Its grounds were in traditional aesthetics of the eighteenth century, primarily in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (1790). Unlike literary criticism, art criticism initially took a form of an informed public opinion-making in the eighteenth century salons, being a social practice rather than a well-formed profession. Only at the end of the nineteenth century, art criticism merged with disciplinary art history, emancipating from arbitrariness and becoming a form of professional estimation. Meanwhile, analysis of critical taste expanded to the field of sociology of taste. As postmodern practice exceeded media, genres, and forms of what orthodox art history named art, today’s art theory is more concerned with the question—is there anything as art at all, and how do we define it. According to today’s leading thinker in the field, James Elkins, today’s art criticism has various reasonably practical functions; it is implemented in marketing, attacking, reviewing, overviewing, introducing, conservation and restoration, and distributing art (Elkins, 2009).12 Thus, critical opinions can take different forms, from catalogue essays, academic treatises, cultural criticism, conservative harangue to philosophers’ reports. Their tone can be descriptive, poetic, and critical (ibid). Yet, despite this variety of forms, today’s art criticism is far more often employed for advocating, especially in curatorial practices (Elkins, 2009; Elkins & Newman, 2005) and fundraising, than producing a critical standpoint which may function as an aid in professional’s work of a gallery or museum curator and a researcher. According to Elkins, the main reason lies in the fact that art criticism rarely has any fixed method, rule, or common ground despite being in widespread use. Thus, it often ends, he notes, in ambitious judgement and over-theorisation instead of interpretation (ibid.). 12

Thus, Elkins asked that: (1) criticism should be reformed by returning to a golden age of formalist rigour, (2) Criticism should have a strong voice, (3) criticism would need systematic concepts and rules (standards), (4) criticism must become theoretical, (5) criticism needs to be serious, complex and rigorous, (6) criticism should become a reflection of judgements, not the parading of judgements, art critic should have a stand or position.

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Indeed, traditional methods of the interpretation of art used to be limited to historicisation and iconography. The first method was massively criticised by narratologists (Danto, 1996; Bal and Bryson 1991). As a result, Bal analysed, art history is forming based on a bit of narrative (complication—climax—closure; the description of the progress, a cyclical narrative of growth—maturity—decay of style or beginning—peak—decline), thus producing “semiosis”, a production of meaning rather than its understanding (Bal and Bryson 1991). After methodological criticism, iconology was expanded with iconology and related ideology studies, initiating the birth of visual studies. In the reformation of art history as the discipline, except for the “name of the father”, some other themes were imported from psychoanalysis, for example, themes of gaze and optical unconsciousness, both becoming influential in feminist reading. The author analysis context was expanded in the eighties, primarily in Ronald Barthes’ writings, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Barthes distinguished the author from the reader. Foucault indicated between the proper name and the function of authorship (Foucault, 1969), while Jacques Derrida analysed that what cannot be subsumed under the appropriate name. Audience analysis, also imported from cinema studies, has been expanded for the ideal and empirical spectator’s themes, distinguishing the reception “then” from reception “now” (Bal, ibid). Except for analysing the author’s name as a proper name, the characters proceed to the social analysis of the participation of the context inside the authorship. The main question of such an analysis is—who participates in the production of art? The social history of art, pushed by feminists, was further developed by Hauser (1999). This history directly pointed us to the means of production and exhibition of art (patronage and provenance studies). Whereas art history analyses how art produces the context, social studies analyse, vice versa, how the context creates art (Bal and Bryson 1991). Broader questions may be subsumed under a single one asking— what could have influenced the art production. Answers to such questions can range from accidents to deep artistic research.

Judgemental AI Many of the previously named methods have been implemented by digital humanities, the most notably iconography, historicisation (in time-lining), author studies, analysis of (social) networks. Yet, art often does not produce a large enough set to make a deep learning process as robust as other human activity areas. In addition, Digital Humanities are developing completely original models of historical analysis, in terms of independent image analysis, image superimposing and comparing, as biometric (facial) recognition and comparison of big image data (Gardiner & Musto, 2015). Furthermore, AI methods can work on a qualitative method, deep learning shows. With the absorption of qualitative data, the old distinction between qualitative and quantitative methods loses its reason.

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The implementation of computing in understanding art is significant. In practice, extensive data analysis according to aesthetic criteria has been around since 2017, when Google has introduced NIMA. This programme can arbitrate the quality of a photograph, which leads to NVIDIA systems as Everypixel Aesthetics Test.13 Everypixel Aesthetics Test is designed to analyse photographs, recognise their subject, theme, and composition, and the photograph’s capacity to be “liked” on social networks. The programme is beneficial to young photographers who are yet to find their road in commercial photography, which is performing what Elkins wrote through the narrow use of art criticism. Once implemented on photographic history classics, much can be learned on aesthetic criteria in the last hundred years. The system is trained on 347,000 Instagram photos and initially trained by ten professional photographers. The professional version of the programme UCG Photo Scoring is said to be “A unique model that sees the beauty of user-generated photos like a human”14 and is “designed to evaluate the aesthetics and technical quality of user-generated photos”.15 Although authors of the UCG photo scoring state the system is not made to assess historical images, it is challenging to compare classical analysis outcomes with machine ones. Indeed, rating the quality of photographs may be done technically as it is technical media, consisting of discreet and numbered elements. Choices within the apparatus’s capacities condition a great deal of its aesthetics; its images are also analysed contentwise. The programme, we learn, functions on the method of logical induction—by calculating the number of likes on specific, similar photographs, thus concluding the number of preferences according to similarity. Although being composite than deductive aesthetic judgement, this type of conclusion draws on an aesthetic decision. But is the aestheticism itself programmable in its axiomatic premises of high art standards, romantic concepts of genius, and art institutions’ creation and social framework? And does it, when becoming understandable and programmable, become predictable—which is precisely what Art should not be? Contrary to all these theories, AI ranks the artworks according to the public taste and big numbers, relying more on audience analysis. Thus, the background research was not art criticism and aesthetics, but rather the user’s profile, filling the customer’s psychology. We are speaking about the commodification of critical culture, in which the aesthetic judgement also becomes a ready-made product. The main problem of the computation of Art is that it defines style and Art as a phenomenon. One of the most exciting attempts of defining Art in a programmable way found its place in the first pages of Duve (1993) Kant after Duchamp. In this book De Duve, similarly to A. Eliens a decade before, practises a modal argument— 13

Every pixel. https://labs.everypixel.com/api/demo. See: Everypixel Aesthetics Test (Beta). https://aesthetics.everypixel.com/ 15 Finally, the same system was implemented in commercial equipment, as Huawei mobile, capable of ranking and choosing well-done images. Within a year from this breaking point in assessment art, a mobile company Huawei has initiated the first international photo contest judged by a machine. Eliminating curators often criticised for their subjectivity, this idea was spectacular. In an era of digital humanities, new aids are developed for image processing but also evaluation. 14

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trying to explain Art to a being coming to Earth out of space. De Duve raises a few questions there: what is Art, what Art should be, and which type of Art you like and dislike—basing his argument on a famous Joseph Beuys’ performance, How to Explain Art to a Dead Hare? (1965), in which the famous artist walked through the gallery space with a dead animal, explaining the essence of Art, de Duve makes a step further in claiming Art is what is defined within the context of Art. After the dead hare or de Duve’s alien, it has become essential to explain Art to artificial intelligence in the recent decade. To know how to frame the problem—an art to artificial intelligence, we should be taking a step back into history and see what art criticism was. To analyse this shift, I will use a photography classic, Migrant Mother, by a famous photographer Dorothea Lange (1895–1965), from 1936. Using various analysis systems and comparing them to those made by a machine, I will perform the analysis that might be seen as a reverse test. I will complete the classic qualitative study in most areas of research mentioned in the overview of art historical standard and its reformed methods, meaning both qualitative and quantitative ones, also reflecting onto modal argument of the definition of Art within its context. My goal would be to trace overlaps and inconsistencies.

AI and Migrant Mother The Migrant Mother image depicts a woman subtly touching her head, with three children, two of whom are standing on each side, while the smallest one is sleeping in her arms. They’ frame’ their mother’s image, which children somehow surround and frame as an aura that brings additional meaning to the portrait. The mother’s face itself has a mixed expression of emotions; it slides somewhere between the tension of expectation and a specific worry inscribed in her facial lines and wrinkles. Her eyes gaze outside of the image frame, in the area which we cannot see. Not only mothers but also children look in the same direction. The person in the image was later identified as Florence Thompson. She was recorded nearby the camp Niporno in California during the times known as the Great Depression, which caught the United States after the Great Recession. According to historical documents, she was a seasonal worker in the fields of beans (Curtis, 1986). By taking this image, Florence was only 32 years old, although she looks much older in the image. The reason for her more aged look might be that she already gave birth to seven children while hardly working on plantations by that age. The image was created by Dorotea Lange, who was working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The FSA was a government project that was supposed to record images of rural areas in the United States, documenting problems to be solved by a New Deal politics proposed by American President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. Although the editor Walker Evans has carefully chosen this image from the set of six and reframed it, he also intervened in it by retouching it.

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In addition to picturing a precise person and her socioeconomic position, the Migrant mother was often analysed as an iconographic settlement resembling Virgin Mary with two kids, known as Alba Madonna (a frequent motif exercised by Renaissance painter Raphael). The other reading also generalises the photographic image into more social reading. Therefore, for example, Gillian Rose writes, “Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’—can come to stand in for larger collectivities and events which are not depicted [. . .]. Therefore, it speaks simultaneously to social generality—you appear as an unidentified one—and to unique individuality—it is you, a particular someone, and no other, in that place and at that time” (Rose, 2012, p. 180). The image was often reproduced within its original context, yet it also changed other contexts from which it gained meanings within time. For example, specific importance was attached to the image once it was exhibited as a part of the travelling exhibition Family of Man (1955), organised and curated by another famous American photographer, Alfred Steichen. This exhibition which was structured around the image of a typical white patriarchic family included a Migrant Mother as one of its variants. Yet, displaying no father figure in the picture, the image in this context appeared paradoxical, showing a partial family. In addition to its differently organised Family, in the exhibition of Family of man, the image of Migrant mother was also contextualised in the sub-theme hunger, which was also present in Kanaga and Joan Miller (Hurm et al., 2018). Thus, the image of a Migrant Mother can be analysed in the iconographic, feminist, discursive, or political context and the social function of art. Some of these qualities can be detected indeed by AI too. Therefore, the Everypixel Aesthetics Test system identifies some of these elements of the image. It tags the image with the following concepts: people, black and white, women, love, togetherness, adult, females, outdoors, Caucasian ethnicity, embracing, bonding, senior adult, lifestyles, portrait, affectionate, smiling, men, males, couple-relationship, heterosexual couple. Thus, it marks its iconographic, feminist, political, and social components well. Yet, in addition to tagging, the system also ranks the image, giving it only 12% of the possibility to be—“awesome”. Although being “awesome” is not a quality acknowledged by art history and art criticism, this type of qualitative evaluation is specific for contemporary online salons. It serves the ranking of art, and it has practical purposes. AI here says on the kinds of image modern culture prefers— ideas that are not depressive, overexposed, colourful, and with faces orientated with their gaze directly looking into the camera (or the mobile phone). Its claims are based on a simple induction of likes onto similar images, closely cropped, underexposed, with some protagonists turning their backs onto the cameraman. But would those preferences prevail in the visibility of the art in the future if AI decided on what is “awesome” and what is not? Again, these questions are answered by de Duve, who claims that art is not what is seen as art but what is institutionalised as such. That would mean that most “artworks” produced by AI would be acknowledged as art as soon as they enter the institutional context. This question is already answered by recent attempts to use AI to select art pieces by an institution.

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AI Curators In 2019 Austrian activist collective Ubermorgen, in collaboration with digital humanist Leonardo Impett and curator Joasia Krysa, announced the participation in the prestigious manifestation Whitney Biennale to be curated by a machine. Their proposal, “The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine”, proposed a famous biennale curated not by some prestigious curator, but by artificial intelligence.16 A proposition for an intelligent system capable of curating was released as a wide call for individual contributions with information on similar manifestations that would be used as a training dataset for a machine yet to be built. Today, Ubermorgen released the version of the biennale made by machine, which works on a machine learning process named b3(NSCAM), which trained the dataset from past editions of the Liverpool Biennale itself Whitney Museum. The system itself is not qualified to work with images, but rather texts and concepts are floating between various artist statements, curatorial ideas, press releases, and critical writing pieces. Machine findings are made interactive on the project’s page featuring a dynamic flash interface. The system is represented in an active cloud, designed in a monochrome spiral animation with small clickable wheels. Clicking on any of these small wheels transforms the background into another animation, activates a random musical score from Tictoc, and proposes another concept for a biennale, rewriting the curatorial statement and inviting artists to participate. Besides Ubermorgen’s project, the 10th Bucharest Biennale for Contemporary Art (BB10), scheduled for 2022, organised by Razvan Ion from Pavilion journal for politics and culture, is also announced to be curated by artificial intelligence.17 The intelligence running the BB10 will be Jarvis’s AI curator, after AI from Iron Man comix and movies. Spinnwerk Vienna creates Jarvis, training it on the set made out of curatorial education programmes run by different universities, museums, and galleries, mining the exhibition’s structure. After describing the exhibition concepts, Jarvis will point to the artwork that satisfies the criteria mentioned, thus selecting pieces. The BB10 is planned as a VR show, and Jarvis will appear as a hologram activated by text or voice. Contrary to Next Biennale, artists proposed are not invented by the machine, but they exist in reality. But what makes Ubermorgen and BB10 project quite relates is they are both trained within a closed and limited set of definitions of what art should be, predefined by its institutions as biennials, catalogues, and programmes.18 Projects such as Ubermorgen’s Next Biennale and Jarvis by BB10 already produced several spectacular titles as “Will A.I. Remake the Art Business” cover 16 Ubermorgen, Leonardo Impett, and Joasia Krysa, “The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine A proposition for an intelligent system capable of curating otherwise” opened the uploading page at The Next Biennale. https://data.biennial.ai/. 17 Ubermorgen The Next Biennale will be Curated by a Machine. https://whitney.org/exhibitions/ the-next-biennial. 18 Whitney Biennale. The Next Biennial. https://whitney.org/exhibitions/the-next-biennial.

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by Artnet News. Yet, such projects criticise the idea of the production of art, as they do criticise art history as a discipline, claiming that art can be analysed, thought, and judged by neutral criteria and therefore can also be programmed. Moreover, as the set is trained on existing manifestations, artworks represented would be those that are/were already shown at exhibitions. That would mean that after a while, new collections would be repeating the same content, as there is no way a new one will come in, which contradicts the innovative and revolutionary, if you like, aspect of culture and arts.

Conclusion While the production of photography makes the automation process of selecting photographs a necessity, at the current stage of the development of rating and ranking machines, which might be implemented in art, is still far from being satisfactory. Despite its great power to recognise the topos and themes of individual artwork, as Everypixel Aesthetics Test does by recognising many elements of the image, or as Ubermorgen Next biennale does by identifying crucial concepts, the system still fails including something fundamentally new, but also recognising what is established. The statistical averageness does not recognise the uniqueness of art. It can hardly access the quality of what we once have seen as unique aesthetic or historical artefacts. Thus, in the future, such tools should include all types of specific points of art critical analysis to define how humans name art, outside of the social definition of the dataset or the institutional definition of art.

References Bal, M., & Bryson, N. (1991). Semitics and art history. The Art Bulletin, 73(2(Jun)), 174–208. Curtis, J. C. (1986). Dorothea lange, migrant mother, and the culture of the great depression. Winterthur Portfolio, 21(1), 1–20. Danto, A. C. (1996). From aesthetics to art criticism and back. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 54(2), 105–115. Duve, D. (1993). Kant after duchamp. MIT Press. Eliens, A. (1988). Computational art. Leonardo, 1, 21–25. Elkins, J. (2009). What happened to art criticism? Prickly Paradigm Press. Elkins, J., & Newman, M. (2005). The state of art criticism. Routledge. Elton, M. (1995). Artificial creativity: Enculturing computers. Leonardo, 28(3), 207–213. Foucault, M. (1969). Archaeology of knowledge and discourse on language. Pantheon Books. Frank, S. J. (2020). Salient slices: Improved neural network training and performance with image entropy. Neural Computation, 32, 1222–1237. Franke, H. W. (1971). Computers and visual art. Leonardo, 4(4), 331–338. Hauser, A. (1999). The social history of art. Psychology Press. Hurm, G., Reitz, A., & Zamir, S. (2018). Family of man. I.B. Tauris.

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Manovich, L. (2022). AI and myths of creativity. Artificial aesthetics: A critical guide to AI, media and design. Retrieved June 13, 2022, from http://manovich.net/content/04-projects/165artificial-aesthetics/artificial_aesthetics.chapter_4.pdf Romero, J., & Machado, P. (2008). The art of artificial evolution a handbook on evolutionary art and music. Springer. Romero, J., & Machado, P. (2021). Artificial intelligence and the arts: Computational creativity, artistic behavior, and tools for creatives. Springer. Rose, G. (2012). Visuality/materiality: Images, objects and practices. Ashgate. Steven, F. J., & Andrea, F. M. (2020). Analysis of Dutch Master paintings with convolutional neural networks. Retrieved from https://paperswithcode.com/paper/rembrandts-and-robotsusing-neural-networks van de Wetering, E. (2017). Rembrandt’s paintings. Springer. Wang, P. (2019). This person does not exist. Retrieved from https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ Whitelaw, M. (2004). Metacreation: Art and artificial life. MIT Press. Zylinska, J. (2020). AI art: Machine visions and warped dreams. Open Humanities Press.

Ana Peraica, PhD, is currently Visiting Professor at Danube University. She graduated in art history and philosophy at the University of Zagreb, continued with PhD studies at ASCA, University of Amsterdam and was awarded PhD in aesthetics of photography from University of Rijeka. She recently authored The Age of Total Images (Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2019), Fotografija kao dokaz (Multimedijalni Institut, Zagreb, 2018) and her often cited Culture of the Selfie (Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2017). She also published chapters for readers with MIT Press, Palgrave, Routledge and other academic publishers. Peraica teaches as an external faculty member at Danube University near Vienna, Austria. She was recently a visiting lecturer at Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. She regularly contributes to conferences and serials of conferences as Videovortex and Media Art Histories, but also CEI meeting of curators held at each opening of Venice Biannual. Email: [email protected]; [email protected]

Chapter 8

Van Gogh’s Universe in the Crossways of Audiovisual Arts and Digital Technology: A Comparative Case Study from an Intermedial Perspective Fernando Valcheff-Garcia Abstract This chapter utilises a comparative intermedial perspective to examine a corpus of three artistic objects which reimagine Vincent van Gogh’s life and work: the film Loving Vincent (2017), written and directed by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, the immersive experience Van Gogh, La nuit étoilée (2019), created by Gianfranco Iannuzzi, Renato Gatto, Massimiliano Siccardi, and Luca Longobardi, and the virtual reality environment The Night Cafe: a VR Tribute to Vincent Van Gogh (2015), designed by Mac Cauley. The transcultural and interartistic nature of these works, coming from diverse geographical regions and drawing from multiple aesthetic traditions, calls for an exploration of their connections and contribution to Van Gogh’s Universe. After presenting these objects' key characteristics and the framework utilised for the inquiry, the chapter critically addresses these artworks’ material aspects, ranging from their technical features to their interweaving artistic languages. I first analyse their formal configuration focusing on technological devices, physical components, and digital features. Afterwards, I reflect on the role of visual, sonorous, and verbal materiality, as well as the intertwinement of painting, music, and poetry in connection to the Dutch artist’s pictorial and epistolary production. Overall, I underline the importance of these projects’ innovative nature as well as their defiance of generic boundaries and conventional categories in an effort to reassess and expand our understanding of Van Gogh’s artistic legacy in the context of twenty-first-century Western cultural production. Keywords Audiovisual arts · Cinematographic pinturisation · Digital technology · Immersive experience · Interartistic · Intermediality · Loving Vincent · Materiality · The night cafe: a VR tribute to Vincent Van Gogh · Van Gogh, La nuit étoilée · Van Gogh’s letters · Vincent Van Gogh · Virtual reality environment The original verison of the chapter has been revised. A correction to the chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9209-4_13 F. Valcheff-Garcia (✉) Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023, corrected publication 2024 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Sight as Site in the Digital Age, Digital Culture and Humanities 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9209-4_8

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Introduction: On/Gogh/ing Trends in Contemporary Artistic Production Vincent Van Gogh (Zundert, 1853–Auvers-sur-Oise, 1890) has been subject to numerous cultural explorations in line with the growing interest his life and work have elicited during the past century (Heinich, 1996).1 While the last decades abounded in artistic products that revisit his work, his ideas and perspectives on art—extensively manifested in the correspondence with his brother Theo—as well as his biographical vicissitudes,2 more recent expressions have capitalised on the availability of new technological tools to diversify said landscape. This study, drawing from my Erasmus Mundus Masters in Crossways in Cultural Narratives dissertation,3 focuses on such contemporary phenomenon through the analysis of three works from diverse artistic and cultural backgrounds across the second decade of the twenty-first century. The first object is the film Loving Vincent (2017), a Polish-British co-production (BreakThru/Trademark Films) written and directed by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman (BreakThru/Trademark Films) presented as the first feature film in the history of cinema to be made entirely with oil paintings. Secondly, I address the recent proliferation of multisensory installations/immersive experiences based on the painter through the analysis of Van Gogh, La nuit étoilée [Van Gogh, Starry Night] (2019), created by Gianfranco Iannuzzi, Renato Gatto and Massimiliano Siccardi with the musical collaboration of Luca Longobardi and produced by Culturespaces for Atelier des Lumiéres (Paris, France).4 Finally, I 1

In her anthropological study about the process of glorification and mystification of Van Gogh, Heinich points out that “around the beginning of the 1920s, three decades after his death, van Gogh became established for good as a major figure in the international art market, in the eyes of collectors, among painters (who recognized him as a pioneer of modern painting), and for the educated public, who had by then become familiar with the most dramatic themes of his biography” (p. 28). 2 “Since the third generation after his death, van Gogh has gradually been integrated into popular culture in its various forms. Today, his integration is greater than ever before. His popularity has been generated and demonstrated by a profusion of best-selling biographies, films (. . .), theatrical productions, ballets, operas, songs, advertisements, and images of all kinds—copies and pastiches, posters, postcards, T-shirts, and telephone calling-cards bearing the likeness of the most famous painter of self-portraits” (Heinich, p. 99). 3 “La expansión del Universo Van Gogh (UVG) en literatura, artes audiovisuales y tecnologías digitales: una propuesta en el marco de los estudios intermediales comparados”. Master Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Crossways in Cultural Narratives at the Universities of St Andrews, Santiago de Compostela and NOVA de Lisboa (2021). 4 In the context of a recent proliferation of the format both in Europe and the United States (and, more recently, in Latin America), I chose to focus on the one that operated in Paris between 2019 and 2020 following a tripartite criteria: (1) the fact that it is a “work of author”, following the idea that “it was the voice of the artist in particular –what he or she was trying to say– that he [Van Gogh] cared about the most” (Veldhorst, p. 87); (2) its “stationary” and “unique” nature, which others do not share as long as they have been conceived as itinerant corporate and serialised exhibits which

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explore The Night Cafe: a VR Tribute to Vincent Van Gogh (2015), a virtual reality environment designed by Mac Cauley for Borrowed Light Studios described on its official website as a unique digital experience in which the user can explore Van Gogh’s world first hand (Fig. 8.1).5 Loving Vincent blends historical and fictional characters and events to reimagine Van Gogh’s last days of life. Set in France, in the summer of 1891, it follows Armand Roulin’s quest after his father, the postman Joseph Roulin, asks him to deliver Vincent’s last letter to his brother Theo, embarking Armand on a journey to unravel the circumstances surrounding the painter’s death. Van Gogh, La nuit étoilée explores different periods of the artist’s life through a pictorial and musical experience organised around ten sequences following thematic and geographic criteria: 1. Prologue; 2. The Provencal light; 3. The early works; 4. La nature; 5. The period in Paris; 6. Arles; 7. Olive trees and Cypresses; 8. Saint-Rémy; 9. The plaine d’Auvers; 10. Epilogue (Atelier des Lumieres, 2019, pp. 10–17). The Night Cafe places users virtually in a free walking experience around Van Gogh’s famous painting Café de la Gare (1888) where the presence of extra rooms, easter eggs, and fragments of “paintings within the painting” help creating changing narratives connected to each visitor's experience and their decision on how to tour the place BBC News (2015). While my dissertation focused on the material, narrative and receptive/interactive dimensions of these works, here I introduce the first aspect utilising a comparative critical perspective. I frame this inquiry as (a) international and intercultural, as it implies geographical and cultural crossways; (b) interdisciplinary, as it draws from several fields including literary studies, cinema, semiotics, art history, media, and game studies, among others; (c) interartistic, to the extent that each object in its way embodies the mixing of pictorial arts, music, and poetry; and (d) intermedial, as the concurrence of audiovisual arts and digital technologies catalyses new modes of creating and experiencing. I argue that these works overcome the mere thematic or referential evocation of Van Gogh by putting into practice the painter’s aesthetic experimentation, artistic ideals, and creative project, therefore reappropriating his cosmovision and legacy and contributing to the transmedia, transartistic, and transcultural expansion of his Universe. Overall, this study is grounded in a theoretical framework that mainly draws from two models: that of Lars Ellestrom (“A Model”) based on the notion of multimodality (Elleström, 2010, pp. 13–14); and that of Antonio Gil González and

primarily respond to commercial interests; (3) the fact that it is no longer operating, which makes it possible to conceive it as a more approachable and finished object. In this sense, a closer look at the commercial aspect surrounding contemporary cultural products based on Van Gogh’s art has yet to be developed. 5 The comparative intermedial perspective allows me to relate these projects without necessarily following the conventional “time of production” or “date of release” criteria. In line with this logic, I present the corpus shifting the focus from chronological linearity to technological progression paying specific attention to the immersive and interactive parameters and their degree of influence in the artworks. While I fully develop this aspect in my dissertation, here I present it linked to the material dimension of the objects in particular.

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Fig. 8.1 Editorial and promotional material of the works integrating the corpus (Kobiela and Welchman; Iannuzzi et. al. (2019); Cauley (2015a))

Javier Pardo (Intermedialidad), which recovers the theoretical basis of Gerard Genette and Irina Rajewsky to propose “a general and categorial model capable of serving as a framework”6 (p. 14) for specific studies on intermediality through the notions of multimediality, remediality, and transmediality. Their discussions are also enriched here by Natascha Veldhorst’s work (Van Gogh and Music) whose

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All references to this work, originally in Spanish, have been translated to English by the chapter’s author.

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interdisciplinary approach to Van Gogh provides significant insights to explore the Dutch artist’s Universe. The intermedial nature of the three artworks raises questions about how Van Gogh’s life path and artistic production have been transferred and resignified in contemporary cultural production; in particular, how the transposition of his pictoric and literary work (his paintings and correspondence), as well as his biographical journey, shape their materiality. With these issues in mind, I first analyse the formal configuration of the three objects focusing on technological devices, physical components, and digital features. Afterwards, I reflect on the role of verbal, visual, and sonorous materiality, as well as the intertwinement of painting, music, and poetry in them. In all cases, I underline the importance of the experimental and innovative nature of these objects that defy generic boundaries and imposed categories opening and expanding our understanding of Van Gogh’s art. Overall, this study aims to fill a gap in critical studies of contemporary artistic reappropriations of Van Gogh’s life and work. It poses a relevant inquiry on current and scarcely explored issues by proposing a dialogue between previously unrelated works utilising an interdisciplinary and interartistic approach. My contribution seeks to highlight the productive potential of comparative intermedial studies for establishing critical connections that overcome positivist, genealogist, and ahistorical readings (Villanueva, 1994) by stimulating the production of transcultural critical relations between seemingly distant–or, at first glance, only thematically related–objects.

Technical and Technological Features: Mediums, Devices, and Artefacts Elleström pays special attention to the materiality of intermedial relations. The author argues that “basic and qualified media are abstract categories that help us understand how media types are formed by very different sorts of qualities, whereas technical media are the very tangible devices needed to materialize instances of media types” (Elleström, p. 12). Although he notes that the distinction between basic and qualified media is not absolute, Elleström explains that “if we define ‘text’ as any conventional sign-system, media such as ‘auditory text’, ‘tactile text’, ‘still image’, ‘moving image’, ‘iconic body performance’ and ‘organized nonverbal sound’ would be examples of what can be seen as basic media” (Elleström, p. 27; emphasis added). Likewise, he argues that art forms broadly accepted as such are encompassed within the category of qualified media. As for the notion of technical medium, the author states that it is “any object, physical phenomenon or body that mediates, in the sense that it ‘realizes’ and ‘displays’ basic and qualified media” (Elleström, p. 30), that is, the physical materialisation of qualities that would otherwise be nothing more than abstract concepts. My analysis draws from these three categories paying attention to their combinations and intersections to analyse the corpus under the premise that

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“qualified, basic and technical media are not three separate types of media. Instead, they are three complementary, theoretical aspects of what constitutes media and mediality” (Elleström, p. 12). Loving Vincent combines the traditional technique of hand-painting with the use of digital technology, resulting in the first feature film entirely made out of oil paintings. Production of the film took around 6 years. The process, which involved 125 plastic artists from more than 20 countries and around 3000 L of paint to create over 65,000 handcrafted frames, inaugurated a new genre full of artistic and technical challenges which I refer to as cinematographic pinturisation. As described on the film’s official website, the production process started with the outline of concept art designed by Kobiela, which was utilised as base material by a team of painters who, over 1 year, created paintings emulating Van Gogh’s style. The result of this work, along with Kobiela’s storyboard and the designs obtained through computerised animation, formed the basis on which live shots were planned. Actors performed their scenes on constructed sets designed to evoke Van Gogh’s canvases and against green screens complemented by an on-set, live view system of digitally composited paintings. The resulting material was later refined with special effects and used as a reference for creating each of the film’s hand-painted frames that shaped the final product through a technique called paint-on-glass animation.7 In sum, this motion picture transfers the language of painting to the cinematographic medium illustrating a case of transmedia multimediality understood as “the direct co-presence of various media within the same text or medium” (Gil González and Pardo, pp. 23–24), that is, the coexistence of multiple media as the backbone of the cinematic project as a whole. Van Gogh, La nuit étoilée was part of a series of “monumental digital exhibitions that immerse visitors in the pictorial world of the greatest artists” (Atelier, p. 4). This experience was set in the Atelier des Lumiéres, a restored 19th century factory converted into a digital art centre that has been “using the digital revolution to promote artistic creativity” (Atelier, p. 4). The space featured technology known as AMIEX® (Art & Music Immersive Experience) which included 140 laser video projectors, a spatialised sound system distributed across 50 speakers, and a projection space covering an area of 3300 m2 with walls up to 10 m high. The premise of this multimedia exhibition was to create a surrounding environment in a room filled with digital remediations of Van Gogh’s paintings and some of his letters. These images, which covered the ceilings, the walls, and the floor, were complemented by ambient music of various cultural backgrounds, epochs, and styles. The installation was also enhanced by two additional tools. The first one, “a new educational device inside the tank located in the centre of the Atelier: a selection of Van Gogh’s famous paintings (. . .) represented in their entirety and accompanied by commentaries about

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For a thorough explanation of the technique of oil paintings on glass sheets, see (Van Laerhoven et. al. (2011) The monumentality of the whole process could be summarised by a brief statement taken from a BBC report which aired a year before the film premiered: “Sarah Wimperis has painted more than 800 frames. That’s just 35 s of film” (BBC News, 2016, How do you paint 31–39s).

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Fig. 8.2 Starry Night (1889) takes over the exhibition space. At the centre, the area dedicated to the digital remediation of paintings (Culturespaces)

his oeuvre and the museum in which it is exhibited” (Atelier, p. 9). The second one, a mobile phone application, Masterpieces on Focus, which allowed users to “expand the experience” by providing information, anecdotes, and curiosities linked to the artist and his work. Therefore, the 360° thematic itinerary was complemented by the digital reproduction of actual paintings (Fig. 8.2) as well as information available through the app.8 The Night Cafe is a virtual environment that recreates Van Gogh’s Le Café de nuit (1888). Evoking its technique and aesthetics, and simulating its spaces, this virtual reality experience also expands them creatively, covering areas of the café that are not part of the original painting and incorporating elements and remediations of other works by the Deutsch artist. This process started out with hand-drawn threedimensional sketches that were later incorporated into a design software allowing the creator to model the objects and provide them with a visual aspect that emulated Van Gogh’s signature style: “In order to achieve the painterly look, especially one as unique as Van Gogh’s, each asset would have to be carefully digitally handcrafted” (Cauley, 2015b, “The Making”). Although its main matter consists of programming codes, or “the byte of multimedia information and computer language” (Gil González and Pardo, 2018, p. 18), this experience can only be accessed through physical hardware. Following Gil González’s proposal, the user is confronted with “the overlap of a layer of digital information over our real-world perception” (p. 307). Therefore, an augmented parameter can be identified when considering, in a broad semiotic sense, the original painting Le Café de nuit as “printed text”— remediated in digital format—and the VR headset as the device that enables the user

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In other Van Gogh exhibitions, immersive multimedia additions can also be found, including auricular walks, decorations set according to the painter’s canvases, interactive artistic activities, fictional dramatic recreations, virtual reality experiences and participation through digital technology (e.g., motion capture or touch screens that allow access to information about Van Gogh life as well as his original works).

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Fig. 8.3 View of the café’s main room + HTC Vive and Oculus systems

to access its recreation (Fig. 8.3). Thus, the virtual component depends on a physical technological device for its manifestation that is available under two formats: Google’s HTC Vive and Meta’s Oculus VR systems. Although each of these presents specific features both work under the same principle and toward the same goal: the creation of a simulated experience primarily based on Van Gogh’s art. From a technical perspective, the three works are innovative objects that make use of experimental materials and techniques. The practice of incorporating painting as filmmaking matter,9 reconfiguring exhibition spaces through multimedia elements, and using virtuality for the aesthetic exploration of pictorial arts, share one thing in common: they creatively exceed the restricted confines of a canvas expanding the understanding of -and access to- Van Gogh’s work. Furthermore, these technical advances, influenced by the Dutch painter’s cosmovision, embrace the transgression of disciplinary boundaries by fostering productive dialogues between artistic languages.

An Interartistic Vocation: Painting, Music, and Poetry as Intermedial Expressions Van Gogh’s search for an abstract ideal was grounded on the conceptual and practical exploration of various artistic languages. This mindset was shared with other painters such as Gauguin, who, in one of his letters to Van Gogh, claimed that “forms and colours brought into harmonies create a form of poetry in themselves” (Gauguin, 1888, “Letter 675”). This interartistic outlook echoes the influence that Richard Wagner’s contemporaneously popular notion of “total work of art” had on 9

Something similar happens with the incorporation of the painter’s correspondence, which implies not only the transposition to various artistic languages of the textual subject matter based on an epistolary discourse imbued with aesthetic and biographical meaning, but also its assimilation as a physical device associated with a specific calligraphy, a type of paper, closing formulas, and even his signature.

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Van Gogh’s artistic quest.10 Consequently, the three works presented here share Van Gogh’s will for challenging generic boundaries and conventions through innovative practices. They can, therefore, be linked to Van Gogh’s artistic sensibility as their quests coincide with his in the sense that “Van Gogh was basically open to all arts, and his sensory ‘impressionability’ therefore applied to his experience of all art forms” (Veldhorst, 2018, p. 87). Pictorial, poetic and musical languages are profoundly interconnected throughout Loving Vincent, Van Gogh, La nuit etoilée¸ and The Night Cafe, weaving an experience that reflects how “to Van Gogh’s mind, paintings possessed voices, words evoked colours, and colours conjured sounds” (Veldhorst, p. 90). This dialogical principle is expressed through a series of strategies that aim to achieve a semiotic and sensory practice marked by plurality in line with the idea that “art, for him, (. . .) became an all-embracing, virtually synesthetic experience” (Veldhorst, p. 90). Drawing on the complementary and interdependent function of different artistic languages as conceived by Van Gogh, this section of the chapter is structured around three key quotations from the Dutch painter’s correspondence that highlight the specific weight of painting, music, and poetry for his cosmovision. As it will become clear, this compartmentalisation is only methodological: whenever the focus is placed on one of these aspects, the other two end up being inevitably involved as well. I’d like to paint men or women with that je ne sais quoi of the eternal, (. . .) which we try to achieve (. . .) through the vibrancy of our colorations (Van Gogh, 1888c, “Letter 673”)

Van Gogh’s painting went through acute modifications over the years. Although a thorough examination of his style and technique exceeds the scope of this study, it is important to highlight one of the most radical changes that took place during the last years of his life, especially after arriving in Paris in February 1886. Van Gogh’s Dutch period (1881–1885)—commonly known as the “dark period” because of the obscure tones of his palette—gave way to much brighter colours due to the influence of the French Impressionists and the Ukiyo-e art (which translates as “picture of the floating world”), a genre of colourful Japanese visual art consisting of woodblock prints and paintings which was very popular at the time. Along with Georges Seurat’s studies of Chevreul’s Law of Simultaneous Contrast of Colours (1839),11 these influences profoundly affected Van Gogh’s work, setting the ground for the most prolific period of his life. From that moment on, Van Gogh’s “intense perception of reality” and “sensitivity to sensory impressions” (Veldhorst, p. 82) are expressed through a heterogeneous use of the palette that conveys “a belief in colour

10 As Veldhorst observes, “when Van Gogh arrived in the city, the whole of culturally minded Paris was in thrall to this German composer. With his trail-blazing music and revolutionary ideas, Wagner roamed around Europe like a god (. . .). Often it was Wagner’s bold artistic views, rather than his music, that inspired them. Wagner’s notion that he could reform not only the arts but the whole society by means of his “Artwork of the Future” appealed greatly to the artists” (p. 41). 11 “When the eye views two colors in close proximity, it adjusts to make them as dissimilar as possible in terms of tonality and hue” (Margulis, 2019, p. X).

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Fig. 8.4 Frame depicting the scene of the film that remediates the painting Wheatfield with Crows (1890)

as an emotional/aesthetic carrier of meaning, almost independent of form and composition” (Brettell, 1999, p. 22). My corpus revolves around many of the above-mentioned aspects through strategies that transpose the aesthetic parameters of Van Gogh’s painting to audiovisual art and digital media. Loving Vincent builds upon different layers of intermediality and processes of media transference. The main transmediation is from pictorial arts to cinematographic language through a replacement of traditional photograms with paintings that recreate Van Gogh’s style and technique (Fig. 8.4). Thus, pictorial art transitions into a different medium when each painting, after being digitised, becomes an individual frame of the film. This operation involves a double process: (1) remediating existing paintings and (2) creating new ones that were not originally executed by Van Gogh but were still necessary for the film’s plot. Said paintings comprise a combination of the coloured scenes depicting Armand’s journey and his inquiry over Van Gogh’s last days as well as the black-and-white flashbacks illustrating the events leading to the painter’s death. In Kobiela’s words, “our initial idea was to bring his paintings to life and to ‘make’ the paintings talk about Vincent. This idea was taken from one of his letters, where he wrote: ‘We cannot speak other than by our paintings’” (Kobiela, 2017). This way, the film does not limit to displaying Van Gogh’s work but aims to reinstate his creative effort, reaffirming and consolidating the value of painting as a means of artistic exploration that allows the viewer to enter Vincent’s world. Similarly, it is worth noting the insistence with which Van Gogh, La nuit étoilée’s promotional materials highlight the way paintings take over the exhibition space and colours saturate the environment that the public is immersed in. The Prologue of the itinerary describes how “the painter’s pictorial technique, with its highly visible and

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Fig. 8.5 Top row: Sunflowers, Van Gogh’s Chair, Coffee Terrace at Night (1888), L’Arlesienne (versions 1888 and 1890) and Self-Portrait (1889). Bottom row: Screenshots of remedialised canvasses in The Night Café

decisive brushstrokes, will be projected onto all the walls” (Atelier, p. 10), connecting the public with Van Gogh’s aesthetics. Likewise, the second sequence of the itinerary, entitled “The provencal light”, deepens this approach by referring to how the “Provençal sun will fill the canvases and the space with its light”, indicating that “the colourful skies of Provence inundate the exhibition space, and wheat fields are set ablaze at sunset”, and inviting to “feel the warmth of the sun, which will gradually invade the entire space, eliminating any human presence” (Atelier, p. 10; emphases added). In the three statements, the marked presence of yellow, one of the painter’s favourite tones, stands out. Moreover, these fragments try to evoke an all-encompassing synesthetic experience in which even the subjects’ presence is displaced by the overwhelming presence of colour. Thus, the format of the moving image allows the public not only to observe Van Gogh’s technique in detail but to access the environments and landscapes of his paintings while perceiving and interpreting his work in light of new connections. The Night Cafe also intensifies the immersive parameter by expanding Van Gogh’s reference universe outlined in the original painting. This operation is prompted by visually transcending the physical edges of the canvas but also through the profuse presence of other paintings within the VR environment (Fig. 8.5). While wandering in the café, users can run into one of the versions of Van Gogh’s Chair (1888) and his Sunflowers (1888). When looking out the window, a very similar sky to that of Café Terrace at Night (Place du forum) (1888) can be contemplated, while in the main room there are two Non-Player Characters (NPC) or visual characters (Gil González, 2020, p. 312) that evoke different versions of L’Arlesienne (Portrait of Madame Giroux) (1888 and 1890) and the painter himself in the fashion of his last Self-Portrait (1889). In his blog, the creator observes how he worked with the digital modelling of each object that is part of the VR trying to “give it some flow and mood similar to the way it appears in the painting” (Cauley, “The Making”). These notions of flow and mood

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are in line with the search for a particular texture12 inspired by artist Alexa Meade’s work and carried out entirely digitally.13 As in the two previous examples, the intermedial processes operating within this artwork go beyond a mere recuperation of Van Gogh’s style, presenting a creative contribution to his legacy that reimagines and expands his Universe through digital technology. In a painting I would like to say something consoling, like a piece of music (Van Gogh, “Letter 673”).

Veldhorst argues that music shaped Van Gogh’s understanding of painting and his ideals were closely connected to a form of “musical painting” which aimed to transcend the surface of the canvas. This exploration, drawing primarily from a metaphoric and abstract principle, was also based on a concrete application as he “sought to translate into painting the deeper truth that music could express by focusing more on pictorial means (colours, lines, forms) and less on the subject portrayed” (Veldhorst, p. 16). In this sense, Van Gogh’s search for transcendence, his drive to reach what lies beyond the apparent, was achieved through elements, techniques and conceptual instruments of music. Furthermore, according to Veldhorst, “he harboured the ambition to produce acoustic effects in his work” (p. 91) as well as “the vibration and resonance of coloured forms” (p. 93), a synaesthetic property that can be found in the three works analysed in this chapter. Loving Vincent’s soundtrack, composed by Clint Mansell, consists of 12 instrumental and one acoustic song that share their titles with some of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings.14 During an interview conducted by Daniel Schweiger in 2017, Mansell notes equivalences between his profession and Van Gogh’s, as well as a shared quest for instilling a mobilising effect in people through art. Moreover, some of the remarks made during this exchange point directly to the deep connection between Mansell’s score and Van Gogh’s painting: [DS]—Did you feel like a painter while scoring the film? [CM]—Yes, to some degree (. . .). Whatever medium you take, it doesn’t really matter, you know? (. . .)—A painter adds and adds and subtracts—very much what I do with music. [. . .] 12 “I tried to recreate the look of a brush used with oil paints using various alphas as my brush setting. For the most part I just painted in a very traditional way without using any fancy tricks to achieve the look” (Cauley, “The Making”). 13 “She was applying layers of painted color on top of people and objects and lighting them in ways that she could make photographs that appeared as if they were paintings. It was impressive what she could do without any fancy shades or post processing, just paint on 3d objects with the right lighting” (Cauley “The Making”). 14 The complete playlist includes: 1. The Night Café; 2. The Yellow House; 3. At Eternity’s Gate; 4. Portrait of Armand Roulin; 5. Marguerite Gachet at The Piano; 6. Still Life With Glass Of Absinthe & A Carafe; 7. The Painter On His Way To Work On The Road To Tarascon; 8. Five Sunflowers In A Vase; 9. Wheatfield With Crows; 10. Thatched Roofs In Chaponval; 11. Blossoming Chestnut Trees; 12. The Sower With Setting Sun; 13. Starry Night Over The Rhone. A reprised version of Don McLean’s Starry Starry Night interpreted by Lianne La Havas completes the soundtrack available on Spotify.

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Fig. 8.6 Sequence of frames remediating Starry Night (1889)

[DS]—Your scores have always been hypnotic, very mesmerising. We feel lost in them, the same way we would in becoming absorbed by Vincent’s work. [CM]—I want to be transported as viewer, and I try to do the same with my scores (. . .) (Mansell, 2017).

Beyond these parallels, the film’s soundtrack, “very classical, with strings, wind instruments, piano and harp, reserving a specifically large role for violin” (Van Nimwegen, 2018, p. 10), complements and supports it’s own narrative structure by providing plot information and helping to identify transitions between the flashbacks and the present. Van Nimwegen illustrates this musical aspect within a scene recounting Van Gogh’s death: “while Adeline Ravoux speaks the words ‘something was very wrong,’ the viewer sees Vincent approaching, his hands pressed to his stomach—and the cellos playing the staccato rhythmic pattern increase in volume to join the first melody, adding a dark, foreboding element” (p. 15). Similarly, sound effects contribute to the building of realistic surroundings, like those accompanying the remediation of Van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889) in the opening credits. In this case, the instrumental sounds, in rhythmic syntony with the flowing movement of the clouds and the stars, provide greater substance and an extra layer of meaning to the ambience of the original canvas (Fig. 8.6). Overall, the congruent dialogue between musical/sonorous elements and the cinematographic display of paintings expresses Van Gogh’s deeply (multi) sensorial conception of art. Van Gogh, La nuit étoilée’s score alternates “classical and contemporary pieces, concerts and symphonies, and jazz and pop music—echoing the artist’s life—with darker phases and more positive phases, as is evident in his works” (Atelier, p. 23). Indeed, the exhibition presents a range of compositions—mostly instrumental, as in the case of the film—which go from original pieces and remastering of classical music, including Mozart and Vivaldi, to modern/contemporary popular music, with artists such as Nina Simone, Miles Davis or Janis Joplin.15 As the quote above suggests, the music complements Van Gogh’s vital and artistic phases reflected in

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The complete list:

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his pictorial work. Musical and visual elements are harmoniously connected, as can be seen in the description of the seventh section of the itinerary, where “the trees grow to the rhythm of the music” (Atelier, p. 16). Here, the score is assembled with the painting accompanying the movement imprinted by the projections, something similar to what happened with the painted scenes and the soundtrack and sound effects in Loving Vincent. In the words of artistic director Gianfranco Iannuzzi, “the soundtrack was created at the same time as the scenario” and is conceived as part of the same creative process in so far as the artists “did not set out to create a predefined sequence to music, but rather to produce a unique piece” (Atelier, p. 23). In effect, this idea reflects both Van Gogh's conviction about the intrinsic dialogue between music and painting, and his ideas about the value of invention and authenticity in artistic search: Van Gogh heralds the triumph of originality, in the sense of what is new, and in the sense of what belongs to a person as his or her very own, what is irreducible to anyone else. The greatness of the singular hinges on these two dimensions of originality, this mixture of innovation and personalization (Heinich, p. 30).

These aspects are also present in The Night Cafe, where the diegetic music emanating from a piano located in the main room accompanies the users on their tour of the VR environment. As Veldhorst points out, this instrument was crucial in Van Gogh’s life, both because of the musical talent of his mother, “who played both the piano and the organ very well” (p. 27), as for his father, who was a minister at several parishes where organs were one of the main attractions; but also by Vincent’s own experience taking classes for a short period in the Netherlands. Moreover, Van Gogh’s sisters, and his younger brother Cor, took lessons as well, in line with what Veldhorst describes as a trend of the time: “In the nineteenth century it was customary in middle-class households for girls, in particular, to take piano lessons. The piano conquered the whole of Europe in the course of the century, driving the harp and the guitar from the drawing rooms” (p. 30). In such context, it does not come as a surprise that the piano emerges as a specific thematic reference in Van Gogh’s work. One of his most famous paintings, Marguerite Gachet au piano (1890), features Dr. Gachet’s daughter, with whom Vincent had a close relationship, 1. “Prologue” sequence: Jean-Baptiste Lully, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme LWV 43: Ouverture (1670); Luca Longobardi, White Room. 2. “The Provençal light” sequence: Janis Joplin, Kozmic Blues. 3. “The early works” sequence: Sofia Gubaidulina, String Quartet No. 4; Edvard Grieg: Peer Gynt Op:23, NO 18. Solveigs sang (Solveig’s Song). 4. “Nature” sequence: Bedřich Smetana, Smetana: Má Vlast—2. Vltava. 5. “The period in Paris” sequence: Giacomo Puccini, Gianni Schicchi: O mio babbino caro. 6. “Arles” sequence: Miles Davis, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud; Moses Sumney, Doomed. 7. “Olive trees and cypresses” sequence: Antonio Vivaldi, The Four Seasons, Violin Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, V 315 “Summer”: III. Presto; Luca Longobardi, Mozart Recomposed. 8. “Saint-Rémy” sequence: Nina Simone, Don’t let me be misunderstood. 9. “The Plaine d’Auvers” sequence: Luca Longobardi, Elegie I. 10. “Epilogue” sequence: Johannes Brahms, Piano Concerto No. 2 in B Flat Major, Op. 83; Luca Longobardi, Elegie I (reprise).

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sitting at the piano playing a piece of music. Evoking these influences, the VR experience places a piano man performing Paul Mottram’s Soft as Velvet under the watchful gaze of Van Gogh’s Non-Player Character. This serene melody, that varies its intensity according to the user’s position in the café, can, once again, be directly linked to Van Gogh’s perspective, as he “compared his working methods to those of musicians and composers” (Veldhorst, p. 95) while trying to convey with his art “an emotional impact on viewers and lend them comfort, just as music had been doing for centuries” (p. 127). I don’t know if you’ll understand that one can speak poetry just by arranging colours well” (Van Gogh, 1888d, “Letter 720”)

Since they were first published in 1914, edited by Theo Van Gogh’s wife, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Vincent’s letters “were eagerly seized on as a rich source of information about Van Gogh’s gripping life story and exceptional work, and there was broad recognition of the intrinsic qualities of his writing: the personal tone, evocative style and lively language” (Jansen et. al. n.d., 2009). Because of these aesthetic and literary attributes, Van Gogh’s writing has been frequently regarded as poetry. This art form was one of the painter’s greatest interests, evidenced not only by the frequent references to poems in his correspondence, but also in his understanding of poetry as a form of “universal beauty”— “Poetry surrounds us everywhere” (Van Gogh, 1883, “Letter 330”)—that could be heralded by art: “a bit of sand, sea and sky, are serious subjects and so difficult, but so beautiful too that it’s well worth the trouble of devoting one’s life to depicting the poetry that’s in them” (Van Gogh, 1882, “Letter 259”). Therefore, Van Gogh conceived poetry not only as a genre or a set of rhetorical strategies but, in a broader sense, as an aesthetic channel for expressing emotions and conveying sensitive impressions, a goal he achieved through both writing and painting. Following this argument, Loving Vincent stands out as an ode to the painter and a window into his poetic mindset through concrete artistic decisions such as using 1.37:1 Academy Ratio frames resembling the square shape of Van Gogh’s canvases instead of the standard 16:9 HD film format fitting the size of the cinema screen (Wecel, 2019 27min 14 s–28 min 36 s). The very title of the film, evoking the closing line that Vincent repeated throughout his correspondence—“Your loving (brother), Vincent”—could easily be read as a poem’s line. Indeed, it simultaneously conveys both Van Gogh’s signature and a statement about the film being a heartfelt tribute to the artist, a duplicity that broadly connects with Julia Kristeva’s theory of ambivalence and the idea that “poetic language is a ‘double’ (. . .). Consequently, the notions of definition, determination, the sign ‘=’ and the very concept of sign, (. . .) cannot be applied to poetic language- by definition an infinity of pairings and combinations” (Kristeva, 1980, p. 69). The transfer of poetry to the film is also accomplished through the visual and sonorous remediation of Van Gogh’s correspondence, what Gil González and Pardo would define as “the simulation, the emulated, indirect representation of the depicted hypo-medium’s semiotic” (p. 28). As an example, the film’s closing scene depicts the Roulins immersed in the setting of Van Gogh’s Starry Night (Over the Rhône)

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Fig. 8.7 Scenes from the film illustrating the conversation between the Roulins (Kobiela & Welchman 1h 27 min–28 min)

(1888) holding the artist’s last letter (Fig. 8.7) and giving way to his voice-over reflecting on the firmament: “(. . .) the sight of the stars always makes me dream. Why, I say to myself, should the sparks of light in the firmament be inaccessible to us? Maybe, we can take death to go to a star (. . .)” (Kobiela & Welchman (2017) 1h 27min 40s – 1h 27min 55s).16 This simultaneous display of the epistle in paper and its recitation through Vincent’s voice under a night sky filled with stars– a key thematic element in the letter–renders the notions of beauty and infinite in line with Van Gogh’s artistic ideals, revealing his conception of painting as rooted in poetic language while reinforcing the fulfilment of Kobiela’s goal to “shoot the world the way that Vincent would have seen it” (Kobiela). Van Gogh, La nuit étoilée also explores the poetic dimension of Van Gogh’s writing at the end of “Arles”, the sixth part of the itinerary in which “the walls of the Atelier will darken [and] the correspondence between van Gogh and his brother Théo, illustrated with his sketches, will move across the walls” (Atelier, p. 14). The letters materialised on the screens are taken from the original manuscripts and, in addition to retrieving Van Gogh’s calligraphy, bring to the scene some of his handmade drawings (Fig. 8.8). Here, people can admire peculiarities of the painter’s handwriting, such as the spatial arrangement of lines, crossing-outs, amendments, highlighted terms, and typographical variations, only noticeable in the fascimiles. Moreover, the artistic decision of laying out a contrast between the bright colours of the paintings and the dark hue of the atmosphere after “the walls (. . .) darken” giving way to the correspondence, invites to be read as a poetic manifestation of a visual aesthetic that comprises Van Gogh’s emotional ups and downs.

16 What Vincent’s voice reads is an adaptation of one of his letters. The unabridged excerpt reads as follows: “But the sight of the stars always makes me dream in as simple a way as the black spots on the map, representing towns and villages, make me dream. Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France. Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star” (Van Gogh, 1888b, “Letter 638”).

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Fig. 8.8 Photograph of the letters projected on surfaces (Culturespaces)

In one of his letters, Van Gogh wrote that “there is infinite poetry in the autumn or in a sunset” (Van Gogh, 1886, “Letter 559”), making the poetic condition extensive to the elements of nature rendered by his paintings. He believed that the relation between the external world and art should not be grounded on imitation but should, instead, be considered an act of poetic creation: “Rembrandt could do something else—when he didn’t have to be true in the literal sense, as he did in a portrait— when he could—make poetry—be a poet, that’s to say Creator” (Van Gogh, 1885a, “Letter 534”). Similarly, Van Gogh, La nuit étoilée does not conform to a mere digital reproduction of Van Gogh’s materials; it uses technology to creatively rework them through processes of displacement/transition/movement of images and elements within the space of the Atelier. Thus, the exhibition exceeds the two-dimensional limits of the conventional canvas/page through a surrounding exploration of the paintings/letters from new perspectives, spawning an act of poetic creation in line with Van Gogh’s artistic ideals. In The Night Cafe, poetry is also materialised through correspondence, which in this case is reduced to a single manifestation in the form of an “easter egg”. In effect, users can find a piece of paper containing a quote from Van Gogh’s letters once they reach the café’s basement (Fig. 8.9). Moreover, the aesthetics of the scene itself are a manifestation of poetic features: the style of the paper and its ageing appearance emulating the original letters; a drawing of Van Gogh’s face and a sunflower, which render his work both thematically and technically; and even the surface on which the paper lies, which presents a varied bright palette in line with his colour ideals. In fact, this chromatism is a key notion in the letter fragment itself–taken from one of Van Gogh’s letters sent to Emile Bernard—which states that “there is no blue without yellow and without orange” (Van Gogh, 1888a, “Letter 622”). The sphrase, which could also be read as a line of a poem, illustrates the notion of contrasting palettes as

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Fig. 8.9 Screenshot taken from the VR (EkosVR 2016 5min 49 s)

a metaphor of Van Gogh’s deeply rooted conviction that “COLOUR EXPRESSES SOMETHING IN ITSELF” (Van Gogh, 1885b, “Letter 537”). Reflecting further on this issue in the same letter, Van Gogh states that “the colours follow one another as if of their own accord, and taking a colour as the starting-point I see clearly in my mind’s eye what derives from it, and how one can get life into it” (“Letter 537”). Such ideas about the harmonised contrast or colours and their importance for outlining the je ne sais quoi that Van Gogh intended to render in his paintings can be condensed into a highly poetic notion that was key for the artist: that of “symphonies of colour”. In Veldhorst’s words, “symphony, consonance, orchestration, arrangement: four synonyms for the same painterly ideal—the deeply felt ingenious amalgamation of colours, comparable to the complex orchestral music of Wagner—which brought about tranquillity, harmony and unity in an art work” (p. 139), an observation that brings together the three artistic languages discussed so far.

Final Remarks: Gogh/ing Forward and Beyond The use of a comparative approach focused on tracing common features between Van Gogh’s work and Loving Vincent, Van Gogh, la nuit etoilée, and The Night Cafe allows for a relevant yet scarcely practised analysis that takes as object of study one of the most popular modern artists in the world. Far from being exhaustive, this inquiry laid out a potential path; aone possible approach to a phenomenon in constant expansion that, at the time of writing these words, still shows the potential for an increasing proliferation of creative works both in the field of traditional arts and in the form of cultural objects and practices that, due to recent technological advances, promise to offer new and fascinating artistic experiences.

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Indeed, the three works place capital importance on the notion of experience, both as verb and noun, in connection to corporal perceptions and stimulation of the senses. Although an account of the effects that these works spark in the audience, and vice versa, deserves a more extensive and nuanced analysis that exceeds the scope of the present inquiry, it is worth noting that the material features of these objects ignite different responses. While Loving Vincent offers a highly aesthetic cinematic experience that reshapes our understanding of audiovisual arts, Van Gogh, la nuit etoilée, and The Night Cafe enhance the interactive and immersive components which are core to digital technology through a more participatory and spatialised experience. Even though the three artworks invite the audience to access the world of the painter, they do so through different techniques, material features, and modes of creation that bring Van Gogh’s work to life while offering added value by conveying new meanings. Laying out this scenario can serve as a closing reflection as much as a point of departure for future inquiries in which the critical analysis of technical and material aspects linked to several categories and objects proves to be productive in unravelling the interdisciplinary and transcultural nature of Van Gogh’s Universe. Drawing from bibliographical sources based on an intermedial framework, this chapter examined the transpositions from Vincent van Gogh’s life and work to three different yet closely related artworks, unearthing previously unexplored connections. Furthermore, laying out those links has provided ground for further study on how contemporary artistic creation has channelled the painter’s project and cosmovision through creative executions that go beyond thematic references. Overall, this study has highlighted the potential of intermedial research to weave unexpected relations between apparently distant objects and further enhance our understanding of Van Gogh’s legacy in a context of technological expansion and increasing dialogue between the arts and the digital world.

References Atelier des Lumières. (2019). Press Kit—Van Gogh, Starry Night. https://www.scribd.com/ document/400582640/Dp-Van-Gogh-Atelier-Des-Lumieres-Paris-Uk-0#. BBC News. (2015, May 27). Turning Van Gogh’s the night cafe into virtual reality. https://www. bbc.com/news/av/technology-32751392 BBC News. (2016, October 29). How do you paint 65,000 pictures like Van Gogh?” https://www. bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-cornwall-37707160 Brettell, R. (1999). Modern Art, 1851–1929. Capitalism and Representation (Oxford History of Art). Oxford University Press. Cauley, M. (2015a). The night cafe: A VR tribute to Vincent Van Gogh. Borrowed Light Studios. Cauley, M. (2015b, September 28). The making of night cafe (part 1). Borrowed Light Studios. http://www.borrowedlightvr.com/2015/09/28/the-making-of-night-cafe-part-1/ EkosVR (2016, June 4). The night cafe: A VR tribute to Vincent Van Gogh—Oculus rift. YouTube. https://youtu.be/Si-pImnlFZs

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Elleström, L. (2010). The modalities of media: A model for understanding intermedial relations. In L. Elleström (Ed.), Media borders, multimodality and intermediality (pp. 11–48). Palgrave Macmillan. Gauguin, P. (1888, ca. September 8). Letter 675: To Vincent Van Gogh. In L. Jansen, H. Luijten, & N. Bakker (Eds.), Van Gogh—The letters. Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING, 2009. http:// www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let675/letter.html Gil González, A. (2020). De la previrtualidad a las experiencias virtuales: Una aproximación a la narrativa del medio interactivo desde los estudios intermediales comparados. In A. A. González, F. C. Aseguinolaza, & A. Casas (Eds.), Textualidades (inter)literarias. Lugares de lectura y nuevas perspectivas teórico-crítica (pp. 305–341). Iberoamericana-Vervuert. Gil González, A., & Pardo, J. (2018). Intermedialidad. Modelo para armar. In Adaptación 2.0: estudios comparados sobre intermedialidad (pp. 11–38). Editions Orbis Tertius. Heinich, N. (1996). The glory of Van Gogh: An anthropology of admiration (P. Leduc Browne, Trans.). Princeton University Press. Iannuzzi, G., Gatto, R., Siccardi, M., & Longobardi, L. (2019). Van Gogh, La nuit étoilée. Culturespaces. https://www.carrieres-lumieres.com/en/van-gogh-starry-night Jansen, L., Luijten, H., & Bakker, N. (Eds.). (2009). Vincent Van Gogh—The letters. Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING, http://vangoghletters.org/vg/ Jansen, L., Luijten, H., & Bakker, N. Van Gogh as a letter-writer. In Van Gogh—The letters. Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING. http://www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letter_writer_1.html Kobiela, D. (2017, October 5). Dorota Kobiela • Director ‘Our bravery was nothing compared to Vincent’s’ (O. Salwa, Interview). Cineuropa. https://www.cineuropa.org/en/interview/337626/ Kobiela, D., & Welchman, H. (2017). Loving vincent. BreakThru Films/Trademark Films. Kristeva, J. (1980). Desire in language. A semiotic approach to literature and art (L. Roudiez, Ed., T. Gora, A. Jardine, L. Roudiez, T., Trans.). Columbia University Press. Mansell, C. (2017, September 21). Interview with Clint Mansell (D. Schweiger, conducted). Film Music Magazine. http://www.filmmusicmag.com/?p=17948 Margulis, D. (2019). Foreword. On the law of simultaneous contrast of colors (and its timeless applications in all the visual arts), by M. E. Chevreul. Modern Color Workflow Publishing, viii–xvi. Van Gogh, V. (1882, August 26). Letter 259: To Theo van Gogh. In L. Jansen, H. Luijten, & N. Bakker (Eds.), Van Gogh—The letters. Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING, 2009. http:// www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let259/letter.html Van Gogh, V. (1883, March 18). Letter 330: To Theo van Gogh. In L. Jansen, H. Luijten, & N. Bakker (Eds.), Van Gogh—The letters. Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING, 2009. http:// www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let330/letter.html Van Gogh, V. (1885a, October 10). Letter 534: To Theo van Gogh. In L. Jansen, H. Luijten, & N. Bakker (Eds.), Van Gogh—The letters. Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING, 2009. http:// www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let534/letter.html Van Gogh, V. (1885b, October 28). Letter 537: To Theo van Gogh. In L. Jansen, H. Luijten, & N. Bakker (Eds.), Van Gogh—The letters. Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING, 2009. http:// www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let537/letter.html Van Gogh, V. (1886, February 6). Letter 559: To Theo van Gogh. In L. Jansen, H. Luijten, & N. Bakker (Eds.), Van Gogh—The letters. Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING, 2009. http:// www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let559/letter.html Van Gogh, V. (1888a, June 10). Letter 622: To Emile Bernard. In L. Jansen, H. Luijten, & N. Bakker (Eds.), Van Gogh—The letters. Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING, 2009. http:// www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let622/letter.html Van Gogh, V. (1888b, June 9 or 10). Letter 638: To Theo van Gogh. In L. Jansen, H. Luijten, & N. Bakker (Eds.), Van Gogh—The letters. Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING, 2009. http:// www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let638/letter.html

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Van Gogh, V. (1888c, September 3). Letter 673: To Theo Van Gogh. In L. Jansen, H. Luijten, & N. Bakker (Eds.), Van Gogh—The letters. Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING, 2009. http:// www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let720/letter.html Van Gogh, V. (1888d, November 12). Letter 720: To Willemien van Gogh. In L. Jansen, H. Luijten, & N. Bakker (Eds.), Van Gogh—The letters. Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING, 2009. http:// www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let720/letter.html Van Laerhoven, T., Di Fior, F., Van Haevre, W., & Van Reeth, F. (2011). Paint-on-glass animation: The fellowship of digitalpaint and artisanal control. Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, 22(2–3), 325–332. https://doi.org/10.1002/cav.406 Van Nimwegen, I (2018). Painting the past: An analysis of the soundtrack in animated feature film loving Vincent (2017). Undergraduate dissertation, University of Utrecht. http://dspace.library. uu.nl/handle/1874/366783 Veldhorst, N. (2018). Van Gogh and music: A symphony in blue and yellow. Yale University Press. Villanueva, D. (1994). Literatura comparada y teoría de la literatura. In D. Villanueva (Ed.), Curso de teoría de la literatura (pp. 99–127). Taurus. Wecel, M. (2019). Loving Vincent: The impossible dream. BreakThru Films.

Fernando Valcheff-Garcia is a PhD student in Spanish at the University of Michigan. He holds an MA in Romance Languages and Literatures (UofM), an Erasmus Mundus MA in Crossways in Cultural Narratives (University of St Andrews/Universidad de Santiago de Compostela/ Universidade NOVA de Lisboa), and a BA in Literature (Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata). His early research focused on the work of the Argentine poet Amelia Biagioni through a psychoanalytical and philosophical lens. In his master’s dissertation, he studied the intermedial relations between literature, audiovisual arts, and digital technologies in contemporary artworks that reimagine Vincent Van Gogh’s life and oeuvre. Fernando’s current work addresses the connections between sovereignty, political imagination, and meat/flesh de-figurations in contemporary narrative texts by Latin American women writers. Email: [email protected]

Chapter 9

New Stage Aesthetics in the Digital Age Minghou Liu

Abstract The new style Peking opera, The Imperial Concubine of the Tang Dynasty, staged by the Shanghai Peking Opera Theatre and the dance drama, The Never Vanishing Radio Wave, staged by Shanghai Song and Dance Ensemble, are the most acclaimed theatrical performances in 2019 in Shanghai. Apart from the charm of the performers, the two plays’ appropriate application of digital multimedia and the virtual audio and video designed in line with the plot and the acting also greatly added to the power impacting the audience and enriched the language for stage performance. One example is replacing the traditional physical scenes and property on the stage with high-tech dynamic pictures on large screens, which resulted in giving the new Peking opera The Imperial Concubine of the Tang Dynasty more flexibility for stage performance, and giving a movie-like quality to the dance drama The Never Vanishing Radio Wave, which depicts the espionage war between the Communists (CCP) and the Kuomintang (KMT) in the late 1940s. The use of digital multimedia has broken through the traditional concept of time and space and promoted the development of 3D presentation on the stage. It is the result of merging various artistic forms and technologies in creative experimentation with new modes of performance and has successfully brought to the audience a new aesthetic experience in the 21st century theatre. Keywords CCP · Dance drama · Digital technology · Digitalisation · KMT · The Imperial Concubine of the Tang Dynasty · Kunqu opera · Mei Lanfang · The Never Vanishing Radio Wave · New stage aesthetics · Peking opera · The Peony Pavilion · Posthuman · 3D effects In the twenty-first century, people’s way of life is digitalised with new means of communication, new modes of learning, and new habits of art appreciation. The stage is no exception when the new age has ushered in new experimentations with arts tech in performance. The breaking down of boundaries has enabled direct communications across time and space, making it possible for global sharing of M. Liu (✉) Department of Dramatic Literature, Shanghai Theatre Academy, Shanghai, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Sight as Site in the Digital Age, Digital Culture and Humanities 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9209-4_9

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information. The digital revolution has not only given birth to a new economy, but also permeated and impacted on all spheres of life, giving rise to digital notation, digital motion pictures, digital exhibition halls, digital museums, digital libraries, and digital new media. The digital revolution has occurred not only in the spheres of literature and art, but also in digital monetary currencies and so on. The use of advanced technology has broken the traditional boundaries of art, combining the advantages of various spheres and helping audiences to better apprehend and appreciate artists’ works. The information system gives the art world great vitality and makes the world more diversified and colourful in presentation. In recent years, there has been a crave for the use of new technologies on the Chinese stage. Chinese artists in Beijing and Shanghai have been experimenting with new modes of expression and new forms of performance. Noted performances with 3D technologies in enhancing stage effects have been staged, which are meant not only to transform the traditional Chinese stage, but also to search for new directions in artistic and cultural representation. In the academia, two conferences were held one after another in the year 2021 to rethink the artistic implications of digitalisation and its fusion with the performing arts. The first one was the “2021 NCPA Taihu Art Centre International Forum” jointly hosted by the Beijing International Design Week, National Centre for Performing Arts and China Institute of Stage Design, which was convened on 29 September 2021 (National Centre for the Performing Arts, 2021). Focusing on the theme “Digitalisation and Stage Art”, the forum attracted about 200 participants who are renowned scenographic designers, artists, and scholars in China as well as worldwide. The second event was the “International Experts Seminar on Innovation for New Media Performing Arts & Shanghai University League’s Forum for International Young Scholars 2021”, hosted by the Shanghai Theatre Academy (2021) (Fig. 9.1). Scholars and artists in both forums exchanged views on how to move forward with new ways of technologising stage performance. Critical views presented at both forums shed light on technical as well as aesthetic issues in digitalisation of the stage and the possibility of emerging new forms mixing human and posthuman experimentations with Peking opera, modern drama, dance drama, musicals, puppet shows and shadow shows. The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games showcased how digital technologies were used in the opening and closing ceremonies with amazing artistic effects. As the Chinese stage has entered its new postmodern era, it has now become an irreversible trend that digitalised stage language and digital audio-visual art exert a great influence on stage art. At the same time, the new language and new technologies have also changed the audience’s aesthetic preferences. However, drama performance is after all the actors’ art. It is an art that depicts people and their thoughts on relationships between people and society, between self and others, and within the self. If digital technology is bent on exhibiting all kinds of new modes of expression, taking up too much space on the stage, minimising the actors’ roles, and diverting the audience’s attention from the primacy of the stage, it is possible that the audience may feel fatigued with technologies, and will yearn for a return to the basics of performance—the art of the performers.

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Fig. 9.1 Forum held at Shanghai Theatre Academy on Digital Technologies in Stage Art. Source: https://en.sta.edu.cn/91/83/c3891a102787/ page.htm

Since ancient times, the theatre has always been an art form that people love to see. In ancient Greece, theatres were built at locations at the mountain foot and close to the sea. The spectators climbed steps on the mountain slopes to get to their seats and the theatres could hold as many as thousands of spectators. In ancient China, the theatres were not as large as those in ancient Greece, but they had raised platforms as stages, sometimes with balustrades on the edges and an open space in front for the spectators. However, whenever there was a performance, the theatre would be thronged with huge crowds of people, old and young. The place would be bustling with crowds of people as if they were having a festival. This is a reflection of people’s spiritual needs, in the East and the West alike. In those times, though the theatre equipment was simple, going to the theatre was nonetheless an important part in people’s life. The folks believed that watching performances could help vent their emotions and learn lessons in life. This is the idea of catharsis in Greek drama. Both ancient Greek theatre performances and ancient Chinese opera performances were staged in the daytime, in natural sun light with very simple stage properties. As regards the form of performances, both ancient Greek drama and ancient Chinese opera were hugely reliant on dancing and singing. Ancient Chinese opera was even more reliant on dancing and singing for telling stories. Being fictitious, hypothetical and in fixed patterns are the basic characteristics of Chinese opera’s performance art. With such conventional performance patterns and theatrical symbols, the audience appreciates the stories enfolding on the compact stage along with their implications and aesthetic connotations.

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New Peking Opera with 3D Effects For generations, Chinese audiences have been accustomed to Peking opera’s theatrical symbols in formulaic patterns with three or five performers representing legions in the thousands, and six or five steps symbolising a march of thousands of miles. On the traditional opera stage, there is no property or scenery. Yet the performers’ fictitious actions can induce the audiences’ associations and sense of being on the spot in person. In spite of all of these merits, the modern audiences have long since been unsatisfied with such simple stage properties as only one table and two chairs. Therefore, the traditional opera has begun to learn from the scenic design of modern drama in pursuit of realistic scenery and adopt the-fourth-wall stage setting. A typical example of this transition is the stage setting of the Kunqu opera The Peony Pavilion staged by the Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe at the Duanjun Theatre of the Shanghai Theatre Academy in 1986. A high-ranking official’s daughter Du Liniang roamed in the gorgeously colourful garden in spring, singing the lyrics “I see a blaze of flowers blossoming splendidly. I know not where my emotions come from. But they are flowing deep and endless”. To display the beauty of the garden that enchants Du Liniang and stirs up her amorous spring fever, the stage was set with huge clusters of artificial flowers artistically arranged on the entire stage instead of images projected on the backdrop. The stage-wide extravagance plus the enhancement of the lighting produced stunning aesthetic effects. That was the first realistic stage design by using emulation properties in the opera theatre. Up to today, the scene I saw then is still clearly imprinted in my mind. In comparison with simple stage settings, this scenic design of Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe’s The Peony Pavilion is inarguably brilliant and eye catching. The famous actress Hua Wenyi played the protagonist Du Liniang, a girl of noble birth. Her soft and graceful gait was a feast for the eyes. Her pleasant singing, resonant and enchanting, literally satisfied the audiences’ aesthetic yearning. For a period of time, the stage design of The Peony Pavilion put on by the Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe influenced tremendously the scenic designs of opera in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Many scenic designers emulated it. Some even went so far as placing a commode on the stage in the American version of the Kunqu opera The Peony Pavilion. The purpose of such scenic design with over-sized properties was to achieve the so-called true-to-life effects. Nevertheless, space on the stage is not simply the physical environment where objects are arranged. It is a space to make the objects’ locations interconnected in a way to show their relationships. That is to say, we should not imagine that space is the vault of heaven filled with objects; nor should we abstractly imagine that space is a special quality common to all objects. Instead, we should think of space as an overall power linking all objects. The same principle applies to the theatre stage. Later on people working in the fields of traditional Chinese opera came to realise that excessive emphasis on copying the reality and eye-popping complicated stage setting can result in diverting the audience’s attention from the performers, snatching the audience away from the actors, taking up much of the physical space of the stage,

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diminishing the area where the performers can act, limiting the space where the performers can use posture and dance expression, and reducing the aesthetic value unique to traditional Chinese opera. Therefore, the stage designers of traditional Chinese opera somewhat withdrew from their ambitions. Their stage setting has become less pretentious. Many things in the world develop in a spiral course. Now in the twenty-first century, audiences of the younger generation have higher expectations for their aesthetic appreciation. They are not satisfied with the aesthetic modes of the oldergeneration art. They want the stage of the traditional Chinese opera to move forward with the times and be more modernised. As a result, multimedia, LED lighting, electronic backdrop, and so on began to be frequently applied to the theatrical stage on the basis of innovation while upholding truth, integrity, and respect for the norm as well as special qualities of the traditional Chinese opera. This has greatly expanded the time and space of the stage. Visual dimensions extended to an unprecedented height and width. Added to all of those are the meticulously designed sound effects. The audience is therefore entertained with a new visual and audio experience. One example is The Imperial Concubine of the Tang Dynasty (Guo, 2019) produced by the Shanghai Peking Opera Theatre, which debuted at the Shanghai Grand Theatre in November 2019. The tragic love story of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang Dynasty (618–907) and his Imperial Concubine Yang Yuhuan is very familiar to the audience. The story is widely known and acclaimed. In the poem Song of Everlasting Sorrows (Chang hen ge), the Tang Dynasty poet Bo Juyi 白居易 depicted Imperial Concubine Yang Yuhuan’s beauty and charm with these words: “One smiling glance back, radiant with indescribable charms, outshines all the beauties in the harem”. Emperor Xuanzong of Tang Dynasty was so enchanted that “he stopped appearing at the morning court meetings,”1 which consequently caused the social unrest called “An and Shi Uprisings”. When the emperor’s army revolted at Mahuai Slope, the Imperial Concubine Yang Yuhuan, the most favoured concubine of Emperor Xuanzong, was forced to commit suicide. Since Bo Juyi’s long poem Song of Everlasting Sorrows, traditional Chinese operas such as Bai Pu’s Rain Falling on Plane Trees, Hong Sheng’s Immortal Palace, Mei Lanfang’s Unofficial Biography of Taizhen and The Imperial Concubine Gets Tipsy, have been repeatedly staged in the Chinese theatre. These operas are very popular and warmly acclaimed. The new-style Peking opera, The Imperial Concubine of the Tang Dynasty, is a creation by the playwright Wen Sizai on the basis of previous plays of the same story, depicting the true love between Emperor Xuanzong and Imperial Concubine Yang Yuhuan. In respect of composition and instrumentation, The Imperial Concubine of the Tang Dynasty of the Shanghai Peking Opera Theatre employs symphony. Because of this, the media has dubbed it with such names as “Shanghai-style symphony Peking opera”, “Mei Lanfang style symphony Peking opera”, “large-scale 1

The line is from the poem “Song of Everlasting Sorrows” by Bo Juyi 白居易.

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Fig. 9.2 The imperial concubine of the Tang Dynasty, 2019. © Photographer Yan Bu. Permission by Shanghai Peking Opera Theatre

symphony Peking opera”, and so on. Whatever the designation may be, everybody agrees that the performance was visually powerful and stylistically magnificent. I would like to make particular mention of its theme song Ode to Pear Blossom: “Pear blossoms with spring rain; its flowers wither and fall brining spring into the mud. In my time I live my life for one person only—the emperor who is infatuated with love [. . . ].” Peking opera’s Erhuang tune and Geyang tune are fused with musical elements of Western symphony. The melody is beautiful, sweet and appealing. Shi Yihong (史依弘), the actress who played the leading role the Imperial Concubine, sang the song with such resonance that it sounded like celestial music. Although Ode to Pear Blossom has been sung across the country for many years, it still enjoys great popularity today. Along with the music and singing, the stage design was likewise unprecedented, adding to the charm of the opera. The design with multimedia and arts tech replaced the traditional hand-painted scenery. The previously-used physical palace structure was withdrawn from the stage and was replaced by huge LED screens and projections on both sides of the stage. The magnificence of the palace in Tang Dynasty’s golden times and the extravagance of royal gardens were vividly displayed to the audience in three dimensions (Fig. 9.2). The swift conversion between elevating platforms and mobile platforms on the stage produced such miraculous visual effects that the spectators felt as if they were on the spot in person. In the last act, Meeting as Immortals, Emperor Xuanzong laid down his own life for the sake of honour. In heaven, he was reunited with the Imperial Concubine who had ended her own life,

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Fig. 9.3 The imperial concubine of the Tang Dynasty, 2019. © Photographer Yan Bu. Permission by Shanghai Peking Opera Theatre

the stage was a scene of streams of soft white gauze flowing down from the canopy and mists rose from below. Visual effects of stunning beauty were thus produced. The story of the couple deep in love with each other eventually came to a wonderful end (Fig. 9.3). The actors’ singing and performance contributed to the warm acclaim The Imperial Concubine of the Tang Dynasty received from the public (Anonymous, 2021). Apart from that, its success was also due to the fact that it kept the special features of Peking opera—the story was told with singing and dancing. And more importantly, it used digital technology, which allowed space and time to transfer virtually and freely while giving full play to the advantages of the art of traditional Chinese opera. The audience was therefore able to acquire an entirely new aesthetic experience. The large multimedia screens on both sides of the stage along with the large backdrop displayed to the full the magnificence of the Chinese palace in ancient times like a panoramic movie. Yet it did not take up any space from the performance. The sense of the far-reaching depth of the stage, the expanded space for performance and the stunningly grandiose scenery were unprecedented. The digital scenic design and digital lighting were mutually complementary. The effects were that feeling and setting were happily blended, that the spectators felt as if they were in a dream or in a delusion and that the performance was immensely poetic (Xu, 2019). The all-star cast plus the ever-changing multimedia scenery created a milieu of celestial harmony and beauty. This befits the romantic theme that “Jack shall have Jill”. The performance is an example of traditional Chinese opera’s aesthetic charm—being implicit, impressionistic, poetic, and romantic.

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Modern Dance Drama with Motion Picture Qualities If it is true to say that The Imperial Concubine of the Tang Dynasty produced by the Shanghai Peking Opera Theatre gave its audience an aesthetic experience of magnificent and powerful visual impact by using modern digital scenic design and lighting, then it is also true to say that the dance drama, The Never Vanishing Radio Wave (Han & Liya, 2021) staged by the Shanghai Song and Dance Ensemble, gave the spectators another kind of aesthetic experience with its symbolic digital stage setting. The Never Vanishing Radio Wave is a dance drama retelling the story of the espionage war in 1948. The story is based on the true events of the historical figure Li Bai, an underground Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member who worked in Shanghai and became a martyr. The drama depicts Li Bai’s selfless devotion in the hard times amidst the espionage war between the CCP and the Kuomintang (KMT) on the eve the fall of Shanghai. His deeds were made into a film early in 1958, which bears the same title The Never Vanishing Radio Wave. The story of its protagonist Li Xia played by the famous actor Sun Daolin moved millions of audiences. Undoubtedly, the director and choreographer Han Zhen and Zhou Liya, as well as the leading actor Wang Jiajun and the leading actress Zhu Jiejing, are outstanding and admirably marvellous in executing little details in acting. Besides that, the light and shadow effects that create the movie-like qualities of this drama are eye catching. The lighting vocabulary of this dance drama compliments and enriches its body language and dramatic atmosphere. Starting from the prelude, the use of digital lighting and shadow lays the foundation for giving the drama movie-like qualities and a sense of modern stage effects. At the very moment when the words The Never Vanishing Radio Wave are projected onto the scrim, there comes the swift rain-like string-by-string and pieceby-piece falling of numbers, old newspapers of those years, and the quick fading in and dissolving of faded photographs. This helps create the tense atmosphere on the eve of Shanghai’s turbulent political changes. Performers stand at the edge of the stage in a row. Behind them are projected captions showing each performer’s name and role. Immediately after that, a group of LED lighting sources with slice imaging functions project rays onto the performers who are clad in black and holding black umbrellas (Fig. 9.4). They keep shuttling in the rain, tense, and firm. Its implication is that the whole city is shrouded in a haze. That is the darkest moment before dawn. In sharp contrast with the gloomy cool colours of the scene is the basic colour tone of the home of the drama’s male and female protagonists, Li Xia and Lanfen, both of whom are underground members of the CCP. Li Xia’s public identity is a newspaper agency clerk. The two protagonists, being comrades and a married couple at the same time, dance in warm colour rays from the crew thread spotlight. The warm colours serve to enhance the warm and harmonious atmosphere in the house. They are hidden amongst the other characters (Fig. 9.5). To illustrate this, there is the scene presenting the casual, languish and slow life tempo in old Shanghai’s alleys. With the appearance of the image of bamboos for airing laundry on the balconies at

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Fig. 9.4 The never vanishing radio wave, the Shanghai Song and Dance Ensemble. © Photographer Wu Yizhang. Permission by Shanghai Dance Theatre Company

Fig. 9.5 The never vanishing radio wave, the Shanghai Song and Dance Ensemble. © Photographer Wu Yizhang. Permission by Shanghai Dance Theatre Company

the back of the stage, a group of Shanghai women slowly come onto the stage with light gait, wearing plain yet elegant Cheung-sam (qipao) and holding cattail leaf fans in one hand and low stools in the other (Fig. 9.6). They move around slowly and

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Fig. 9.6 The never vanishing radio wave, the Shanghai Song and Dance Ensemble. © Photographer Wang Xufeng. Permission by Shanghai Dance Theatre Company

gracefully. They begin to make a fire in the stoves. They chat with each other. Some might be in solitude and immersed in thoughts. Sometimes they would stand on the low stools on tiptoe in expectation of the return of their men who are working elsewhere. Their graceful dancing and demure look embody the elegance and exquisiteness deeply rooted in Shanghai women. At this moment, side lighting draws out long shadows. With the incessant changing of the bar screen slides on twenty-six tracks, the common people’s worldly lifestyle in old Shanghai’s alleys is vividly presented. The multimedia employed in this drama is powerfully expressive. It does not divert the attention of the audiences. It does its job appropriately, complementing the performance in the aspect of unfolding the plot and depicting the characters. It serves to enrich the narrative vocabulary. It also serves the performance form and the style of the dance drama. For example, in the act “Newspaper Office,” Li Xia takes the

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Fig. 9.7 The never vanishing radio wave, the Shanghai Song and Dance Ensemble. © Photographer Wu Yizhang. Permission by Shanghai Dance Theatre Company

same elevator with Liu Nina, an official of the KMT Intelligence Agency. In those years, elevators in Shanghai had lattice doors. The crisscross light and shadow of rhombus patterns gives the audience the sense of narrowness and oppressiveness in the elevator. The two highly alert espionage agents, who are enemies, watch each other in the narrow space without showing any emotions (Fig. 9.7). The continually moving light and shadow gives the impression that the elevator is moving upwards. Another example is when Xiao Guang, a tailor shop apprentice lays down his own life in order to protect Li Xia, an introduction of the young CCP member Xiao Guang is projected onto the backdrop, giving an account of his identity and age so that the audience can have a better knowledge of him. This method of introducing characters by using captions is employed on many occasions. With the appearance of Liu Nina on the stage, the caption reads “director, Shanghai Bureau, KMT Secret Agency”. These captions very often are projected at critical moments. For instance, when the rickshaw driver Ah Wei, whom Liu Nina has ordered to watch over Li Xia and Lanfen, makes his first appearance on the stage, the projected caption reads “special agent of KMT Secret Agency”. By doing so, the spectators could have a better understanding of the complex relations between the characters. This technique is a borrowing from traditional drama script writing—to hide from the characters, but not from the audience. One more example is the parallel montage of the narrative scene created by light and shadow effects. When Li Xia and his wife comes to the “tailor shop” to pick up

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intelligence information, they find out that the important contact location of the CCP has been destroyed by the KMT. The tailor shop owner Fang, leader of the local CCP intelligence team, has been murdered at the entrance to the shop. Facing this emergency, Li Xia at once orders Lanfen to go back home by rickshaw. He goes into the tailor shop by himself to look for the information they have come to pick up. At that time, the lighting divides the stage into two sections. Two thirds of the stage are the interior of the tailor’s shop where Li Xia as well as the KMT intelligence team headed by Liu Nina are searching for that important information. One third of the stage is the scene of a street where Lanfen is riding a rickshaw. Lanfen finds out that the rickshaw driver is not her comrade Dayong. The atmosphere is tense in both sections. The tailor shop has bright lighting. This is the main battlefield. The street, Lanfen and the rickshaw driver are dimly lit. The rickshaw is a real object. The light and shadow produced digitally suggests that the rickshaw is moving. Here the use of digital lighting and music very well sets off and enhances the tense atmosphere of the act. In this act, the director boldly adopted the technique of artistic exaggeration to bear out the characters’ psychological state. In the gloomy street, Lanfen, who is inexperienced as an agent, is suspicious of the rickshaw driver’s true identity. She steps down from the rickshaw, cautiously sizes up the driver, even goes so far as to take off the driver’s cap and finally confirms her suspicion. Then, she gets back to the rickshaw and sits down. The lighting creates the effect of the swiftly moving rickshaw. Trembling, Lanfen fishes out of her handbag a pistol and shoots the KMT agent who disguises as a rickshaw driver. And at the same time, the KMT spies, who have searched every corner of the tailor shop, again return to the shop. They proceed to search for the important information side by side with Li Xia. Both parties end up finding nothing. Anxiety grips all of them. At that moment, the tailor shop boss Mr. Fang, who has died, comes back to life. He stands behind Li Xia, watching over him. Only when he sees Li Xia find the secret code of the information in a tape, does he utter a sigh of relief and become dead again. The scene of the tailor shop and the scene of Lanfen’s shooting the rickshaw driver are synchronised on the stage. Li Xia’s finding the secret information and Lanfen’s shooting occur simultaneously. The stage dims with the bang of Lanfen’s pistol. The climax of this dance drama is the eternal life-and-death separation of Li Xia and Lanfen, who is his wife and comrade. Both the husband and wife know in their innermost heart that the separation will be eternal and that they will never meet again. Yet at the critical moment they are not allowed to pour freely their agony. There is no intensely emotional crying. Their dance vocabulary and facial expression are suggestive of their suppressed anguish. This is all the more moving. Li Xia looks at the back of his pregnant wife, who is leaving reluctantly, and then turns around, takes out the radio transmitter composedly, sits down at the desk and transmits to Yan’an his last piece of intelligence information. He knows that the enemy has already found out who he is. He calmly types “Farewell, comrades! I miss you!” With these words being projected on the screen, a cluster of red beams is projected onto this CCP member in the depth of the stage. It stirs up a sense of solemnity and respect. Immediately after that, projected on the screen are newspapers declaring the

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liberation of Shanghai and the birth of a new age. Li Xia as well as his comrades-inarms Fang Haisheng, owner of the Fang’s Tailor Shop and leader of CCP East China Intelligence Bureau, the apprentice Xiao Guang, the rickshaw driver Dayong ended their lives on the eve of the liberation of Shanghai in pursuit of their beliefs. In the dance drama The Never Vanishing Radio, the scenery is controlled by computer programming. There are 26 huge screens, which can fold, unfold and revolve. That makes the scenery change quickly and flexibly, greatly expanding the performance space. The change of the scenes occurs at the unfolding the story and the changing mood of the characters. That stimulates the audience’s imagination by realising the transformation and motion of the performance space, creating the atmosphere and making real space fictitious. The precise control by the modern digital technology helps to turn the story of an espionage war with invisible smoke from the gun into something like a motion picture. It effectively sets off emotions such as restraint, composedness and passion with no lack of romantic feelings, and enhances the audience’s identification. All of this helps depict in relief the CCP members’ spirit of fearlessly sacrificing their own lives for the sake of the birth of Socialist China. This spirit is an embodiment of the power of belief. In short, in the dance drama The Never Vanishing Radio Wave created by the Shanghai Song and Dance Ensemble, the terse and fluent digital lighting vocabulary and the stage setting of 26 movable screens that can open and close, worked closely with the rich and exquisite dance vocabulary, successfully enhanced the artistic power and charm of the dance drama. Such unique vocabulary helped achieve for this dance drama with a soul, warmth and profound sentiments a completely new visual experience. It played a positive role in the success of this dance drama. It elevated the dance drama’s cultural and ideological implications, and at the same time, the audience not only enjoyed the beautiful and touching dance drama, but also enjoyed the aesthetic experience of appreciating the immensely charming effects of digital lighting.

Remarks on Technology-Enhanced Performance Technology gives the theatre artists space for experimentation with new modes of presentation. Stage performance demands the integration of many art forms, dance, music, lighting and scenic design. It is through the art of sight that a theatrical performance is elevated to a site of aesthetic-psychological expression. If it is true to say that the overall impression created by the new style Peking opera, The Imperial Concubine of the Tang Dynasty, is dazzling magnificence and grandeur, then it is also true to say that The Never Vanishing Radio Wave produced by the Shanghai Song and Dance Ensemble takes grey as its basic colour tone, and its aesthetic style is unexaggerated. It has the theatrical effect of minimalism. The difference between the two productions stems from their different subject matters. The aesthetic concepts of both productions have marked modern elements, employing modern light and shadow art to expand the physical space and psychological space of dramatic

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expression. The three-dimensional and true-to-life virtual space created by multimedia bears out the difference between the subject and object of aesthetic appreciation. The audience is therefore given an aesthetic experience richer than what they can get from the original drama forms. As a result, the audiences’ aesthetic dimensions are expanded. Currently technology and art are playing an important role in complimenting each other in new ways of artistic experimentation, thus reshaping people’s mode of perception and their understanding of art. This has brought to the audience a wealth of art, which presents a perfect combination of audio and visual aesthetic experience. In our digital age of arts tech, artists are giving full play to their imagination and creativeness, utilising advanced digital technologies, breaking through the boundaries of stage art and employing immersive techniques borrowed from filmmaking to expand the space of the stage. The result is that the limitations are overcome in using visual symbols to represent cultural codes that transmit information. These symbols effectively serve to hint at the message the scene on the stage is meant to give as well as to convey the emotions and meaning of the entire performance. The artistic space and scenery created by digital technologies are virtual; yet the spectators may feel that they are real. With the stage space expanded and the arts experimented with in new modes, the audiences feel that they have a totally new experience. From this it can be seen that the advantages of digital technologies are a blessing for theatre arts. Of course, performance must not rely solely on technology.

References Anonymous. (2021). The new version of Peking Opera The Imperial Concubine of the Tang Dynasty is staged in Wanping Theater. Breaking Latest News. Retrieved from https://www. breakinglatest.news/entertainment/the-new-version-of-peking-opera-the-imperial-concubineof-the-tang-dynasty-is-staged-in-wanping-theater/ Guo, X. (2019). Da Tang guifei 大唐貴妃 (The imperial concubine of the Tang Dynasty). Shanghai Grand Theatre. Han, Z., & Liya, Z. (2021). Yong bu xiaoshi de dianbo 永不消逝的電波 (The never vanishing radio wave). Retrieved from https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%B0%B8%E4%B8%8D%E6% B6%88%E9%80%9D%E7%9A%84%E7%94%B5%E6%B3%A2/23489847?fr=aladdin National Centre for the Performing Arts. (2021). 2021 NCPA Taihu Art Centre International Forum. National Centre for the Performng Arts. https://en.chncpa.org/NEWS/wzxw/202109/ t20210929_237018.shtml Shanghai Theatre Academy. (2021). International experts seminar on Innovation for New Media Performing Arts & Shanghai University League’s Forum for International Young Scholars 2021. Shanghai Theatre Academy. https://en.sta.edu.cn/91/83/c3891a102787/page.htm Xu, W. (2019). Peking opera tragic tale gets multimedia makeover. Shine.CN. Retrieved from https://www.shine.cn/feature/art-culture/1910123534/

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Minghou Liu, PhD, Professor of Shanghai Theatre Academy. She is currently a member of the expert review panels of the Art Category of National Social Science Fund of China, Shanghai Culture and Art Development Foundation, Shanghai Magnolia Theatrical Performance Award and Shanghai Film Bureau. She is on the Board of Directors of the China Section of the International Association of Theatre Critics. She is three times recipient of “Award of Outstanding Contribution to Development of Theatre in Shanghai” and is the author of the play Life in the Fog, which has been awarded Excellent Play of North China Theatrical Festival. Email: liuminghou0503@163. com

Chapter 10

Luvv Bazar: Queer and Feminist Representation in Music Video After the Internet Ryann Donnelly

Abstract This chapter argues that user-populated video platforms, such as YouTube and Vimeo have accommodated the production and circulation of subversive Queer and Feminist music videos since the platforms’ rise in the mid-2010s. In the post-Internet shift away from MTV and comparable networks (VH1, BET) as the predominant source for music video distribution and consumption, websites such as YouTube and Vimeo have allowed independent and emerging artists to create and display music video—a medium that was historically relegated to a few television stations and produced almost exclusively by major label artists with sizeable budgets. The ways in which these technological developments of the mid-2010s changed music videos’ modes of production, distribution, consumption, and regulation are all inextricably linked to the proliferation of subversive representations of gender and sexuality in the medium. For independent artists and directors, YouTube has provided a place to distribute music and video, legitimizing the DIY production of media that could suddenly be accessed as easily as work by mainstream artists. As an arena largely populated by the content of its users, YouTube has offered an unprecedented channel through which to present and access Queer media, and to engage with cultural differences historically avoided, or censored by mainstream media. This chapter offers a historiographic analysis of the pre-Internet literature on sexual representation in music video to highlight the stark rise in Queer and Feminist representation in the medium, and its analysis after the launch of YouTube in 2005. Keywords Androgyny · Art · Digital · Feminist · Gender · Grotesquerie · Identities · Lady Gaga · Mediating mechanism · MTV · Music video · Pop culture · Postclassical · Posthuman · Queer · Racist · Representation · Role · Sex · Subversive image · Youth culture · YouTube · Violence · Visual When Music Television (MTV) launched in 1981, it established music videos as objects of cultural and arts research. This chapter offers a historiographic analysis of some of the early research on music videos to provide a context for how the medium R. Donnelly (✉) Department of Art History, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Sight as Site in the Digital Age, Digital Culture and Humanities 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9209-4_10

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and its discourse approached sexual representation. Much of the literature produced in the first decade of music videos’ mass production and distribution grappled with it as an exploding social phenomenon, and expressed a desire to understand the medium in the most basic terms: What was it? Was it advertisement or art? Who was watching, and how often? What were the recurring visual themes? Many of these initial queries manifested in fairly clinical analyses that took qualitative inventory of images with limited interpretation. They deduced from percentages and ratios, the various problems of representation that still plague the medium: white men dominated over their female counterparts, there was a disturbing amount of dramatized violence, and people of colour were negatively stereotyped by racist representations (Brown & Campbell, 1986; Burns & Thompson, 1987). Sherman and Dominick (1986) “Violence and Sex in Music Videos: TV and Rock ‘n’ Roll” produced comparable findings, though their work is of some note in relation to this study for their interest in instances where cross-dressing, homosexuality, bondage, and voyeurism were represented—areas which have proved greater sources of subversive imagery for their confrontation of sexual norms. Though similarly representative of the nascent nature of music video research, Baxter et al. (1985) “Content Analysis of Music Video”, and Auferheide (1986) “Music Videos: The Look of the Sound” expressed concerns with gender representation that are relevant to this research. Baxter et al.’s article tracked visual trends in music video in a similar way as the articles mentioned above. Ultimately, they were concerned with characterising the focus of the medium at large, though two of their research questions denoted a foundation for research into gender subversion in music video: “Do music videos focus on bizarre, unconventional representations?” and “Is androgyny present in portrayals of video characters?” (Baxter et al., 1985). Their research took a sterile approach to dealing with the questions, which effectively remained unanswered: 23 content categories were created to analyse a sample of 62 videos. Of the content categories studied, they reported frequent occurrences of visual abstraction, sex, dance, violence, and crime (Baxter et al., 1985). The authors quantified reoccurring types of images, but did so without discussing examples of said images, or in what videos they occurred. Furthermore, it was never questioned, or argued whether these images were positive, negative, or progressive. And, unlike the attention drawn to “the bizarre and unconventional”, no concerns were posed about social limitations potentially presented by stereotyping subjects, or homogenous social representation. We might consider it easy to answer affirmatively the article’s questions, considering the work of artists such as David Bowie or Madonna, who consistently played with established representations of gender in their music videos and wider work in performance. Yet, tangled in such a seemingly simplistic response, are weighted issues of normativity around which this research has been based. What is meant by “bizarre” and “unconventional”? Were these qualities to be specifically attributed within the context of gender, as might have been suggested by the second question’s more specific inquiry about androgyny? And would this positioning have affirmed a space for the bizarre and unconventional within the popular and within gendered frameworks, or would it have acted as a way of locating those artists and their

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identities as “outside” and “other”? The value of Baxter et al.’s text can be positioned in relation to this study as marking the introduction of questions about non-normative gender representation in the study of the medium. This could further be seen to exemplify a fundamental lack in Queer and Feminist gender representations in music video before 1985, and the slow but identifiable rise is such imagery given the scholarship that would follow. In the year following the publication of Baxter et al.’s article, Auferheide (1986) “Music Videos: The Look of the Sound” advanced the dialogue about gender, and the fluid nature of identity in music video through a concentrated focus on how gender and identity are represented. Aufderheide opened her discourse about gender through the concept of identity. She identified music video as a site where identities must be represented by a strong aesthetic image and considered the value of performers’ ability to rapidly reinvent their identities through music video (Auferheide, 1986). Aufderheide then discussed cultural stereotypes—male and female identities drawn from pop culture. She claimed that “In music videos, the very act of image manipulation is the action. The sex role, more than a costume, is an identity fashioned from the outside in” (Auferheide, 1986, p. 60). Aufderheide introduced the concept of gender performance in her claims, though rather than her focus resting on how gender roles can be manipulated through performance, she simply highlighted music video as a site where the notion of fixed identity is combatted. Aufderheide’s point failed to note the manipulation available in a performance context. If identity was fluid, though the set of social expectations attached to those identities was not, then the value of that fluidity would be compromised, and a potentially threatening terrain to navigate. However, Aufderheide did work around several terms which might be considered to have signalled a resistance to social conformity. For both men and women (apparently regardless of sexuality, which she does not address), she identified grotesquerie and shifting identities as resulting in androgyny (Auferheide, 1986). It is unclear whether she qualified this as a positive or negative strategy, especially given the traditionally negative meaning of grotesque. Her intrigue with experimental gender representation seemed to be prioritized over concerns with preserving traditional gender norms, however. For example, she elaborated on androgyny in the following passage: “Androgyny may be the most daring statement that an entire range of sex roles is fair game for projecting one’s own statement of the moment. Gender is no longer fixed; male and female fractured into a kaleidoscope of images” (Auferheide, 1986, p. 64). The sense of bravery and commitment aligned with the idea of a “daring statement” suggests that Aufderheide was supportive of a destabilization of restrictive gender roles. Her use of the term “fair game” would also have suggested that previously the game was not fair—an acknowledgement of the inequities of the gender binary. Lastly, the comparison of new gender roles to the highly aestheticized image of a kaleidoscope also had a positive connotation. So much of her analysis, however, was focused on the fluid nature of gender representation, rather than any ability for the characteristics traditionally attached to men and women to be appropriated by the opposite sex—a common method of contemporary gender subversion in music video.

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I would like to conclude my review of Aufderheide’s analysis by noting that from her work we have also been able to begin piecing together a history of production and consumption of music video and consider how shifts in those modes might also have change music video content. She explored how music video consumption impacted the formation of identity through a relationship to music as subculture, especially by MTV’s largest audience: adolescent consumers. The myriad social settings where music videos were consumed, or even used in a decorative way (on view at clubs or retail establishments) equated to omnipresence with subversive commercial implications. She explained that “music videos have animated and set to music a tension basic to American youth culture: that feeling of instability which fuels the search to buy and belong” (Auferheide, 1986, p. 63). With that claim, Aufderheide located music videos, not as sites of advertisements for specific objects, but as advertisements for insecurity. If the fantastic and cool—even kaleidoscopelike—identities portrayed in music video could deflect insecurity onto their viewers, then consumption—likely in those social and commercial spaces where they were on view—may have been triggered in order to achieve such a desired identity. Her portrait of early modes of distribution and consumption was of note for its stark contrast to the post-Internet shifts in those modes that have allowed audiences to self-curate videos from websites such as YouTube and Vimeo, rather than relying on TV stations such as MTV to dictate programming. Though the websites I have mentioned are not without advertisements, nor do they combat whatever insecurities are inherently linked to consumerism, these sites offer the user/viewer/listener increased control and freedom to decide what media they consume. It is of note that despite Aufderheide’s, and to a lesser extent Baxter et al.’s interest, in gender, sexuality was never discussed. These materials illuminate attitudes toward gender at the time and foreshadow the expansion of formal and theoretical discourses on the medium. They also reflect on modes of consumption, which are crucial to identifying the shifts in those patterns over the last 30 years. The subsequent wave of music video literature in the 1990s addressed the growing interest in more nuanced debates of representation, and expanded the exploration of the medium’s production, distribution, and form. This evidenced a growing interest in the medium in scholarly contexts, but also speaks to the growth of production and availability of music videos through networks like VH1 and BET. The discussion of music video as postmodern, or in fact whether it should be qualified as such, was a main focus of music video literature through the 1990s. It is a factor that separates my work from other discourse on music video; much of which draws meaning from the work through its postmodern aesthetics. It is explored in the frequently cited, Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (1987) by E. Ann Kaplan, in Frith et al. (1993) text, Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader, which argues against qualifying music video as postmodern, and in Roberts’ (1996) Ladies First: Women in Music Videos, which, conversely, claims the postmodern qualities of music video as the very source of the genre’s feminism. As it relates to today’s discussion on the rise of Queer and Feminist representation after the Internet, I will touch briefly on Lisa Lewis’ chapter “Being Discovered: The

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Emergence of Female Address on MTV” in Frith et al. (1993) text, Sound and Vision. In addition to considering modes of video production in relation to female representation, Lewis also highlights how the distribution of music video acted as a new mode of popularizing female artists and cultivated female identity through the fandom resulting from video consumption. The distribution of music video into homes created a domestic outlet to promote musicians. Because the concert tour had been a primary means for promoting rock musicians before MTV, and was identified as male adolescent cultural activity, video afforded female musicians an address to girls and women (Frith et al., 1993, p. 134). Lewis noted that, as a result, female audience attendance increased at rock concerts, specifically at those of female artists. Lewis continued to draw parallels between the domestic spaces women stereotypically occupy, the invasion of that space by music video, and the cultivation of “girl culture”—a space created through female music fandom. She identified the craze of trying to emulate the look of Madonna by female fans as an example of this. The points Lewis explored are valuable to this research because she noted how significant modes of video circulation and consumption could be to developing a Feminist audience. The first decade of the new millennium saw more focused studies of music videos, with a trend of essays investigating the intersection of race and gender in rap and hip-hop videos. This was explored in Rana Emerson’s, “Where My Girls At? Negotiating Black Womanhood in Music Videos” (2002), Kate Conrad et al.’s “Controversial Rap Themes, Gender Portrayals and Skin Tone Distortion: A content Analysis of Rap Music Videos” (2009), and Murali Balaji’s “Vixen Resistin”: Redefining Black Womanhood in Hip Hop Videos, among others. Though the sexism and misogyny explored in some of these texts provide foils for appreciating the necessity of combative Feminist and Queer representations, the articles’ focus on works that typify misrepresentation of women, rather than confrontational Feminist or Queer videos (2010), and are thus less relevant research materials for this study. Communications scholar, Carol Vernallis introduced questions of how new modes of video circulation and consumption online had impacted the medium. She released Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context in 2004, followed by Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video and the New Digital Cinema in 2013. In Unruly Media, Vernallis considered conventional music video, but also YouTube clips, and film techniques related to our more rapid consumption of images, and more intense fusion of audio with visual, which she calls “postclassical” techniques. The text is of greater significance to this study for its exploration of how the post-Internet viewing experience impacts the music video medium. For example, she explains how the aesthetics of homemade videos posted by YouTube users—that is, the non-famous, non-performing public who might post anything from a comic pet video to makeup tutorials—have been adopted by mainstream pop stars. This is seen in Lana Del Rey’s video for Videogames (2011) and Beyoncé’s 7/11 video (2014); which both feature lo-fi home video recordings of themselves. Though Vernallis’ focus was on the changing form, my interest in her analysis is related to how the mechanics of fandom have reversed the dynamic Lewis observed above (of fans modelling themselves after artists). Instead, stars began utilizing low or

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common technologies such as the homemade video, and adopting more casual, less glamourous appearances, which subverted the typical images of a “superstar”, many of which are signalled by formal, high femme aesthetics. Though some issues of representation can be gleaned from Vernallis’ scholarship, its relevance to this research is in its exploration of post-Internet implications on the medium. Lastly, in Railton and Watson (2011) book, Music Video: The Politics of Representation, the authors express their research concerns through a quote from Dyer (1993) book, Matter of Images: “cultural representations have real consequences for real people, not just in the way they are treated, but in terms of the way representations delimit and enable what people can be in any given society” (Dyer, 1993, p. 3). My focus on subversive representations of gender relates directly to a confrontation of those social limits referenced by Dyer. The authors also outline in their introduction that their approach is, “a Feminist one, broadly speaking, inasmuch as its principal concern is with the production and reproduction of normative gendered identities” (Railton & Watson, 2011, p. 10). Though I also take a Feminist approach, I do so by identifying constructed challenges to normative gender roles. The fact that Railton and Watson are looking at normative constructions rather than subversive challenges to normativity is what separates our work. I have offered this review of existing music video scholarship as a way of exploring the co-progression of the medium and its discourse, but to highlight the lack of Queer and Feminist analysis resulting from a lack of—most expressly— Queer objects of study in the mainstream music video landscape from which these scholars derived their research. The lack of Queer analysis in Railton and Watson’s text might be accounted for by the fact that the book was published in 2011, before the now landmark video work of Lady Gaga largely reignited issues of gender and Queer representation. Railton and Watson acknowledge the ill-timed publishing in an afterword exclusively dedicated to Lady Gaga. In addition to exploring gender issues, they use the artist as a vehicle for discussing new modes of video access through YouTube and iTunes, and the intersectionality with online fandom, as seen through the creation of GIFs. They also credit Lady Gaga with renewing interest in video at large, mainly due to her sensational aesthetics. In the following passage, Railton and Watson (2011) finally examine the combative potential of femininity in Lady Gaga’s video, Telephone: [Telephone] offers a deliberately ambiguous and playfully perverse image of femininity that defies normative conceptions of female sexuality. In its absurdist bricolage of lesbian prison films, female revenge fantasy, Feminist road movie, and TV cooking shows it activates a number of complex sex-gender discourses and reworks and repositions them in an indeterminate aesthetic space somewhere between high art and trash culture. (Railton & Watson, 2011, p. 146)

Here, Railton and Watson (2011) engage with the work by defining and praising the Feminist current of the video through an exploration of its cinematic devices and references. Furthermore, they relate the polarizing effects of Lady Gaga’s Feminist sexual agency and Queer representation to Madonna’s early video canon. They also accurately predicted that Lady Gaga would turn into a similar subject for academics,

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who have dealt with Madonna’s work in texts such as The Madonna Connection, Madonnarama, and Deconstructing Madonna. Railton and Watson eschew issues of Queer representation, maintaining that there are but “few” artists who work outside a heteronormative framework. I will now consider the cultural conditions which have accommodated a rise in Queer and Feminist representation. This section seeks to establish the landscape of contemporary music video as a vital site where this radical proliferation, and displacement of gender identities occurs in ways that are unique to the medium, and on an unparalleled scale. The ways in which the technological developments of the early 2000s changed music video’s modes of production, distribution, consumption, and regulation are all inextricably linked to the proliferation of subversive gender representations in the medium. Perhaps most significant among these developments was the launch of the audience-curated website, YouTube, in 2005. For independent artists and directors, the site provided a place to distribute music and video, legitimizing the DIY production of media that could suddenly be accessed as easily as work by mainstream artists. The implications of a popular, and open forum for Queer artists— historically marginalized by commercial industries—to represent themselves, and their work, is explored in the following passage by Jean Burgess, in YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (2009): “YouTube is big enough, and global enough, to count as a significant mediating mechanism for the cultural public sphere. . . the website is an enabler of encounters with cultural differences and the development of political ‘listening’ across belief systems and identities (Burgess & Green, 2009, p. 77). Though Burgess does not reference Queer artists specifically, what he proposes above is that YouTube is a social mediator, which accommodates encounters with cultural difference. As it relates to this research, we might qualify Queerness, alternative expressions and practices of sexuality, and the “belief systems and identities” referenced by Burgess, amongst those differences. As an arena largely populated by the content of its users, YouTube has offered an unprecedented channel through which to present, and access Queer media, and to engage with cultural differences historically avoided, or censored by mainstream media. This is reinforced by artist, Peaches, who compares the access to her music videos previously offered by TV stations, to the access afforded by lack of censorship on YouTube, by stating, “My videos were played after 11 o’clock at night. There were restrictions, there were rules. Now there aren’t any rules because you can put [music videos] on YouTube” (Nisker, 2016). Peaches references her own work, which exemplifies the Queer media YouTube has made more accessible. Other examples of Queer videos on YouTube range from videos of Queer subjects coming out, and documentation of Queer family life, to lesbians discussing their relationship on camera, and a mother reading her son’s Grindr messages (Lawson, 2015). Peaches specifies the website’s lack of censorship as the reason for access to such media and highlights that work such as hers would previously have been censored for content and screened for the limited audiences of late-night television.

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While distribution of, and access to, independent, Queer and Feminist media is of the most significant contributions of YouTube to amateur musicians, directors, and their audiences, the site’s specific benefits to the major corporations of the music industry are explored by Vernallis (2013) in Unruly Media. Vernallis traces the significant progression from the downturn of the music industry in the early 2000s, to the subsequent softening of regulations to which music video had historically adhered, and how this allowed for the production, and distribution of more controversial work. As a result of the loss of profit caused by illegal downloading of music through websites such as Napster and Pirate Bay during this time, the budgets for music videos were severely reduced in turn. Through the addition of advertisements played before a viewer’s selected content, YouTube allowed the music industry to monetize the medium online, and recoup some of the losses on music sales. Several record companies also banded together to create a similar site, Vevo,1 where directors could incorporate product placement for additional revenue (Vernallis, 2013). Whereas music videos were previously used as advertisements for the sale of the song for which they were made, they now had their own monetary potential. Garnering online traffic justified a renewed investment in the visual economy of an artist. With this growth of the online viewing platform, the necessity of adhering to the regulations imposed by television stations such as MTV became less crucial. Vernallis provides a portrait of the obstacles faced by artists and directors before the existence of YouTube and similar sites: In the eighties and nineties, music videos were primarily seen on a few satellite services— like MTV, BET, or VH1—or in a countdown on broadcast television late at night, and it was difficult for record companies to get their clips on the air. To make MTV rotation, clips were first vetted by a board of ten, then had to clear the Standards and Practices division. Consciously or unconsciously, directors and artists tailored their work for these committees. . .Directors and musicians could never predict which constraints would be enforced. For example, no alcohol or product placement was supposed to appear on MTV. . .Some forms of smooching and T&A were okay, others not. (Vernallis, 2013, p. 208)

In this section, Vernallis highlights the tenuous relationship between censorship and distribution. Music videos had to meet certain standards, even to be considered for rotation on what was a severely limited number of outlets, each with their own styles of programming. Most important to this research, she notes the lack of clarity around the representation of sexuality and physicality (colloquially referenced by her as “smooching” and “T&A” (tits and ass), respectively). While the banning of Madonna’s Justify My Love (1990) video for its explicit sexual content has become somewhat legendary—a sufficient promotional tool in itself—at the time, few artists could have sacrificed the support of MTV in a similar way as Madonna did. In an industry where MTV visibility was, as Vernallis suggests, intensely competitive for its promotional value, incorporating sexually provocative material could prove an 1

Though audiences are not able to upload their own content to Vevo, I have qualified the site as similar to YouTube for the ability offered to audiences to curate their own selection of content for viewing.

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unjustified risk. By contrast, she explores the current role of censorship on YouTube in the following passage: “There is little vetting of clips. Except for concerns about copyright violations (a constant struggle), prosumers feel free to upload a range of material that confounds genres. For example, many clips with full-frontal nudity remain up even though YouTube viewers can flag them” (Vernallis, 2013, p. 208). In this quote, Vernallis notes YouTube’s lack of censorship, which is controlled to a significant extent by its viewers, who have the option to “flag” offensive material for the site’s administrators to review. It is of note here that Peaches and Mykki Blanco have both had music videos censored by YouTube (Stutz). Their works were flagged by viewers and removed. However, unlike MTV, which would permanently remove a censored video, YouTube allowed Peaches’ Rub (2015) and Blanco’s Loner (2016) to go back onto the site after the flags were reviewed. In addition, a decrease in regulation, online distribution of music videos has also increased. Commercial websites such as Vevo, Hulu, Launch, and Pitchfork, are among the dozens of additional outlets where music videos are now dispersed (Stutz). Images in music video have responded to greater freedom to explore previously regulated content. Brooke Candy’s Opulence (2014), and Rhianna’s Bitch Better Have My Money (2015) are two such examples, which include Queer sexuality, acts of extreme violence by female protagonists, and nudity. These works experiment with gendered representations which confront the static binary whose representation in music video was effectively required by the outlets that distributed them. Change in regulations has triggered the production of more provocative content, while YouTube’s open platform for distribution and consumption has proved integral to allowing amateur musicians and directors to produce, consume, and distribute Queer work. The technological factors which saw returned revenue to music video, and greater license to visual content occurred in conjunction with dramatic social change, which may also have informed the Queer and Feminist content of contemporary work. The videos exemplify a growing consciousness of gender rights and roles, evidenced by a period whose radicalism can be measured in definitive political change and legislation. In 2015, same-sex marriage was legalized throughout the United States after the Supreme Court ruled state-level bans to be unconstitutional. Same-sex marriage has been legal in the United Kingdom since 2013. Since the first legalization of same-sex marriage in an American state in 2003, the extremity and prevalence of subversive representations of gender has increased in both commercial music videos, and in those by artists outside the mainstream, reinforcing its relevance as a period of study. While it is not my intention to establish causality between same- sex marriage laws and music video directly, the parallel progression poses relevant questions of cultural assimilation. Has Queer culture penetrated popular culture as a bi-product of greater gender and sexual equality that we might see as confirmed by same-sex marriage laws? Is it a more tenuous relationship of hetero-commercial culture co-opting the Queer market through its representation, while reinforcing the illusion of superiority by acting as gatekeepers to other social structures and ceremonies, such as marriage? Or, is music video a platform for anti-assimilation—a place where Queer representations combat heteronormative conformity? Though it will be not

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possible to address these questions in adequate depth, I hope to have opened a view to technology’s role in making Queer and Feminist aesthetics more accessible, sexually provocative, and in subjecting these objects of study to great scholarly analysis. Some of the videos which further evidence this include Mykki Blanco’s Loner (2016), produced with pornography website, PornHub (Stutz, 2017). Styled by Lady Gaga’s former stylist, Nichola Formichetti, the work features allusions to virtual and group sex, and has been one of the few videos to be banned by YouTube after being repeatedly flagged for explicit content by the site’s users. In the video, Butt Muscle (2017), artist, Christeene—a punk drag artist known for a grotesque aesthetic of matted, chopped hair, white contact lenses, and sloppy makeup—released a video in collaboration with avant-garde fashion designer, Rick Owens and his wife, Michele Lamy. In the video, Christeene inserts Owens’ long, black hair into her anus, which is then shown exiting her mouth. Christeene caresses Lamy’s naked, lubricated body, urinates on Owens, and holds two long, black, dildos that have been mounted on handles to look like guns. And, in spring of 2021 Lil Nas X released a video for his song “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” where he lyrically acknowledges himself as a Queer artist through references to the gay romance film, Call Me By Your Name (2017) (the lyrical refrain refers to the film’s title), and gives a lap dance to Satan after performing a pole dance in patent leather stiletto boots and a dog collar. Lastly, I will conclude with a case study of Arca’s video, Reverie (2017) to highlight some of the dynamic Queer and Feminist representations have been accommodated by the changing conditions explored above.

Arca, Reverie, 2017 Until the release of Reverie, Arca’s videos often lacked the kind of additional images or narrative that might complicate and contextualize Queer and Feminist relationships, environments, and identities. They often focused on a single image—either Arca’s body or a computer-animated figure of ambiguous gender—moving in vaguely sexual manner. In Sad Bitch (2014), we see a digital figure, naked, with an oleaginous, variegated green skin dancing slowly from behind. Small red bursts explode out of their back to the beat, then linger and float around their form. The figure’s back appears polyped and grotesque as more starry red bursts accumulate in the frame. The figure in Thievery (2014) is similar; digital, naked, bald, and androgynous, with the same sickly skin colour. We again see them from behind as they dance, but this figure twerks, and squats to the floor with their knees spread and their hands above their head. This figure eventually faces the camera, revealing breasts, but amorphous genitalia, which defy our initial inclination to gender the figure female. Close stills of the forward-facing body reveal demonic, child-like faces, inset in the figure’s hips. These are some of director Jesse Kanda’s signature characters. The video Soichiro (2014) marked a turning point for the inclusion of Arca’s body, but still lacked broader context. Arca’s recent works, however, have

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included more homoerotic and feminine imagery and costumes. The aesthetics has been compounded with images of wounds, prosthetics, and fusions with machine, suggesting an invincibility. This culminates in a posthuman feminism, enacted on a body further signified as Queer through performances in the video which I will explain below. In Reverie, we first see Arca’s hand protruding from a heavy, white lace sleeve of a bullfighter’s jacket. A small bit of torn fabric hangs from the cuff, set against a hot pink background. The delicate lace and saturated colour read of the classically feminine. The shot slowly moves up and away from their body, revealing complicated leg prosthetics. The attachments are made of leather and metal rods and are modelled after a bull’s leg shape. Arca’s feet are held in a stirrup of each attachment and they stand on metal hooves. Around the knee, there is a white globular shape, the texture of which is bumpy, covered in a lace black fabric, and vaguely reptilian. The construction of the attachment gives the illusion that this is Arca’s exposed skin. They wear black thong underwear. As the shot pulls further back we see that Arca is in an abstract space with neon red floors, flanked by curving hot pink walls. A sudden close-up on Arca’s face shows them in unexpected anguish. They look up with eyes wide and mouth drawn. The camera moves to the level of their pelvis. Another close shot shows that they have been penetrated from behind, straight through their body by a bull’s horn. As Arca grapples with the horn, however, the image looks simultaneously masturbatory. When the camera returns to their face, the suggestion of sexual pleasure gives a new reading to their expression. The image also readily suggests Queer sexual penetration. Arca staggers away, grabbing their buttock, which is smeared with the blood from their wound. They collapse, and the light changes to dark blue. They begin to crawl, and flower petals descend upon them. Their backlit, slow-moving body now looks wiry and animal-like. The music surges again, and they stand in a kind of resurrection. The pink hues return to the light. They flail and reach their arm out while the shot staggers as if the Earth too is in a quivering state of trauma. They collapse for a final time against the bright pink stage, the song ends, and the shot cuts to black. Sexual pain and pleasure, masturbation, and Queer sex are weighted with a valour imbued by their character as bullfighter. These elements’ collision with, and subversion of the classically feminine aesthetics of pinks and lace affirm a Queer Feminist subtext. There is further gender dissonance proposed throughout, in the pairing of Arca’s high, feminine, and operatic vocal with the more aggressive, industrial electronic sounds of the track. Arca has addressed this layered meaning, saying of the video that, “Bullfighting is a piercing metaphor: you are fighting a bull, and at the same [time] yourself. You are not the victim or the oppressor, you are both—Animality and bestiality are conflated. Evoking sex invokes our animality” (Arca). In this work, they employ more direct human manipulation, still coded with a cyborg aesthetic. I propose that Arca’s earlier work is less subversive, and ultimately less potent as Queer and Feminist work because it was symbolic of the posthuman, but ultimately always already non-human, un-human, digital. In a video such as Reverie, Arca displays the confusion and obliteration of the binary through the distinct production and performance of a live—aesthetically Queer, Feminist—

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posthuman other. For a scholar such as Robin Roberts, the body subsumed by technology in Sad Bitch (rather than embellished with glamorous, machine-like technology) would be seen as sufficiently subversive in its own right. In her book Ladies First: Women in Music Video (1996), Roberts asks, “How can the deconstructive possibilities of the postmodern art form be harnessed for the subversive agenda of a feminism committed to questioning the traditional limits of femininity?” (Roberts, 1996, p. xxv). In response, she explores the denaturalization of the cis-female body through montage, rapid sequencing, and fragmentation as combatting beauty and passivity as naturally feminine. She also sees this as working toward a confrontation with the commercial commodification of women’s bodies in videos such as Pat Benatar’s Sex as a Weapon, where Benatar performs against a satirical background of dozens of TV screens of leggy models. I agree with her focus on the form as its own source of discourse: this manipulation and mastery of the virtual anatomy also echoes a tenant of Katharine Hayles’ definition of the posthuman. She calls the body “an original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born” (Hayles, 1999, p. 3). I propose that our manipulation of, and reliance upon, technology has become, as Hayles suggests, a continuation of the prosthetic manipulation we first apply to our bodies. As Roberts’ work shows, it can also be used to combat the limits of what those bodies signify.

References Auferheide, P. (1986). Music videos: The look of the sound. Journal of Communication, 36(1), 57–78. Baxter, R., et al. (1985). A content analysis of music video. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 29(3), 333–340. Brown, J., & Campbell, K. (1986). Race and gender in music videos: The same beat but a different drummer. Journal of Communication, 36, 94–106. Burgess, J., & Green, J. (2009). YouTube: Online video and participatory culture. Polity. Burns, G., & Thompson, R. (1987). Music, television and video: Historical and aesthetic considerations. Popular Music and Society, 11(3), 11–25. Dyer, R. (1993). The matter of images: Essays on representation. Routledge. Frith, S., Goodwin, A., & Grossberg, L. (1993). Sound and vision: The music video reader. Routledge. Hayles, K. N. (1999). How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. University of Chicago Press. Kaplan, E. A. (1987). Rocking around the clock: Music television, postmodernism, and consumer culture. Routledge. Lawson, R. (2015). Why are there so many gay people on YouTube?” Vanity Fair. Retrieved from www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/06/youtube-digest-june-26 Nisker, M. (2016). Q&A: Peaches on queer imagery and getting yanked from YouTube. Montrealgazette, Montreal Gazette. Retrieved September 13, 2016, from www. montrealgazette.com/entertainment/qa-peaches-on-queer-imagery-and-getting-yanked-fromyoutube/ Railton, D., & Watson, P. (2011). Music video and the politics of representation. Edinburgh University Press.

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Roberts, R. (1996). Ladies first: Women in music video. University of Mississippi Press. Sherman, B., & Dominick, J. (1986). Violence and sex in music videos: TV and rock ‘n’ roll. Journal of Communication, 36(1), 79–93. Stutz, C. (2017). Mykki Blanco’s ‘Loner’ Back on YouTube After Calling Out Video’s ‘Homophobic’ Removal. Billboard. Retrieved from www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-hop/ 7597332/mykki-blanco-loner-video-youtube-removal Vernallis, C. (2013). Unruly media: YouTube, music video, and the new digital cinema. Oxford University Press.

Ryann Donnelly, PhD, is an artist and academic interested in modern and contemporary art with a focus on subversive bodily representation and performance strategies; Queer digital cultures and audiovisual practices; and the role of biopolitics in Queer and Feminist art historical narratives. She completed a practice-based PhD in the Visual Cultures Department at from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2017. Her first book, Justify My Love: Sex, Subversion, and Music Video was released by Repeater Books in 2019. She has held teaching positions at Goldsmiths, University of London; and Pratt Institute, New York; and is currently an Associate Lecturer in Art History at University of Sussex. Email: [email protected].

Chapter 11

Demystify Twenty-First Century Creativity, Innovation and Education through Film Analysis David Kei Man Yip

Abstract Creativity and innovation are, respectively, divergent and convergent thinking involving critical, reflective and design thinking across-the-board in various fields and settings. Creativity and innovation are important skills in the twenty-first century networked and knowledge-based global economy. In the future of work, being creative and innovative is very important to stay competitive. With emerging technologies such as AI, Big Data, 5G and many smart technologies, new tools give rise to new ways of thinking, expressing and doing things. However, creativity is often an internal, hidden and personal thinking process. The essence of creativity and innovation are often abstract, intangible and sometimes full of mysteries and misconceptions. This study takes a content analysis approach to discuss creativity and innovation through biographical films about the most creative and innovative people of our time. Through content analysis (White and Marsh, Library Trends 55(1): 22–45, 2006; Krippendorff, International encyclopedia of communication, vol. 1. Oxford University Press, New York, 2018), this study examines a selected group of biographical films inspired by or based on real-life characters in hopes of shedding new lights on how creative innovation works. Through analysing some of the thinking patterns of these great creative and innovative minds depicted in this film genre, the key focus of this study aims to discuss with new perspectives the topics of creativity and innovation, which is abstract and multi-factual in nature. After all, being creative and innovative is to examine issues from multiple perspectives. To demystify is to make this invisible and abstract process of creative innovation more visible for discussion. Keywords Adobe · AI · Big data · Bill Gates · Creativity · Innovation · Biographical films · French New Wave · Global village · Information superhighway · Jean-Luc Godard · John Nash · McDonald’s Brothers · Mark Zuckerberg · Metaverse · Pixar · Steve Jobs · Technology

D. K. M. Yip (✉) Computational Media and Arts Thrust, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Sight as Site in the Digital Age, Digital Culture and Humanities 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9209-4_11

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The global village and information superhighway were the technology buzzwords at the turn of the century. This global village and information superhighway have now been materialised as a major part of our daily life through the internet, in which there is no shortage of content. Content these days are not just generated by human but also generated by machines automatically. We do not just live in an information age; we live in an era of excessive information of infinite forms, shapes and types. This information travels at the speed of light making the old superhighway metaphor sound like a distant past. It is now unthinkable to live without a Wi-Fi network in a modern society. Data information can be further interpreted and analysed for various purposes including decision making. With so much information that can be generated and shared instantaneously anywhere anytime, anything is possible. With almost everything connected through the internet, twenty-first century is an age of unpredictability. The first two decades of the twenty-first century have also been the age of rapid digital automation and transformation. We use the internet to share, communicate and express virtually. We have media tools and platforms that lets us pull and organise content information but also at the same time it has pushed us much of the information tailor-made for us through algorithms analysing data of our own digital footprints. With so much information abundance, we not only need hardware and software but also mental power and thinking skills to help ourselves select, organise and process information. The COVID-19 pandemic has speeded up this digital and virtual transformation at an unprecedented rate beyond our imagination. It has forever changed the way we think, communicate, work and live. Smart city and smart living through the internet of things or its next phase metaverse are said to be the next big thing. Artificial intelligence and artificial creativity continue to be the buzzwords. Being smart but also being artificial seem like an unnatural but inevitable combination. These smart devices with artificial intelligence are supposed to let us live smartly and also virtually or artificially. Would these smart but artificial technology with artificial intelligence make us grow dependent or over-dependent on many smart devices that could ironically make us less smart or less creative? Human creativity has been known to be in decline and in crisis. (Bronson & Merryman, 2010; Kim, 2011) We need more natural and authentic creativity in the age of artificial creativity. The seemingly utopian view of the future in the Pixar animation Wall-E (2008) shows a world full of similar chubby looking people living comfortable life in the utopian high tech. world of automation. More horribly, not only do they all look alike, they also act alike. The hi-tech view of the future actually looks quite dystopian. Buzzwords change over time but the need for creative and innovative thinking is ever more in demand in the age of automation. To complete with machine, we human need to think creatively in order to stay in control. We have let machine do many things for us, not just manual work but also some of the thinking and creative work. Would this dependence on machine intelligence be soon at the expense of human intelligence and creativity? To be creative is to think differently with combination of logical, emotional, critical, reflective thinking. It is a process of both divergent and convergent thinking

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that is unique to individual with both objective and subjective factors taken into consideration. However, this creative thinking process is internal, hidden and sometimes chaotic, and also somewhat mysterious. We often can only see the result or end product of creativity and innovation and even the end product of creativity is subjective and personal subject to interpretation or mis-or over-interpretation. These selected biographical films on real-life creative and innovative minds have their primary sources of story materials based on published biographical books, interviews or prior research studies. Therefore, the biographical films are considered parts of the ongoing creative representations adapted with certain degree of creative license exercised on the part of the filmmakers for dramatic effects. According to Kline (1996) adaptation theory, story adaptation can be an ongoing culturalhistorical processes with institutional factors involved that shape the final creative work. These biographical films are no examples and can be considered as representation of these creative adaptive process. The focus of this study aims to discuss the topics of creativity and innovation through a content approach. Through content analysis of some biographical films of the most creative and innovative people of our time, we might be able to gain some insights of what creativity and innovation could look like in situated context. After all, to be creative and innovative is to examine issues differently through different perspectives. With this spirit in mind, this study discusses the film stories of the famous creative and innovative people in different lines of profession. We might not directly learn to be creative and innovative from these films; perhaps we can learn something about what make these people depicted in these films more creative and innovative through content analysis (Altheide & Schneider, 2013; Krippendorff, 1989; White & Marsh, 2006). The most obvious sources of data appropriate for content analysis are texts to which meanings are conventionally attributed: verbal discourse, written documents and visual representations. The mass media have been the most prominent source, and the literature is dominant by content analysis of newspapers, magazines, books, radio broadcasts, films, comics, and television programming (Krippendorff, 1989, p. 404).

Verbal discourse in the form of situated dialogue of some selected scenes in these biographical films provide data “to identify for concepts and patterns” (White & Marsh, 2006, p. 34) for scene analysis in order to “capture the meanings, emphasis, and themes of messages” (Altheide & Schneider, 2013, p. 33). Besides studying these scenes, film as a visual and audio medium has been metaphorically compared with dream (Rascaroli, 2002), which is often associated with creativity. Film is an artistic and creative expression of the filmmaker; dream is a subconscious and creative expression of the dreamer. Film is described as a dreamlike mirroring of reality. French filmmaker René Clair considered film like a “dreamlike state”. When we dream in sleep, our brain is actively connecting the brain neurons, in which many creative imagery can occur. Many creative breakthroughs and wonders were said to be inspired in dream. According to biographers

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of Paul McCartney and the Beatles,1 McCartney composed the entire melody of Yesterday in a dream one night. I woke up one morning with a tune in my head and I thought, “Hey, I don’t know this tune— or do I?” It was like a jazz melody. My dad used to know a lot of old jazz tunes; I thought maybe I’d just remembered it from the past. I went to the piano and found the chords to it [. . .]. “Do you know this? It’s a good little tune, but I couldn’t have written it because I dreamt it”.

Similarly, Rolling Stones’ I Can’t Get No Satisfaction2 written by Keith Richards and James Cameron’s film ideas such as The Terminator and Avatar were also reportedly said to be inspired in dreams.3 When we dream, our brain is busy making connections between the neurons that store our recent and no so recent memories and experiences. This unconscious act of connecting abstract and unrelated experiences forms the basis of our creativity. As Steve Jobs believed that creativity was about connecting things. He was referring to the act of consciously connecting knowledge and experiences in a creative process. In dream, our brain connects them unconsciously. Many studies have shown the relation between dream, creativity and problem-solving (Adelson, 1960; Montangero, 1993; Taylor, 1983). This active neural activity of dream lets us dream the most creative dream. In fact, neural networks simulating the connections of brain neural activities is one of the approaches in artificial intelligence and machine learning. These creative brain activities of a dream generate dream images that sometimes share similar visual expression and structure of film language with composition, movement and symbolism. Many of us might probably have experienced a dream that looked like a film, vividly visual and cinematic with characters, story and even climax in a sequential structure of moving images. As dream images is said to be a reflection of our subconscious and deep or lost memories, films and dreams can be connected in psychological analysis by examining the relationship between the act of watching cinema in the dark and the act of dreaming as a passive spectator in sleep. Similar to the dream images in our brain, we can only perceive the dream images like a passive audience in cinema. When a film begins in a dark movie house, it is as if the audience was invited to fall into sleep and into a dream. When a film ends, the audience seems to wake up to the reality feeling “sleepy and drowsy as if they had just woken up”, said French literary theorist, critic and semiotician Roland Barthes. Ingmar Bergman comments: “Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls”.

1

https://www.biography.com/news/paul-mccartney-the-beatles-yesterday-dream. https://medium.com/@thelegendsofmusic/the-story-behind-i-cant-get-no-satisfaction-9afe4d50 b6f0. 3 https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/hollywood/avatar-director-james-camerondreams-inspire-his-films-4799269/. 2

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At a subconscious level, both dream and creativity share some mysterious and unpredictable qualities as they are both creative forms of visual and narrative expressions.

The Myths Creativity is generally regarded as a right-brain activity of thinking divergently outside the box and it is often associated with art and design. Innovation is regarded as a left-brain activity with convergent and logical thinking within the box. Innovation is often associated with problem-solving ability in science, technology and business. In fact, even this well-known idea about right and left brain activities is discovered to be one of the misconceptions about creativity and how our brain works.4 Although it is true that different parts of our brain regulate different parts of our body functions, when we think and engage in creative activity, our brain connects different neurons across the entire brain regardless left or right. There have been many definitions and myths about creativity. To some, creativity can be an act of intuition driven by emotion and instinct without much thinking needed. This definition suits those who are in the performance arts or related creative works in which intuition and spontaneous improvisation are important parts of a creative process. To others whose works require more knowledge-based design structure and critical thinking, creativity is an act of intelligence. “Creativity is intelligence having fun”, said Einstein. Nevertheless, creativity is regarded by many as an inborn gifted talent that could not be directly taught but could be nurtured and developed. For some, creativity could be seen as a curse responsible for causing many unfulfilled ideas and pain. Another common myths or misconception about creativity is that it only refers to artistic creativity in art and design when in fact creativity is across-the-board and essential for success in almost every field and discipline. Adobe, the world famous design software company, developed eight types of creative personalities, which are artist, thinker, adventurer, maker, producer, dreamer, innovator and visionary (Fig. 11.1). They represent the main personality traits of creativity. Based on the psychology test, the link will ask visitor a series of questions about how he or she thinks and acts in certain situations. The responses determine to which creative personality the visitor belongs. Creative people can have a little bit of different combination or all eight types in them. They might also change types at different stages of the creative process. Instead of using the same old cliché brain image to symbolise creativity, the creative images and animation of these eight creative personality traits are distinctively visualised and animated to represent different qualities found in a creative person.

4

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/right-brainleft-brain-right-2017082512222.

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Fig. 11.1 Creative types by Adobe. Source: https://mycreativetype.com. Screen capture 21 May 2022

Innovation: The Rational Part of Creativity In his book Thinking: Fast and Show, Kahneman (2011) provides arguments about two kinds of thinking systems: system one was based on instinct and intuition that let us think quickly and freely and the second system was based on rational thinking, which required us to think slowly and carefully. Creativity is divergent thinking outside the box as a creative person likes to think of many possibilities and think from many perspectives; innovation is convergent thinking within the box because innovator focuses on solving problems creatively and inventively within constraints. Both involve different extend of critical thinking that belongs to the system two thinking according to Kahneman. If creativity is purely defined as thinking more on the emotion-driven side, then innovation is the critical and rational side of creativity. The catchy phrase “Think Different” is often used to associate with creativity, which is the starting point for all innovation. However, just thinking differently without taking action is not sufficient for innovation. Being innovative encompasses critical and reflective thinking skills, problem-solving ability, implementation knowhow, communication and collaborative skills and in many cases with entrepreneurial spirit also. To be truly creative is hard enough; to be creative and innovative with a can-do spirit at the same thing is even harder and arguably rare. One of the myths about creativity and innovation is that it begins with a flash of inspiration or breakthrough of great idea known as an eureka moment. The Eureka Myth (Burkus, 2013), the notion that all creative ideas arrive in a “eureka”, was an ancient Greek meaning “I’ve found it!” (Burkus, 2013, p. 19). The term implied

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some sorts of supernatural intervention involved in the formation of great idea. Ancient people mystified this moment of having a heaven sent idea from God. A person who has an eureka moment experienced an inspirational breakthrough or sudden discovery of a great idea. He or she can find this sudden inspiration by connecting information or events that do not seem to have any relation on the surface. Understanding the context of the eureka moments in films can help us understand how great ideas were being discovered and what creativity and innovation have got to do with them.

Eureka Moments in Film While some would argue that the Mark Zuckerberg’s eureka moment in Fincher (2011) The Social Network was the famous scene when the two Harvard twins approached Mark Zuckerberg for the first time. The twins offered him a chance to join them build a social network. From the conversation, it was expected that Mark would do all the technical work for the project. After the twins explained their idea to Mark, he agreed almost instantly. It was then thought that the original idea for the social network was not Mark’s to begin with. Indeed, lawsuits were made against Mark and huge amount of court settlements were made afterwards. Alternatively, there is another scene that could constitute a real eureka moment. It was a short and small scene, in which a typical conversation of a puzzled college boy sharing his secret crush on a girl to his indifferent friend. In this short scene, Dustin Moskovitz, the future co-founder of Facebook, was asking Mark Zuckerberg many questions about his love interest: “There's a girl in the art history class that you take. Her name is Stephanie Attic. Do you happen to know if she has a boyfriend? [. . .] I mean, have you ever seen her with anyone? [. . .] And if not, do you happen to know if she's looking to go out with anyone?” Mark Zucherberg was seen uninterested in this conversation. Without giving this conversation much thought, Mark reluctantly replied his friend. “Dustin. People don't walk around with a sign on them that says”. At that moment, Mark stopped as if he has just solved a big mystery. He then ran straight to his doom room to work on his new big idea. According to the film, this was the eureka moment that gave birth to the idea of Facebook. Mark just discovered the true mission of Facebook, which was to let young people like his puzzled friend Dustin to publicly declare their love relationship status. This brief eureka moment was considered the beginning of Facebook and the rest was history. It hit Mark like a lightning strike in the middle of an unrelated and even unimportant conversation. Another film example of eureka moment was also related to young men chasing girls in a university setting. A Beautiful Mind (2001) directed by Ron Howard was about the life of Nobel Laureate John Nash in Economics, who invented the famous equilibrium game theory. In the scene, John’s study was interrupted by his friends at the bar. Their conversation quickly turned to the five ladies entering the bar. As the men were discussing who among them would get the only blonde among the ladies,

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the conversation of these economic major graduate students were quickly turned into a discussion of Adam Smith’s theory of economics. “In competition, individual ambition serves the common good” as one of the men claimed. “Every man for himself” said another man. And then another added, “those who strike out are stuck with their friends”. All these talks suddenly gave John a new idea about Adam Smith’s theory of competition: Adam Smith was wrong [. . .]. if everyone competes the blond, we block each other and no one gets her [. . .] so then we go for her friends but they give us the cold shoulder, because no one likes to be second choice. Again, no winners [. . .] but what if none of us go for the blond [. . .] we don’t get in each other’s way, we don’t insult the other girls. That’s the only way we win. (Goldsman and Nasar, 2001)

And then John went on to say that “Adam Smith said that the best result comes from everyone in the group doing what is best for himself, right? . . . Incomplete. OK, because the best result would come from everyone in the group doing what is best for himself and the group”. John’s eureka moment led to a new theory that supplemented Adam Smith’s classic economic theory of how self-interest worked. This eureka breakthrough later led to his Nobel Prize winning work in equilibrium game theory. Similar to Mark who rushed out of the computer lab right after his reluctant conversation, John rushed out the bar right after their men’s talk about the girls. Although these situations along with other examples discussed in this study might be fictional events inspired by real-life people, these examples had something in common in depicting eureka moments. At first, both scenes began with talks about young men meeting young ladies. Secondly, they both illustrated how a spark of great creative insight could suddenly occur and inspire from something seemingly unimportant and unrelated. The criteria for this eureka moment to happen to a person, who must have been previously trying very hard to figure out the problems in hand. As Einstein put it, “Inspiration doesn’t come to the unprepared mind”. Being observant to the surroundings with an open mind, open eyes and ears was important ability to connect things to form new idea. Ironically, it was the real Mark Zuckerberg who spoke against the idea of a single eureka moment: “Movies and pop culture get this all wrong. The idea of a single eureka moment is a dangerous lie. It makes us feel inadequate since we haven’t had ours. It prevents people with seeds of good ideas from getting started”.5 Mark Zuckerberg didn’t mean to say that eureka moment could not occur in real life. What he meant to say was that a single eureka moment was overrated and undetermined the importance of a creative and innovative process that often began with not one single eureka moment but many small ideas connected together along the way. As a creative journey is full of unpredictability, it should be filled with explorations, small and big trials and errors and discoveries in the process with many small eureka moments that occur at different stages of a creative process.

5

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/26/full-text-of-mark-zuckerbergs-2017-harvard-commencementspeech.html.

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Myth about Originality Being creative and innovative is to come up with original thought and useful thing. Another myth about creativity is that creative idea must be original, and often time, the spotlight or credit of a creative work is given to just one person. In many cases, creative ideas are not necessarily all too original. Creative people often use creative methods and work with other creative people to do creative things or do things creatively. The Originality Myth and the Lone Creator Myth (Burkus, 2013) are the notions that good creative ideas come from a sole creator and the creator’s idea must be wholly original. Originality doesn’t exist in vacuum. All creative ideas must be inspired by other sources. Originality has been described as the art of concealing the sources. Even Einstein was quoted saying, “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources”. As Mark Twain put it “Substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources”. In the film Jobs (2013), Steve was acting furiously after discovering Bill Gates’ Microsoft Windows interface design looking a lot like his. He immediately accused Gates of stealing his idea and threatened lawsuit against him. According to Burkus (2013, p. 61), Gates calmly responded saying “I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it”. Gates was referring to their competitor, another computer company called Xerox, where Steve Jobs once visited and reportedly got his own interface inspiration from. The Father of French New Wave Film Jean-Luc Godard once said, “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to”. “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination”, said renowned independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. Creative people stand on the shoulders of the great giants before them. For many creators, one of the known methods of generating creativity is a process of combining old or existing ideas. Combinational creativity is the process of mixing and matching old and existing ideas to come up with something new. Similarly, Steve Jobs described creativity is about connecting things, which are made up of all the experience and knowledge one can accumulate. In dream, connections between neurons were made unconsciously by our brain to form dream images. In a creative thinking process, we attempt to make these connections consciously. When connections were made, a network or system of dots were formed. Thus, combinational creativity is also similar to system thinking. To think systematically is to consciously connecting observations, experience and knowledge like making a mind map with one important ingredient—human imagination. As Albert Einstein famously put it “imagination is more important than knowledge”. You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. (Steve Jobs)

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In other words, in a creative process, one cannot anticipate and predict how dots will be connected together to form new idea as creativity is full of uncertainty and unpredictability. We can only understand how these dots were connected when we looked back and reflected on the creative experience. Ideas don’t come out fully formed. They only become clear as you work on them. You just have to get started. If I had to understand everything about connecting people before I began, I never would have started Facebook. (Mark Zuckerberg)

That also explained why Mark Zuckerberg thought that eureka moment is a dangerous life.”6 One cannot know connected in the beginning of or even the early stages of a key is to begin the process and ideas will become clear experience of trials and errors.

“the idea of a single how dots would be creative process. The later on through the

From Creativity to Innovation The biographical film Jobs (2013) also shows that creativity must work with the creator’s burning desire, persistence, passion and vision in hopes of providing the best and unique user experience for customers while paying great attention to the smallest details that make up the whole user experience. Creativity is often an unconscious process filled with emotion-driven intuition. As discussed earlier, innovation can represent the rational side of creative thinking. If divergent thinking is to come up with many ideas; critical and convergent thinking is to identify and select the best ones to concentrate on through a critical selection process. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying “no” to 1000 things. (Steve Jobs)

Moneyball (2011) is a film adapted from the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (Lewis, 2004), which is based on a true story. In one famous scene, the general manager of the baseball team keeps pressing his team for the answer of one question: “What’s the problem?” he asked repeatedly as none of the answered he heard satisfied him. Although the question seems simple, the answer is not. He explains that baseball is an unfair game. “There are rich teams and there are poor teams, and then there is 50 feet of crap, and then there is us”. Moneyball shows the importance of critical thinking in identifying the key problem first and then uses creative method to solve the problem. It is a story about an underdog team that turns data evidence into winning with a new mathematical tool called sabermetrics, which measures not how many hits a player makes but how long each player runs and stays

6

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/26/full-text-of-mark-zuckerbergs-2017-harvard-commencementspeech.html.

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in the base and thus increases chances of scoring. This revolutionary move represents a cultural and thinking shift in management and leadership in baseball against old school conventional wisdom.

Moneyball vs. Sully While Moneyball shows the importance of critical thinking and embraces the idea of using numerical data in decision making and creative problem-solving, another biographical film Sully (2016) gives almost an opposite view on this topic. While the former film is about the use of numerical data in assessing ball player’s performance, the latter film is about the importance of taking into complex non-numerical human factors and contextual information in assessing and interpreting data information. It supplements the weakness of the sabermetrics used in the former film that does not take into account many other real-life complex human factors. Player’s confidence, emotions, teamwork and other people issues just cannot be directly converted into numerical data. Sully (2016) is based on actual incident of the hero pilot who successfully lands the plane on Hudson River after the sudden failure of both engines. The incident is certainly an example of quick critical thinking and problem-solving creativity. The biographical film embraces this aspect of creative problem-solving. Nevertheless, the film unfairly portrays a group of characters who play the airline investigators as antagonists against the hero pilot. These airline investigators use data generated from computer simulations to question the pilot’s decision by showing that the plane can have returned to the airport safely. Both films have been dramatised to different extents. The latter film further fictionalises the investigators’ bias against the hero pilot. The message and the theme are about the overreliance on numerical data that ignores some of the qualitative human factors involved in decision making. It advocates against the bias of using incomplete numerical data without taking into human factors. The high point of the film is a public hearing during which several simulation tests are conducted to prove the investigators’ case against the pilot’s decision. However, as the hero pilot points out, these tests are all carefully rehearsed without objectively taking into the account of the emergency situations and the time it takes for human to respond in the case of emergency. When human factors are loosely converted into seconds added to the simulated tests, the new result are in favour of the pilot’s decision to land on the river. Although these films are dramatised for dramatic effects, these two films show us two sides of the coin. On one side, it shows the strength of using numerical data in decision making. The flip side shows the weakness of it when the data does not take into account some of the subjective and emotional human factors that might not be easily quantifiable by numbers. Problem-solving creativity involves exercising critical thinking in decision making. Critical thinking involves taking into accounts both quantifiable and the not so

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quantifiable factors, both objective and subjective ones, into consideration, especially when human behaviours and emotions are involved. With the rise of big data technology, many major corporations have relied on numerical data in making important decisions and predictions. While data can identify patterns, calculate odds and predict new trends but data machine cannot automatically mimic the human responses and the complex human thinking and emotions involved in decision making, especially in Sully’s situation when so many lives are at stake. Similarly, machine can predict basing on data. It can’t mimic human’s ability to imagine. A visionary is a forward thinker who turns his or her knowledge, experiences, problem-solving creativity, critical thinking and imagination into innovation. Like innovators Henry Fore and Steve Jobs who, respectively, talked about that their innovative vision was not the product of customer survey. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”, said Henry Ford who invented the assembly line that revolutionised the automobile industry. Steve Jobs was also famous for trusting his own intuition and instinct over study or data analysis. Of course, their intuition and instinct were inspired by their good observation, rich experiences and creative imagination. Their creativity and innovation came from identifying and approaching problems from their unique perspective, which was based on their long years of objective and subjective observation, experience, confidence and imagination. Knowledge alone is insufficient. Vision is able to synthesise all these to form its own view of things. While a machine can observe patterns and predict trends through iteration, a machine lacks the ability to imagine. Predicting is different from imagining. Prediction is based on objective patterns of what have happened before; imagination takes one step further from prediction. Imagination is dare to think subjectively and freely out of the box and beyond. Creative imagination embraces subjective and personal judgement. Data can reveal problems, but the solutions to these problems require creative, critical and imaginative thinking with a period of trials and errors, which forms the base for design thinking.

Creative Innovation through Design Thinking Creative innovation is a process of research, iteration, prototyping and testing. This process is also known as design thinking, which is a system of design process with stages of thinking beginning with problem identification, research, conceptualisation, idea refinement, trials and errors, prototyping and implementation. This human-centred design process reminds designer to focus on the people they are creating for, which can lead to better innovation. In the biographical film The Founder (2016), the two McDonald Brothers were frustrated with the time inefficiency and the high cost of running the traditional drive-in fast food restaurant targeting mostly youngsters with little money to spend on food. The brothers observed and identified several key high-cost problems, such as the long waiting time, the traditional way of preparing food on demand, high cost

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Fig. 11.2 Design thinking and innovation in the founder. Source: https://www.subtraction. com/2018/01/23/design-lessons-from-mcdonalds/. Screen capture 21 May 2022

of running a drive-in or restaurant space and the large menu choice that resulted in unsold food. In response to these problems, they limited their menu to just hamburger, French fries and soda. Disposable paper packaging was used instead of regular dishes. They changed their ordering system making their customers walk up to the front counter to order food instead of staying in their cars. They also came up with their system of food production. They rehearsed and tested their food production line to achieve efficiency. This process is known as design thinking (Fig. 11.2), which starts from idea conceptualisation to execution through a series of research, prototyping and testing as proof of concept. The term Design Thinking was not invented when the McDonald’s Brothers practised their new food production system by drawing different food sections on the ground and rehearsed the staff’s different divisions and movements with a timer. Efficiency with precise timing was the key to their new system. It took many trials and errors before they invented a new innovative system. However, this new system was still a complete disaster as the customers were confused and totally not ready to accept this whole new culture and model. Hollywood films like to celebrate persistence and turning points. As the story went, the brothers used their previous experience in show business to set up promotion events to attract families. Eventually people then began to accept this new innovation. Innovation was not about coming up with new technology. In this story, innovation was about inventing a new system, and a new culture and way of doing things. To be creative and innovative is to take risks trying and to learn from trials and errors until a concept is proven and optimised.

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Fig. 11.3 Knight Lab of Northwestern University (right) and website showcasing their innovation (Left). Courtesy of https://knightlab.northwestern.edu/. Screen capture 21 May 2022

Education for Innovation In one of the intense scenes in the biographical film Jobs (2013), Steve Jobs the character declared: Why do they buy an Apple, not the competitor? Because it’s got bravado. It’s social status . . . It’s social currency. We’ve raised the bar. And if we want to stay there, we gotta risk everything. Great artists, Dylan, Picasso, Newton, they risk failure. And if we want to be great, we’ve gotta risk it, too. (Whiteley 2013a, 2013b)

Knowledge and experiences are the dots, of which creative people connect to make creative ideas. This creative process also combines with one’s imagination, motivation and passion in order to turn creative ideas into innovative products. As a creative and innovative process is full of uncertainty and unpredictability, a creative innovator must be willing to take risks and never be afraid of failures. As one of the most innovative companies, IDEO7 celebrates failure because it can lead to iteration. Their founder David Kelley famously said, “Fail early and fail faster, in order to succeed sooner”. Although failure doesn’t necessarily lead to success, being able to learn from failure can definitely increase the chance of success. However, the mainstream education system often penalises failure and thus discourages students from taking intellectual risks. Our mainstream education system that largely concerns about ranking students does not encourage students to think differently. Quite contrarily, it encourages the opposite through standard tests and answers. Our education system often rewards high scores from tests or exams as the main form of success and penalises failures through a selective ranking process of competition. Knight Lab of the Northwestern University (Fig. 11.3) promotes interdisciplinary team teaching and project-based learning culture as pedagogy for creative innovation. Their teacher team is made up of educator, computer programmer, artist, designer and storyteller and their students have diverse interests and backgrounds.

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https://designthinking.ideo.com/.

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This culture of innovation combines with design thinking pedagogy has turned many creative ideas into innovative educational products that are shared with the public.

Conclusion We have discussed some biographical films that show examples of the creative and innovative minds in different situations and contexts. Although it is true that some people are more creative than others, creativity is not necessarily inborn nor just some mysterious or unexplainable talents. Creativity is intuition, instinct and much more. As the films have shown, it is about how ones thinks, feels and connects knowledge and experiences and be inspired by living. It is about habits of thinking and ways of living with curiosity, sensibility, and open heart and mind. It is also one’s conscious effort and willingness to think critically and to imagine boldly. Knowledge helps definitely but knowledge alone is not enough. Creativity and innovation embrace not just objective knowledge but also subjective emotion, intuition, judgement, intelligence and imagination. We also have other memorable and provocative forward-thinking films such as Her, Ex Machina, Moon, etc. that show us the artificial kind of creativity, emotion and intelligence. However, this group of sci-fi films is beyond the scope of this article. These films ask the question whether new ground-breaking technology, though fictional, is technological breakthrough or breakdown of humanity? The question remains: can current and future smart technologies let us live smarter and freer? As smart technologies continue to evolve, this debate topic will continue for some decades to come. Every major technological breakthrough has brought new opportunities and challenges to humanity. From TV to the different phases and generations of the Internet, the mass media had changed from content pushing to content pulling and later content sharing and co-creating. Early Internet users were able to choose and pull information from the Internet as they wished. Nowadays, the Internet has evolved into something that does both pulling and pushing at the same time by analysing the user’s browsing and clicking habit. Machine is now smart enough to push specific or even tailor-make content for the individual user before he or she knows the need of it. While technology evolves and more new buzzwords will be created, the need for creative and innovative thinking is ever more in demand in the age of automation. Instead of becoming more homogenous in the world of digital conformity when everyone is using similar digital tools and workflow, we need to understand more about creativity in order to be more creative. To be creative is to challenge the status quo and conventional wisdom, which is not always outdated and irrelevant. To be critical is to be able to know the differences and to make good decision by asking the right questions and solving the problems creatively. However, creative thinking is not sufficient if it just remains on the conceptual or thinking level. We need innovative skills to put creativity to good use and to do good things.

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Due to the pandemic, the next big digital transformation is already happening. Big data, AI deep learning, virtual or extended reality continue to redefine reality and blur the line between the unreal and real. Internet of things among many other innovative technologies will continue to change the way we think, feel, communicate and live. They have certainly changed the way we create and express. Nevertheless, creativity is not just for art expression, but also relevant to all fields. Creative thinking skills are not just great to have, but essential survival skills for anyone to stay competitive in the global market. In the twenty-first century, information and knowledge are everywhere at anyone’s fingertip anytime. We need to develop our own know-how system to select from the abundance of information and to put knowledge to good use. It is not about what we know; it is about what we can do with what we know and will learn. We have already learned to co-create content with strangers in the Internet and we can now co-create with machine with deep machine learning of artificial intelligence. The collaboration between machine and human will be the norm with everything connected in the future metaverse. We need authentic creativity to work with artificial creativity and intelligence. We need innovation to make good use of the machine rather than being used by it.

References Adelson, J. (1960). Creativity and the dream. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly of Behavior and Development, 6(2), 92–97. Altheide, D. L., & Schneider, C. J. (2013). Process of qualitative document analysis. In Qualitative media analysis (pp. 23–41). Springer. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452270043.n3 Bronson, P., & Merryman, A. (2010). The creativity crisis. Newsweek. Retrieved from https://www. newsweek.com/creativity-crisis-74665 Burkus, D. (2013). The myths of creativity: The truth about how innovative companies and people generate great ideas. John Wiley & Sons. Fincher, D. (2011). The social network. Sony picture. Retrieved from https://thescriptlab.com/ download/screenplays/thesocialnetwork_screenplay.pdf Goldsman, A., & Nasar, S. (2001). A beautiful mind. Retrieved from https://www.scriptslug.com/ script/a-beautiful-mind-2001 Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and show. Macmillan. Kim, K. H. (2011). The creativity crisis: The decrease in creative thinking scores on the torrance tests of creative thinking. Creativity Research Journal, 23(4), 285–295. https://www.nesacenter. org/uploaded/conferences/SEC/2013/handouts/Kim_Creativity-Crisis_CRJ2011.pdf Kline, K. E. (1996). The accidental tourist on page and on screen: Interrogating normative theories about film adaptation. Literature/Film Quarterly, 24(1), 70–83. Krippendorff, K. (1989). Content analysis. In E. Barnouw, G. Gerbner, W. Schramm, T. L. Worth, & L. Gross (Eds.), International encyclopedia of communication (Vol. 1, pp. 403–407). Oxford University Press. http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/226 Lewis, M. (2004). MoneyBall: The art of winning an unfair game. WW Norton & Company. Montangero, J. (1993). Dream, problem-solving, and creativity. In C. Cavallero & D. Foulkes (Eds.), Dreaming as cognition (pp. 93–113). Harvester Wheatsheaf. https://psycnet.apa.org/ record/1993-99001-005

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Rascaroli, L. (2002). Oneiric metaphor in film theory. Kinema: A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media, 2002, 982. https://openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/kinema/article/download/ 982/1054?inline=1 Taylor, J. (1983). Dream work: Techniques for discovering the creative power in dreams. Paulist Press. White, M. D., & Marsh, E. (2006). Content analysis: A flexible methodology. Library Trends, 55(1), 22–45. Whiteley, M. (2013a). Jobs. Retrieved from https://subslikescript.com/movie/Jobs-2357129 Whiteley, M. (2013b). Jobs. Script in PDF. Retrieved from https://www.scripts.com/scriptpdf/11335

David Kei Man YIP is currently Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). He received his MFA in Film Production at University of Southern California and his EdD at Bristol University. He had worked in the film industry and had taught in the School of Creative Media, the City University of Hong Kong, and also served as Programme Leader of BFA (Hons) in Animation & Visual Effects, and Programme Leader of BA (Hons) in Computing and Interactive Entertainment, Department of Creative Arts, The Open University of Hong Kong (now renamed as Hong Kong Metropolitan University) before he joined the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He has published on digital games and film animation. Email: [email protected]

Chapter 12

Visual Art as Alternative Epistemological Approach Myriam Dao

Abstract I have seen vernacular cultures in South China slowly disappear since 1987. In France, meanwhile, I have witnessed an epistemic oppression towards the profession of my father, a Vietnamese diviner. Similar oppression has been denounced by South American thinkers (Anonymous. (2011). Épistémologies du Sud. Études Rurales, 187, 21–50). One of the French Theory thinkers, Jean-François Lyotard, wrote: “[...] knowledge and power are simply two sides of the same question: who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided?” (Lyotard 8–9, The post-modern condition, Manchester University Press, 1984) The argument in this study is that alternative epistemologies need alternative analytical frameworks. In addition to academic epistemic standards, the primacy of written language, and particularly the English language, erodes cultural and epistemological diversity. The question this study seeks to address is how hegemonic thought and language might be replaced by an alternative approach, such as that of visual art, not only as tool but as an object of reflection and archive. My proposal to “Sight as Site in the Digital Age” presents a selection of two artworks constituting my corpus, my statement and manifesto. – De nos vies... quelques traits (Outlines of Our Lives) aims to highlight the traces of divinatory arts that bear the capacity to imagine future. The video (18’36, with English subtitles, available online) was shot in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) during the French Institute’s 2018 Villa Saigon residency programme. – Élévation is a photographic series shot in the Yunnan Honghe Terrace fields (People’s Republic of China PRC) in 1995–1996. These photographs document the Hani ancestral ecosystem before the development of tourism. A “Villa Medicis Hors les Murs” grant made this work possible. Keywords Appadurai · Art · China · Divination · Epistemology · Hani culture · I Ching · Image · Language · Lyotard · Non-western calendar · Vernacular · Vietnam

M. Dao (✉) Independent Researcher, Paris, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Sight as Site in the Digital Age, Digital Culture and Humanities 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9209-4_12

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Vernacular Cultures and Epistemic Oppression: A Field for Alternative Epistemologies Why study vernacular cultures? First of all, I wish to clarify where I am speaking from as a woman who is perceived as “racialised” in France, and the context that has produced my standpoint (Bracke & Puig de la Bellacasa, 2013). My father was born in the former French colony of Indochina where he began to practise the divinatory arts. He then exercised the profession of diviner throughout his definitive exile in France. In Paris in the 1960s, this profession was considered at the bottom of the social ladder, and, although divinatory art requires a long apprenticeship and years of practice, it was regarded as “charlatanism”, or even a sham, in comparison with so-called “modern” science. My father did not teach me Vietnamese, his native language, wishing his children to master French, the dominant language (Dao, 2020a). This context made me sensitive to the notion of injustice or “epistemic oppression” long before I could name this form of inequality. I studied architecture. Very quickly, I lost interest in the modern architecture that the French schools of architecture focused on in the 1980s–1990s. I drew my inspiration from the vernacular architecture of the countries of the South, which seemed to me less dogmatic and as having political, social, and environmental significance, even though they were widely minoritised. My interests come from this double heritage. The landscapes and dwellings of the Hani rice farmers of southern China are human constructions that are quite the opposite of the tabula rasa of modern architecture, and in particular that which Le Corbusier built in Chandigarh, India. They, along with my focus on divinatory arts such as Tử Vi in Vietnam, which derives from Chinese thought and is based on an “ecology of knowledge”, opened me to new epistemological perspectives. Once we have recognised this epistemic injustice and the devaluing of vernacular cultures, how can we shift our gaze and with what new tools?

A Vision from “Below” as an Alternative to the On-High Vision of the Academy From the 1970s on, feminist scholars like Sandra Harding showed that scientific knowledge is not neutral and that there is a close relationship between science and politics (Harding, 1991, 2004). Moreover, epistemic oppression has been brought to light by scholars from South America such as Santos (2017), who establishes the link between epistemologies of the South, exclusion from the production of knowledge, and the academy. By studying theory at the expense of practice, a significant proportion of the knowledge created by humans is set aside. Arturo Escobar’s concept of senti-pensar (thinking-feeling), which aims to give space to non-modern, non-dualistic ontologies, in their approach to nature, the earth, and the planet, is necessary for decentering (Escobar, 2018).

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The primacy of writing, mainly from the historian’s point of view, has been challenged by alternative discourses, such as that of the “witness”, whose subjective speech emerged at the Chicago School of Sociology through the testimonies of Polish migrants. In France, in the 1930s, Marc Bloch and the École des Annales sought to put the questions of beliefs and representation at the heart of the Social Sciences. In addition to the change of method, there was a shift of interests, from the grand history of the powerful of this world to small narratives; the life stories of ordinary people. Pursuing the movement of the École des Annales, which aimed to end academic hierarchisation and compartmentalisation, Cultural Studies has proposed an approach to popular, minority, and protest cultures since the 1960s. Their transdisciplinary and even “anti-disciplinary” dimension, mixing philosophical, anthropological, artistic, sociological, and literary approaches, are close to that of French Theory which strongly inspired me. On the one hand, the “scientificity” of knowledge is questioned (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2003), and, on the other, the status of the “legitimate” speaker, whose knowledge is purported to be admissible, contrary to that of the impostor, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued. He considered the production of knowledge limited not only by the position of authority from which it is expressed, but also by the legitimate language, requiring linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1977). The disappearance of vernacular languages and the erosion of cultural diversity are among the consequences of these conditions of knowledge production. In the academy, the hegemony of the written language, and in particular English, contributes strongly to this, creating a new “academic colonialism” (Nguyen et al., 2018; Ramanathan, 2007; Tupas, 2011). An alternative, real counter-discourse to this predominance is necessary, using extra-linguistic means, in order to avoid the dilemma between national languages and the language of global capitalism.

The Power of the Visual Image Art, and especially the visual arts, have been mobilised in Social Science seminars for some years. However, the place given to them sometimes leaves me confused. Is mobilising guest artists just a passing phenomenon to update the academy? Do works of art only have illustrative value to support the researchers’ points of view? What is the status of the image in the hierarchy of knowledge? The artist’s position of exteriority to the institution, or even his/her social commitment, is indispensable to the academy. The Pictorial Turn advocated by W. J. T. Mitchell in 1992 gives the visual a subversive and critical force vis-à-vis ideology—a real social and political force, then—as understood in Cultural Studies (Delacourt, 2019). I situate myself within that line of thought. Moreover, I would like to make a detour via the special place given to the image in two cultures: Italian and Chinese. These cultures have linked image/power and image/thought, seeing this language as accessible to both the eye and the mind. To

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summarise briefly, in the history of Western art, a scientific vision of the image, forged according to the laws of perspective, appeared in Florence, Italy. In 1435, Leon Battista Alberti established both the “frame” of painting—subsequently, this frame would become that of photography and cinema—and the status of artists in (the ideal) society. This strong link between art and power in a sense initiated the foundations of the political commitment of the artist (Alberti, 2007). In ancient Chinese thought, the ideographic character 象 (xiang) designates both the image and the phenomenon, such as the figures of the stars in the sky (Jullien, 2003, p. 331). “The image, for Chinese scholars, is not a simple given representation of the real perceived by the eye. It itself is a phenomenon, produced by the commitment of humans assuming their mediating position in the cosmos. It is a realism of another order” (Li, 2016, p. 47). Western thought has more difficulty extrapolating theory from the image, as the philosopher Carl Jung expressed in the preface to the English translation of I Ching, Book of Changes by Richard Wilhelm: “While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed moment” (Wilhelm, 1962, p. 2). In Chinese thought, and especially in the I Ching, more than a monstration, the image of the hexagram ushers a demonstration. In addition, the I Ching provides a spatial description of the hexagram. (See, for example, Fig. 12.1, hexagram number 11 T’ai/Peace: above K’un the receptive, earth; below Ch’ien the creative, heaven). Thus, an image and a judgement correspond to each combination of continuous and discontinuous lines (Jullien, 2003). The reference to the I Ching allows me to mention the original function of Chinese pictorial writing in ideograms: the interpretation of the oracle. Unlike writing born in Mesopotamia for accounting purposes in trading, Chinese writing has a mantic, divinatory origin (Vandermeersch, 2013). Art has always had an allegorical and metaphorical side, and painting conveys an idea, cosa mental (a mental thing), an imaginary landscape or meditation, as Leonardo da Vinci wrote; the Mona Lisa thus conveys the idea of the passage of time and the humanism of the Renaissance. While Leonardo Da Vinci “juxtaposes” Fig. 12.1 A hexagram in the I Ching

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two-time spaces in the Mona Lisa—the “figure” of the Mona Lisa and the landscape in-the-making in the background—the landscapes of Chinese painting “superimpose” several entities by building levels (water, mountain, the hermit, the clouds). Closer to us in time in photography, montage, and collage operate in the same way, making several temporalities coexist. Like in the perspective view of the Renaissance, the composition organises the different grounds of the landscape. By organising space, the artist organises thought. The image produced by the artist is neither reality nor truth but requires his standpoint. From the moment it was accompanied by a caption, the image has borne a dual meaning. In Europe, a turning point in the reading and interpretation of images came with the Dada movement, whose titles of works attribute another meaning to the images, shifting it. For Walter Benjamin, the caption is a “trigger” of the speech, triggering what will be said in the commentary (Masure, 2014). Benjamin further emphasises the articulation between reading and writing—reading being subject to cultural code— prophesising in 1930: The illiterate of the future, it has been said, will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph. But must we not also count as illiterate the photographer who cannot read his own pictures? (Benjamin, 1996, p. 29).

The image is an interaction between its creator and its viewer, for whom it can produce representations. In 1936, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre expressed the idea that the image is an act (Sartre, 1936). Art historian Horst Bredekamp goes even further: “the image acts”, bearing a potential to act, and even a political and social dimension (Bredekamp, 2015). My approach does not consist in using the image as an object of interdisciplinary research. My aim is not to analyse images but to produce images that bear meaning and questioning, beyond their aesthetic dimension. It is the visual which is itself transdisciplinary, a vector of modes of thought and action, inscribed in a temporality because belonging to a spatial and physical contextuality; the image is a construction of cognitive operations (Piaget & Inhelder, 1966). Beyond the images emerges the question of the construction of the sensible and phenomenological experience, and the impact on sensibility and the imaginary.

Corpus, Archive, and Artistic Manifesto How to approach minoritised cultures from my position as an independent artistresearcher? I am not in a position of authority, the art that I produce is outside the art market, and deliberately territorialised, in contrast to an “unsituated” production. As an artist, I create and share my work outside of the gallery system, thanks in particular to the Internet which has allowed the emergence of alternative content. These counter-discourses have been produced in particular thanks to digital

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technology, which significantly reduces the cost of producing images, and allows people far from mainstream production modes to produce their own images and sounds. Digitalisation is a real revolution not only in production but also in the dissemination of alternative visual content and narratives. Concretely, there are two constants in my approach. In a given context, I will opt to produce an in situ, contextual, temporal work. Like a director, I take into account the place and the audience that the work addresses. Each issue will have a unique, suitable, and tailored response. The second constant is the desire to challenge preconceived ideas by proposing singular perspectives. Furthermore, since I question the predominance of written language, I aim to produce new languages, to build new hybrid tools, to produce knowledge, from images, gestures, and works of art. My objects of study depart from the dominant culture, from officialised history, to focus on popular cultures, vernaculars, and small narratives (Simbao, 2019). Whether it is Tử Vi Vietnamese divination or irrigated terrace rice growing, these cultures share a holistic view of the universe. Vietnamese divination and the Yunnan Hani ecosystem are at the same time practices to implement and worldviews that are part of a thought system inherited from the origin myths. By focusing on these cultures, I wish to highlight the risk of seeing them erased by dominant living standards, whether those of the majority Han ethnic group in the People’s Republic of China, or those introduced by Western culture, which impact language and education, culture and the environment. Indeed, to understand these worlds, I have to use both practical and theoretical tools. As an artist and architect, I create an answer for each given context, producing archives and visual materials in situ (drawing, photography, sketches, and video), my approach moving away from imitation and the application of a method. The visual archive I have created is not only intended to document and bear witness to invisible cultures, but also to present my positioning in relation to these cultures. First of all, I noted that their representations in mainstream culture and the collective imagination were reductive and gave a “folkloric” vision. It was then necessary to deconstruct, in order to build.

First Artwork: De nos vies... quelques Traits (Outlines of Our Lives) Immediately after the advent of socialist politics in Vietnam, just like in the People’s Republic of China, everything related to divinatory knowledge was banned. But beyond the folkloric aspects of the lunar calendar, signs of the divinatory arts’ persistence still exist. The production context of this artistic work was a “Villa Saigon” grant and artistic residency at the French Institute in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC).

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This video work shot in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) may be understood as a “visual philosophical essay”, with several objectives. First of all, I try to emphasise the fundamental place that the current measurement of Vietnamese time—a non-western one based on the lunar calendar—occupies in Vietnamese culture. This temporal measurement is one of the foundations of Vietnamese civilisation, but what is problematic is that it has been reduced to folklore, and the divinatory arts related to it have been left in the margins, or even banished, ostracised. Science, culture, tradition, thought, religion, belief, myth, folklore: the words that qualify that which we believe in shift according to the position from which we speak. I went to HCMC to make an inventory of the persistence of the divinatory arts related to the specific measurement of time, which I try to capture here. In this video work, there is no longer any theory or practice, but an imbrication of phenomena, art, and concerns. This video plays on the different statuses of the image—a trace, representation, miniaturisation, memory, interpretation, readings of images by the art critic, just as the diviner “reads destiny”—in order to question our certainties. The difficulty is making visible a knowledge like divination that has remained “occult” and abstract concepts such as doubt or the future. The video is structured in five parts, all of which represent temporal concepts, and appeal either to collective memory or the memory of the intimate.

Video Part 1: Cosmologies The printed solar lunar calendar is a must-have item for the celebration of the lunar New Year. The place that it occupies in the physical space might inform us of the status of this particular measurement of time in Vietnamese culture. Everywhere in HCMC, a lunar calendar hangs on the wall, whether places of millennial worship, of teaching, companies, offices, restaurants. In private homes, people of all generations also display the lunar calendar on the wall. Printers compete in originality to offer colourful and illustrated copies of a constantly renewed iconography. I wandered around HCMC and discovered a great diversity of these printed calendars. The lunar solar wall calendar has a central place, of course, but the collective imagination has made it a “kitsch” object of consumption. I propose a completely different understanding. Of the many shots of lunar solar wall calendars, in their context, the video presents only a representative excerpt. The object itself juxtaposes two temporalities: the official solar calendar (Gregorian) and the lunar calendar, both coexisting on the same page (Fig. 12.2). Next to the calendars is one or more illustrations, which, in addition to the temporal dimension inherent to the calendar, add a spatial and even “territorialised” dimension, for example, when each page of the calendar presents a different country, recognisable by its monuments. Finally, the printed calendar is designed to be hung on the wall, so I found it particularly interesting to show these objects in their context, as the walls of homes and shops in HCMC present a particular heterogeneity and tell a story (Fig. 12.3).

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Fig. 12.2 A page torn from a Vietnamese calendar, October 2018

For example, the one inside one of the narrow facade “shophouses”. On entering, one immediately sees the wall calendar above a small shelf that serves as an altar. Some photos of deceased people are displayed there. And then an object attracts my attention: a “Bo Doi” helmet—a soldier’s helmet. The temporality of war intrudes into this sort of “still life”.

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Fig. 12.3 Screenshot of the video “Outlines of Our Lives”, Myriam Dao 2019, both a Gregorian and lunar solar calendar in a pharmacy, HCMC, Vietnam

Through the Vietnamese ancestors’ altar’s characteristic layout, the dead coexist with the living, through offerings. But here, with the proximity of the calendar, it is a cohabitation between the past, the present, and the time that remains for us to live.

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Fig. 12.4 Screenshot of the video “Outlines of Our Lives”, Myriam Dao 2019, the artist tracing lines in clay

Video Part 2: Medium To create my works, I traced palm lines in the raw clay that I had previously shaped into the form of a hand. These lines are specific to each individual and diviners read indications of one’s destiny from them. In parallel to this artistic work, I consulted a diviner who drew up the contours of my birth chart in front of me: he drew the broad strokes, defining the main lines of my past, present and future life from a few lines (either drawn or written). My images juxtapose these two processes: modelling a reduced scale hand / tracing the birth theme. Both are microcosms: the miniaturisation and conceptualisation of human existence (Fig. 12.4). An essential dimension of visual artwork is not so much the result it produces as the act of “doing” which presides over its process. Gestures constitute a synthesis of body and mind that involves them equally. The gesture is a language in space. It conveys both a temporality and a spatiality. Body activity and conceptualisation are inseparable: the body holds a creative potential. As there may be a corpus of texts here, there is, then, a visual, corporeal, gestural, memory holding corpus. People who work with their hands know this: at the beginning of the gesture, we think it and then, as the body repeats this gesture several times, it becomes part of memory. In Ce que sait la main, Richard Sennett defends the philosophical, civic, and moral value of work in its technical dimension through the concept of craftsmanship. Seeing himself as an object of study, he analyses how manual and practical actions require cognitive imperatives, and are structured by intellectual operations, by thought prior to the gesture. He writes, in substance, “To do is to think” (Sennett, 2010). Research in the social and

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neurological sciences have focused on the hand’s memory. The hand is a medium, a tool, an instrument of mediation, and an object of study, as I described the function of the hand in divinatory practices, both in learning through mnemonic means, and in the prediction (Dao, 2021). On this matter, Tim Ingold makes an analogy between fate, destiny, and destination, in the common sense that assigns them “lines” to follow (Ingold, 2003). According to the anthropologist—who establishes a link between the eye and the hand, in phenomenology of perception terms—the gesture of drawing lines to make a topographical sketch captures both the movement and the temporality of movement in space and an experience and a perception of the world: all this in a single visual representation (Ingold, 2013).

Video Part 3: Mythologies The visual device I adopted for this part superimposes three levels of language, or three levels of reading: the “reading” of the work of art, which itself gives an artistic interpretation of the clay hand; the reading of the lines of the hand, which only the diviner can do; and finally, reading the quotes of the philosopher, spoken in French (Fig. 12.5). The question of the status of divination is at the core of my approach. To apprehend it, it is necessary to decenter, to conceive another “being-in-the-world”, another form of ontology, and to do this, the issues raised by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in On Certainty are relevant (Wittgenstein, 1987). Ignoring indigenous

Fig. 12.5 Screenshot of the video “Outlines of Our Lives”, Myriam Dao 2019, the hand shaped in ceramic, with a quote by Wittgenstein

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ontologies such as divination is a philosophical question. By ignoring them, we break between the world and our imagination, between being and knowledge, according to Ingold (2018). Can we strike a balance, then, between non-Western and Western cosmologies, or what Arturo Escobar calls “pluriversal cosmovisions”? (Escobar, 2018). Incidentally, I may point out, in the small world of contemporary art there is a conviction that art can change the course of the world; this belief might appear, in the eyes of the uninitiated, to be a mythology. Is not the interpretation of artists’ works and intentions also a question of point of view—what Wittgenstein calls our “frame of reference”?

Video Parts 4 and 5: Aspiration/Imagination The bodies of the women and men I saw living in the streets of HCMC—“subalternalised” bodies for some—these moving bodies expressed action, or expectation, and sometimes aspiration to action or fear of expectation. Could divination be a tool to develop the capacity to mobilise the imagination? Two South Asian thinkers have developed inspiring concepts to address the question of the tools of emancipation of the working classes. Arjun Appadurai defined the concept of the capacity to aspire, as one of the tools allowing minority voices to express their hopes by reclaiming cultures confiscated from them (Appadurai, 2004). Could not the divinatory arts allow our capacity to aspire to free itself, allowing us to go beyond the limits that our condition has set for us, and without the need for legitimation? Tử Vi divination has no answer to the existential questions that the inhabitants of HCMC ask themselves; on the contrary, it asks questions, and in doing so, it alerts. It can awake the patient’s consciousness. Similar to Buddhist thought, the divinatory arts circulate around the pagodas. The voices I relay express hope. Reclaiming ancient knowledge and cultures such as Tử Vi divination could contribute to building one’s own aspirations, not in quest of the progress or development imposed by market economies, but in quest of the link that unites us to the cosmos in an “ecology of knowledge”. The title “Imagination” was inspired by the thinking of Dipesh Chakrabarty (Chakrabarty, 2000). I modelled the hand of all twenty people I randomly met in HCMC, and I promised myself I would give them each my artistic interpretation of their hand in ceramic. Some people were expecting me to give them a divinatory interpretation. My visual device is based on a mise en abyme: the objectification of the ceramic hand in the hand of the person who contemplates it. It is for the person who contemplates it and holds it in their hand alone to imagine that he/she may control his/her own destiny. For the lines of the hand and the birth chart are nothing but the projection of our destiny (Fig. 12.6).

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Fig. 12.6 Screenshot of the video “Outlines of Our Lives”, Myriam Dao 2019, Mrs. K. holding the artistic interpretation of her hand

Second Artwork: Élévation What is a landscape? What subjective criteria make a “territory” enter the “landscape” category? While for some it is a land, and even a world, for whom does it become landscape? How to apprehend the rice fields of the Hani of Yunnan, with what tools of analysis? While in 2021, decentering is de rigueur, in 1995 when I began my research it was less common. When I went to the People’s Republic of China on a “Villa Medicis Hors les Murs” French grant in 1995, the main French theorists established the appearance of the landscape at the time of the Renaissance. The only form of mediation between human and earth that they acknowledged as a landscape was through painting and literature—and this by studying essentially two societies: western society and that of ancient China (Berque, 1994). The interpretive frames of the history of art developed by western thought are not relevant with the Hani of the Red River, a writing-less society that transmits an oral culture from generation to generation. Could their fabric, their ornate clothing, not be considered a “medium of writing” of their landscape? This is one of the hypotheses I wanted to explore, by deviating from scientific authority to adopt the subjectivity of artistic vision based on my personal trajectory. The concept of “cultural landscape” applied to cultivated lands raises questions— objectification, patrimonialisation, merchandisation of territories—of the same order as those agitating the art world in connection with alterity and some of its corollaries: exoticisation and cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation is manifest when a dominant group borrows or consumes elements of a minority culture, such as the

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recent examples of the wearing of Native American headdresses in fashion shows, for example; I would like to make it clear that this is not a bilateral cultural exchange (Cuthbert, 1998). In the context of the Yunnan Province of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), landscapes are made or “maintained”, bodies are formatted (Yu, 2018), fictions are constructed, and constitute new imaginations for consumers. The transformation of a Hani rice farmers’ village into a “tourist object”—the Hani people are among the 25 minority ethnic groups surveyed by the PRC in the Yunnan Province—led me to consider this new “consumer product” made up of a territory and its ethnic groups, visually absorbed by a mass tourism greedy for authenticity. During the development of my Élévation art project, a family of Hani rice farmers hosted me as they would have a “distant relative” and I felt empathy and affection for the members of that family, a dimension that permeates my work. It is notable that the terraced rice fields had not been represented as landscape in the history of Chinese painting, except at the time of the Maoist propaganda to magnify the agricultural worker. My black and white photographs reverse the usual point of view, which, giving a high-angle view of the flooded terraced rice fields, gives a representation that literally remains “on the surface” of the water. First of all, my shots were taken during the season when the parcels of land are drained. By doing so, I tried to escape the “Mountain-Water” (shanshui) style omnipresent in the photographs of flooded rice fields. Then, I proposed that they be seen from a different perspective. During the post-production, I digitally reworked my 35 mm photographs, accentuating the contrasts to give them a grain closer to the stroke of a paint brush. Finally, I cropped my images in a vertical format that I adopted to emphasise the verticality of the rice fields. In so doing, I also (re)connected with the vertical landscape format specific to Chinese painting, on vertical scrolls, as opposed to the western horizontal landscape format that appeared in the Renaissance in the history of art. The title of the Élévation series plays on the double meaning of the word in French; an elevation is a frontal view that captures the object in its height, and this word also designates the action of rising, in the proper and figurative sense, even spiritually (Dao, 2005) (Figs. 12.7 and 12.8). Although in 2021, Hani rice farmers are still primarily concerned with escaping their precarious living conditions, it may be that in a few years’ time, young Hani people will interest in the existence of a visual archive to which I will have modestly participated. Each of my visits to the Hani family led me to witness parts of their culture disappear. This observation motivated my work as an artist, mainly consisting in inventorying, fixing traces and imprints of what existed, creating a visual archive. My primary objective was to give the family these collections of drawings and photographs (Dao, 2020b).

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Fig. 12.7 Myriam Dao, Gravir III, Élévation series, 2003. Digital print © Myriam Dao/ADAGP

Conclusion The objects I work on are not neutral, politically speaking. In developing them, I clearly saw their connections with the global world, with resource sharing, with the challenges of spatial planning, as well as the relationship between a minority culture

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Fig. 12.8 Myriam Dao, Degrés III, Élévation series, 2003. Digital print © Myriam Dao/ADAGP

and a dominant one. As part of a French tradition of intellectuals and committed artists, I chose, as an artist working on coloniality, to position myself on the side of the dominated and of threatened culture (Quiroz, 2019). The analysis of alternative, visual, audiovisual, and sensible sources aims to open up perspectives, disciplines, and to provide tools that will be easily appropriated by

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people whose culture is marginalised. This will necessarily involve a decentering, a decolonisation of the history of visual art, which, in 2021, is still mostly written from the West, without taking into account other frames of reference. I aim to express questionings through the medium of the image, the gesture, the inscription of the body in space, and, at the same time, to go beyond the use of written languages, and in particular English, to give an echo to the vernacular voices that are silenced. The question is linguistic, epistemological, social, political, and decolonised. It is a matter of giving body and voice, through other tools of apprehending the world, to people for their emancipation, their empowerment, and the re-appropriation of their cultures, reclaiming the “I” (Dao, 2015). The artist is a whistle-blower. This study is therefore intended to be an illustration of the questions that we contemporary artists can raise and make visible; on that premise, it attempts to move the lines between the academic and artistic spheres, giving a different status to visual art and culture: that of a manifesto. The emergence of the Internet and then platforms means that everyone, in theory, can share their images and opinions, on social networks in particular. But while economic barriers have disappeared, cultural and political barriers remain real, and censorship restrains the creation and sharing of knowledge. These barriers reproduce a form of epistemological inequality: it is no longer Western science that dominates, but political power that controls. It is no coincidence that the two subjects I have studied, Hani culture and Vietnamese Tu Vi divination, are being invisibilised: they are two sensitive subjects which the powers of the countries concerned, the People’s Republic of China and Vietnam, are monitoring. To conclude, I am witnessing a controlled digital revolution in which my privileged status as a French artist-researcher allows me to take part.

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Dao, M. (2015). Posséder le ‘Je’ différents usages de l’anthropologie. Afrikadaa.com, 9, 54–57. https://issuu.com/afrikadaamagazine/docs/_9-anthropologismes Dao, M. (2020b). Millennial landscape and tourist development in China. The case of the hani rice terraces in yunnan. Translated by Nelson Graburn, Via #17. Retrieved November, 2020, from http://journals.openedition.org/viatourism/5428 Dao, M. (2021). Divinatory knowledge. In J. Gillen, L. C. Kelley, & P. Le Ha (Eds.), Vietnam at the vanguard: New perspectives across time, space, and community. Singapore. Dao, M. (2020a). Clavier A Đ E R T Y, un objet de correspondence. In Corinne Alexandre-Garner et Alexandra Galitzine-Loumpet L’objet de la migration, le sujet en exil (pp. 269–272). Presses Universitaires de Paris Nanterre. Delacourt, S. (2019). L’Artiste-Chercheur—un rêve américain au Prisme de Donald Judd. Éditeur. Escobar, A. (2018). Sentir-penser avec la terre. Une écologie au-delà de l’Occident, traduit de l’espagnol par l’Atelier de Minga. Seuil. Harding, S. (1991). Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women’s lives. Cornell University Press. Harding, S. (Ed.). (2004). The feminist standpoint theory reader: Intellectual and political controversies. Routledge. Ingold, T. (2003). Lines. A brief history. Routledge. Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge. Ingold, T. (2018). Marcher avec les dragons, Trans. Pierre Madelin. Points Essais. Jullien, F. (2003). La Grande Image n’a pas de forme ou du non-objet par la peinture. Seuil. Li, S. (2016). De l’Occident en Chine, étude de l’expression art abstrait dans son context global. Marg, 23, 47–61. http://journals.openedition.org/marges/1185 Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The post-modern condition. Manchester University Press. Masure, A. (2014). Le design des programmes, des façons de faire du numérique. PhD thesis, supervised by Pierre-Damien Huyghe, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, UFR Arts plastiques. Retrieved from http://www.softphd.com Nguyen, L. V., Quang, N., & Hai, M. (2018). English as a medium of instruction: A case study at a gifted high school in Vietnam. Journal of Asia TEFL, 15(4), 1083–1102. Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1966). L’image mentale chez l’enfant. Presses Universitaires de France. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2003). Scientificité et politique aujourd’hui : un regard féministe. Nouvelles Questions Féministes, 22(1), 48–60. Quiroz L. (2019). Le leurre de l’objectivité scientifique. Lieu d’énonciation et colonialité du savoi. Nouveaux Imaginaires, La production du savoir: formes, légitimations, enjeux et rapport au monde. Retrieved from https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-02422696 Ramanathan, V. (2007). English vernacular divide: Postcolonial language politics and practice. Orient Longman. Santos, B. (2017). Southern epistemologies and academic activism. Sociologie et Societes, 49(1), 143–149. Sartre, J. P. (1936). L’imagination. PUF. Sennett, R. (2010). Ce que sait la main. La culture de l’artisanat. Albin Michel. Simbao, R. (2019). Pushing against ‘China-Africa’—slowly, and with small stories. Something We Africans Got, 7, 228–233. Tupas, R. (2011). Afterword. Crossing cultures in an unequal global order: Voicing and agency in academic writing in english. In L.-H. Phan & B. Baurain (Eds.), Voices, identities, negotiations, and conflicts: Writing academic english across cultures, series: Studies in writing (Vol. 22). Brill. Vandermeersch, L. (2013). Les Deux Raisons de la pensée chinoise. In Divination et Idéographie. Gallimard.

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Wilhelm, R. (1962). The I Ching or book of changes. The Richard Wilhelm translation rendered in English by Cary F. Baynes; foreword by C.G. Jung. Pantheon Books. Wittgenstein, L. (1987). De la certitude. Gallimard. Yu, L. (2018). Alternative indigeneity in China? The paradox of the Buyi in the age of ethnic branding. Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 4(2), 107–134.

Myriam Dao is an artist, architect and independent researcher. She has a Master’s degree in Cultural Geography (EHESS/ENSAPLV). Initially, she took her inspiration from research on vernacular architecture and its confrontation with Modernity. From these general issues, she has gradually shifted toward a more autobiographical quest. Based on her singular personal experience in geography, she focuses on postcolonial issues, memory and transmission. She lives and works in Paris, France. Email: [email protected]

Correction to: Van Gogh’s Universe in the Crossways of Audiovisual Arts and Digital Technology: A Comparative Case Study from an Intermedial Perspective Fernando Valcheff-Garcia

Correction to: Chapter 8 in: K.-k. Tam (ed.), Sight as Site in the Digital Age, Digital Culture and Humanities 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9209-4_8 The last name of author “Fernando Valcheff-Garcia” was unfortunately published with an error. The initially published version has now been corrected.

The updated version of this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9209-4_8 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Sight as Site in the Digital Age, Digital Culture and Humanities 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9209-4_13

C1

Index

A AARON, 132, 133 Academic colonialism, 217 Access accessibility, 4, 49, 55, 59, 75, 93, 119 accessible, 10, 47, 51, 57, 66, 87, 88, 96, 111, 125, 189, 192, 217 visually accessible, 106 Activism, 95 Adaptation theory, 199 Affordances, 66, 68, 69, 71, 79 AI Art, 134 Alberti, L.-B., 218 Analog, 51 Andersen Andersen Park, 18, 29–31, 36, 37 Androgyny, 184, 185 Anlo-Ewe, 77 Appadurai, A., 226 Arca, 192–194 Archives, 4, 45, 71, 84, 135, 220 Art, 8, 19, 51, 66, 84, 106, 132, 167, 179 Artefact, 7, 37, 45–48, 59, 60, 68, 105, 108–112, 116, 117, 125, 132, 133, 142, 149–152 Artificial creativity, 132, 198, 212 Artificial intelligence (AI), 83–102, 132, 134, 137–142, 198, 200, 212 Arts, 183, 216 Associated sites, 114, 116–118, 125 Audio-visual art, 147, 154, 168 Aura, 2, 9, 11–14, 75, 78, 79, 139

B Bannockburn, 8 Benjamin, W., 11, 13, 219 BET, 186, 190 Beyoncé, 187 Bibliographic references, 114, 116, 119–121, 125 Big-data, 208, 212 Biographical films, 199, 207, 208, 211 Birth of the museum, 66–71, 79 Branding, 9 British Museum (BM), 106, 107, 110, 112–120, 123–125 Building Information Model (BIM), 2

C Cabinets of curiosities, 66, 79 Canterbury Cathedral, 6–11 Capacity to aspire, 226 Cauley, M., 147, 148, 155, 156 Children’s literature, 18, 29 China, 18, 19, 26, 28, 29, 40–43, 168, 169, 179, 216, 220, 227, 228, 231 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 174, 177–179 Christeene, 192 Churches, 1, 6, 7, 9, 12 Cinematographic pinturisation, 150 Collaboration, 27, 46, 47, 49, 51–52, 56, 59, 60, 71, 141, 146, 192, 212 Collection history collection’s past, 116

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Sight as Site in the Digital Age, Digital Culture and Humanities 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9209-4

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236 Collections, 50, 66, 85, 105, 133, 228 Colonial period, 66 Comparative studies, 163 Computational art, 131 Computer generated, 133 Conditions, 10, 51, 69, 79, 88, 100, 113, 114, 116, 123–125, 138, 160, 189, 192, 217, 226, 228 Contact zone, 70, 71 Contemporary, 8, 9, 18, 40, 42, 66, 67, 70, 84– 86, 88, 94, 98, 101, 106, 110, 112, 113, 116, 123, 136, 140, 146–149, 157, 163, 185, 189, 191, 231 Contemporary art, 76, 141, 226 Content analysis, 184, 187, 199 Context, 11, 21, 27, 46–49, 59–61, 68, 70, 72, 77, 78, 84–87, 89, 94, 95, 98, 100, 101, 108, 109, 111–113, 117, 119, 136, 137, 139, 140, 158, 163, 183–187, 192, 199, 203, 211, 216, 220, 221 Convolutional neural network (CNN), 133–135 Coronavirus, 5, 6, 14 Cosmologies, 221–223 Counter-discourse, 217, 219 Creativity, 32, 38, 110, 132–134 Cultural consumption Cultural markers, 78, 84 Cultural structures, 88 Cultural studies, 2, 86, 217

D Dance drama, 168, 174–179 Database, 55, 69, 88, 92, 97, 98, 105–107, 114– 116, 123–125, 135 Deep learning, 86, 96–99, 131, 132, 137, 212 Democracy, 74, 87 Denmark, 19, 20, 25, 28–31, 34, 37, 43 Derrida, J., 87, 137 Design thinking, 208–209, 211 Digital access, 69, 70 Digital age, 1, 27, 28, 52, 56, 67–70, 77, 88, 167–180 Digital automation, 198 Digitalisation, 2, 45, 46, 49, 60, 168, 220 Digital materiality, 68, 71, 79 Digital media, 4, 40, 49, 59, 107, 154 Digital museum collections, 105, 106 Digital museums, 57, 69, 73, 168 Digital technology, 27, 43, 49, 51, 52, 55–57, 59, 60, 68–71, 79, 80, 88–90, 107, 147, 150, 151, 156, 163, 168, 169, 173, 179, 180, 219

Index Digital transformation, 212 Digitisation, 46, 51, 52, 55, 57, 66–71, 92, 96, 105–109, 117, 121, 123, 125, 131 Distributive, 46–49, 60, 61 Divinatory, 216, 218, 220, 221, 225, 226 Documents, 46, 47, 52, 53, 59, 60, 72, 87, 91, 94, 114, 139, 199, 220 Drama, 9, 18, 40, 168–170, 174

E Ecosystem, 220 Egypt ancient Egypt, 109, 110, 117, 125 Egyptian, 105–125 Einstein, A., 201, 204, 205 Emic, 14 Escobar, A., 216, 226 Ethnographic museum, 67 Etic, 14 Exhibition, 18, 25, 33, 34, 36–38, 40, 45, 50–52, 54–58, 67–69, 74–77, 86, 93, 95, 96, 101, 110, 113, 136, 137, 140–142, 150–152, 154, 155, 157, 161, 168 Exoticisation, 227

F Feminist, 113, 137, 140, 186–193, 216 Film, 18, 39, 40, 146, 150, 154, 156, 157, 159, 174, 187, 192, 199, 200, 203, 205–207 Film analysis, xiv, 197–212 5G, xiv Flow, 49, 75, 90, 155 Foucault, M., 69, 86, 88, 137 French Theory, 217 Future, 10, 19, 47, 49, 50, 66, 71, 85, 96, 100, 106, 107, 124–125, 140, 142, 163, 198, 203, 205, 211, 212, 219, 221, 224

G Gamification, ix, 28, 29, 40 Gatto, R., 146 Gender, 97, 99, 184–189, 191–193 Generative adversarial network (GAN), 133– 135 Global, 4, 14, 29, 46–49, 52, 57, 59–61, 76, 167, 189, 198, 212, 217, 229 Google, 2, 6, 7, 96, 138, 152

Index H Hani, 216, 220, 227, 228, 231 Helen Miller Gould, 112, 121–123 History, 1, 6–9, 12, 28, 46, 47, 53–56, 58, 59, 61, 67, 70, 71, 75–77, 85, 87, 90, 91, 106–108, 110, 112, 113, 115, 116, 119, 121, 125, 136–140, 142, 146, 147, 186, 203, 217, 218, 220, 227, 228, 231 History of collecting, 59, 125 Holistic, 125, 220 Horizontal, 47, 49, 59, 60, 228 Hui, Y., 97, 98 Human intelligence, 131, 198 Human scales, 1–15 Hybridity, 90

I Iannuzzi, G., 146, 148, 158 I Ching, 218 Identity, 12, 13, 20, 26, 28, 46–48, 58–60, 70, 78, 87, 90, 100, 174, 177, 178, 185–189, 192 Immersive experiences, 146, 150 Indigenous ontologies, 225 Innovation, 98, 107, 158, 168, 171, 199, 201– 203, 206–212 Interartistic, 147, 149, 152–162 Intermediality, 148, 154 International Council of Museums (ICOM), 56, 58, 61, 84, 90

J Japan, 18, 19, 29, 33, 34, 40–43, 56, 84 Jobs, S., 200, 205, 206, 208, 210 Jung, C., 218

K Kainai, 70 Kobiela, 146, 148, 150, 154, 160 Korea, 18, 19, 36–38, 40–42 Kunqu opera, 170 Kuomintang (KMT), xiii, 174, 177, 178

L Lady Gaga, 188, 192 Landscape, 19, 21, 24, 28–34, 133, 146, 155, 188, 189, 216, 218, 219, 227, 228 Lange, D., 136, 139, 140 Latour, B., 48, 93 Legacy collections, 108, 113, 117

237 Level, 46, 47, 57–59, 68, 76, 87, 97, 134, 135, 193, 201, 219, 225 Lil Nas X, 192 Local, 8, 10, 14, 41, 42, 47–49, 52, 58–61, 70, 71, 78, 79, 121, 178 Longobardi, 146, 157 Loving Vincent, 146, 147, 150, 153, 154, 156, 158, 159, 162, 163 Lunar calendar, 220, 221 Lyotard, J.-F., xv

M Machine-learning, 96, 133, 141, 200, 212 Machines, 69, 72, 87, 96, 98, 131, 132, 135, 138, 139, 141, 142, 193, 198, 200, 208, 211, 212 Madonna, 140, 184, 187–190 Marketing, 3, 4, 136 Material, 4, 5, 7, 13, 46–59, 68, 73, 77, 79, 92, 106–109, 111, 112, 114–116, 125, 147–150, 154, 161–163, 186, 187, 190, 191, 199, 220 Materiality, 68, 79, 111, 149 McCartney, P., 200 Mediatisation, ix, 40–43 Metaverse, 14, 198, 212 Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET), 106, 112–123, 125 Migrations, 49, 59–61 Mosques, 8, 10 Multisensory museum, 73, 75–79 Murch, A., 121 Murch, C. Reverend, 106, 110, 111, 121–123 Museological approach, 85 Museum, 4, 18, 45, 65, 84, 105, 136, 151, 168 Museum architectures, 73–75 Museum collection databases collections databases, 107, 125 digital collections databases, 107 museum databases, 124 online database, 123 Museum space, 75, 85, 94, 95, 98, 106, 113 Music, 28, 172, 186, 200 Music Television (MTV), 183, 186, 187, 190, 191 Music videos, 183–191, 194 Mykki-Blanco, 191, 192

N Narrativisation, 9 National, 9, 18, 34, 46–49, 51, 52, 57–60, 70, 87, 168, 217 Navajo, 78

238 New stage aesthetics, xiii, 167–180 Network, 48–50, 90, 97, 134, 186, 205 Network society, 46–49, 60

O Object biography, 107, 110 Object level data, 106, 107, 125 Object records, 106, 113–117, 125 Old Trafford, 9, 10, 14 Openness, 48, 59, 60 Organisation, 7, 8, 46, 53, 56, 65, 84–86, 88, 101, 107, 108, 112, 113, 115, 125

P Painting, 34, 76, 78, 133–135, 146, 147, 149–162, 218, 219, 227, 228 Pattern recognition, 132 Peking opera, 168, 170–173, 179 Performance, 12, 14, 38, 74, 78, 94, 99, 139, 167–169, 172, 173, 184, 193, 201, 207 Phenomenologia, 225 Photography, 11, 134–136, 138, 139, 142, 218–220 Physical, 1–15, 26, 32, 40, 46, 48, 52, 53, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 66–73, 75, 76, 79, 80, 85–87, 90, 92, 93, 95, 99, 101, 107, 109, 114, 116, 124, 125, 149, 151, 152, 155, 170, 172, 179, 219, 221 Physicality, 2, 3, 72, 75, 79, 80, 190 Pictorial Turn, 217 Pitt Rivers museum, 67 Pixar, 198 Place, 2–6, 10–14, 32, 37, 38, 46–49, 57, 58, 60, 61, 68, 69, 71, 74, 75, 87, 89, 93, 97, 99, 106, 108, 109, 113, 132, 138, 140, 147, 153, 155, 159, 162, 169, 189, 191, 217, 220, 221 Pluriversal cosmovisions, 226 Poetry, 147, 149, 152–162 Politics, 13, 42, 46, 67, 68, 100, 139, 141, 188, 216, 220 Politics of museum, x, 65–80 Postcolonial, 47, 87 Posthuman, 168, 193, 194 Power, 48, 66–74, 87, 89, 90, 99, 109, 110, 142, 170, 179, 198, 217–219, 231 Presentation, 31, 50–52, 55–60, 85, 105–109, 112, 113, 115–118, 121, 125, 179 Presents, 4, 7, 9, 10, 18, 46, 47, 49, 50, 56, 57, 60, 61, 84, 85, 89, 94, 96–99, 111, 115, 121, 125, 136, 140, 152, 157–159, 162, 180, 184, 189, 220, 221, 223, 224

Index Protest cultures, 217 Protocols, 48, 91, 97 Provenance, 107, 113, 114, 116, 121–123, 125, 137

Q Queer, 186–193

R Records continuum, 94 Reflexivity, 88 Regional, 18, 46, 49, 58–60 Representation, 18, 27, 42, 46, 47, 69, 70, 72, 84, 93, 95, 98, 107, 109, 114, 134, 168, 188, 199, 217, 219–221, 225, 228 Rhianna, 191

S Scientificity, 217 Second Life, 3 Secular temple, 66, 74, 76 Sensory experiences, 73, 76 Seoul, 37, 38 Sexual representation, 184 Shanghai, 19–22, 26, 31, 168–170, 176 Shanghai Peking Opera Theatre, 171–174 Shanghai Song and Dance Ensemble, 174–177, 179 Siccardi, 146 Sight, 10, 18–43, 160 SIMS forum, 2 Site, 1, 19, 68, 85, 117, 185 Social constructivist paradigm, 113 Social network, 49, 50, 54, 55, 60, 138, 203, 231 Society, 15, 29, 46–49, 54, 56, 58, 60, 68, 77, 107, 109, 132, 168, 188, 198, 218, 227 Somatic, 3, 9–11, 98 de Sousa Santos, B., 216 Space, 2, 26, 48, 49, 59, 72, 85, 109, 167, 177, 184, 216 Spatial arrangement, 75, 160 Stage design, 168, 170, 172 Stage performance, 11, 12, 168, 179 Standpoint, 136, 216, 219 Storytelling, 24, 37 Systematic approach, 113, 115–124

Index T Technologisation, 39, 168 Technology, 11, 13, 14, 27, 28, 46, 47, 49, 59, 67, 68, 73, 100, 107, 150, 161, 168, 194, 198, 201, 208, 209, 211 Terraced rice fields, 228 The Beatles, 200 The Eureka Myth, 202 The Imperial Concubine of the Tang Dynasty, 171–174, 179 The Never Vanishing Radio Wave, 174–177, 179 The Night Cafe: A VR Tribute to Vincent Van Gogh, 147 The Peony Pavilion, 170 3D effects, 170–173 Time, 4–7, 12, 19, 46, 47, 49, 50, 52, 55, 57, 58, 60, 66, 71, 72, 77, 84, 86, 87, 89, 93, 95, 99, 106, 108–112, 114, 115, 121, 125, 132, 140, 167, 168, 170–174, 186, 190, 193, 198, 199, 203, 205, 207, 208, 211, 218, 220, 221, 223, 227, 228 Tlingit, 71 Tokyo, vii, ix, 29–35 Transmission, 69, 72, 75, 89, 97, 99 Tử Vi, 216, 226, 231

V Value attributed, 116 devalue, 12, 115, 121 frameworks of, 106, 124, 125 heritage, 107 object, 124 undervalued, 121 valuation, 109, 138, 140 Van Gogh, La nuit étoilée, 146, 147, 150, 153, 154, 157, 160–162

239 Van Gogh’s letters, 153, 156, 159–161 Van Gogh, V., 145–163 Vernaculars, 216, 217, 220, 231 Vernallis, C., 187, 190 Vertical, 49, 60, 228 VH1, 186, 190 Video, 2, 3, 6, 7, 12, 14, 28, 40–42, 55, 80, 184, 186–194, 220, 221, 223–225, 227 Vietnam, 216, 220, 223, 231 Vimeo, 186 Da Vinci, L., 218 Virtual reality (VR), 40, 42, 55, 141, 147, 151, 155, 158 Virtual space, 7, 11, 13–15, 57, 85, 90, 92, 93, 95, 99, 101, 180 Visual archive, 220, 228 VR environment, 147

W Way of seeing, 72, 79 Websites, 2–5, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 49–52, 54, 55, 92, 99, 147, 150, 186, 189–192, 210 Welchman, H., 146, 148, 160 Wittgenstein, L., 225, 226

Y YouTube, 40, 54, 55, 186–192 Yunnan, 220, 227, 228

Z Zen meditation, 33 Zoom, 14, 55, 74 Zuckerberg, M., 203, 204, 206