Conference Agenda

Our Art was a 2023 project of the Reykjavik Art Museum in collaboration with the Human Rights and Democracy office of the city of Reykjavik and the Citizens foundation. The Citizens Foundation is a global nonprofit offering creative and secure open source digital democracy solutions used in 45 countries. The Democracy office uses Citizens solution for its Better Reykjavik Program a platform where citizens of Reykjavik can suggest and vote on projects in their neighbourhood they would like the city build or implement. www.betrireykjavik.is The idea was to use the platform to allow people to vote which works from the art collection of the Reykjavik Art Museum should be installed in a special exhibition.

The art collection of the Reykjavik Art Museum is the largest in Iceland, totalling nearly 18.000 accessioned works. All of these are documented in a purpose built Filemaker database that is run by the museum and hosted by the IT department of the city of Reykjavik. The database holds a vast amount of data on the accession artworks. In 2023 the museum celebrated its 50th anniversary. In honour of that occasion the museum put together an anniversary program that focused in part on the collection of the Reykjavik Art Museum. The main goal was to inform the citizens of Reykjavík of their collective ownership of the collection. One of the projects was Myndlistin okkar // Our Art where the public was given the opportunity to choose artworks from the collection for an exhibition. They were in a way given the role of the curator. The museum has for the past decade published nearly all of its collection online for visitors to browse through. It is for instance thought of as a way for the public to get to know the collection but at the same time it can be a powerful research tool for art historians and other researchers. in Our Art information on 3.000 artworks from the museums online database safneign.listasafnreykjavikur.is were exported alongside images of them to the Citizens foundations platform. The need to make a smaller selection was mainly because of practicality, not all of the works can be shown because for instance the limitations of the exhibition space, the condition of the works and there was a need to limit as some artists have works in the thousands in the collection which would have completely drowned the selection. The selection website is still open for browsing here: https://myndlistin-okkar.betrireykjavik.is/ Information on the final show and images from it can be found here: https://listasafnreykjavikur.is/syningar/myndlistin-okkar. The project was a big success and garnered much attention from the public and media in Iceland. There were over 26.000 votes cast in the project with nearly 5.000 individual logins.

In this short presentation the author will be giving an overview of the project as a whole, its aims and goals, the challenges involved in its management and how the museum found an interesting way to reproduce and mediate the data from its database.

Sigurður Trausti Traustason is the Head of Collections and Research at the Reykjavik Art Museum. Previously was the manager of Sarpur the collective collection management system of Icelandic museums. His interests lie in documentation and the preservation of cultural heritage.

This paper recounts the transformative journey of a museum conservator thrust into the realm of Digital Humanities through the inception of a groundbreaking database for managing contemporary art collections and facilitating exhibition production. The narrative unfolds at Luma Arles in France, where, as an assistant conservator, I unexpectedly became the project owner for a crucial collection management database initiative. Initiated in conjunction with the opening of Luma Arles in the summer of 2021, the project aimed to address the unique challenges posed by the dynamic nature of contemporary art.

The intricacies of the project involved grappling with existing private solutions that proved inadequate for the institution's needs and overcoming the shortcomings of an agile method adopted by the previous project owner. Upon the departure of the original project owner, the endeavor faced dissolution due to its perceived high cost and lengthy production timeline. Faced with the essential need for a database, I assumed responsibility for the project and proposed alternative solutions, leading to the successful realization of the database.

This paper illuminates the unconventional path taken during the database creation, highlighting both successful and unsuccessful practices. It emphasizes the importance of deviating from conventional approaches, revealing instances where embracing chaos and fostering a collaborative making process proved more efficient than strictly adhering to established methodologies.

Key aspects to be discussed include the evolution of the database creation process, challenges faced, and the ultimate solution devised. Furthermore, the narrative delves into the strategies employed to engage professionals from various sectors, emphasizing the transformation of the database from a mere archival tool to a dynamic and indispensable asset in the management of contemporary art collections.

As a conservator intimately involved in the project, I will delve into the intricacies of collection management, exploring the diverse types of data related to both the physical and conceptual aspects of artworks. Special attention will be given to the utilization of digital solutions as tools for conservation, particularly in the context of multimedia, performance, and installation artworks, showcasing the complexity that the project aimed to comprehend and manage.

This presentation extends beyond the project's technical aspects, sharing personal insights and experiences as an untrained project owner who, amidst challenges, discovered the realm of Digital Humanities. The culmination of this transformative journey has inspired the pursuit of a Ph.D. in Art History at the Université de Montréal (CA), supervised by Emmanuel Château-Dutier in the Research Digital Humanities Laboratory called l’[Ouvroir](https://ouvroir.umontreal.ca/accueil).

In this Ph.D, I approach the question of exhibition conservation using a conceptual framework that considers it as a network of interconnected elements. To grasp this, I plan to consult the sociological notion of a boundary object (Star and Griesemer 1989), whose materiality arises from action rather than physicality. This concept also emphasizes the links between social worlds, allowing for different considerations of the object. Concurrently, the actor-network theory (Akrich, Callon, and Latour 2006) will define a referential state based on a set of multiple properties located in various times and spaces, involving multiple actors.

I also intend to invoke Jean-Pierre Cometti's investigation methodology in philosophy (2016), which opens the profession to a more biographical and holistic approach. This practice is also found in conservation-restoration theories of contemporary art and deemed complex works (Saaze 2009; Scholte and Wharton 2011; Stigter 2017). These will play a central role in the work I intend to develop. The creation of the documentary model will also involve a theoretical framework specific to digital humanities (Schweibenz and Scopigno 2018; Barok et al. 2019), for which I will analyze the CIDOC-CRM ontology of ICOM following the documentation logic created by and for conservation-restoration (Leveau 2012). With this interdisciplinary approach, I propose to envision a tool to capture the complexity of exhibitions in collaboration with the Partnership for New Uses of Collections in Art Museums with [CIECO](https://cieco.co/fr).

My research, in general, aims to explore ways to make digital tools accessible for museum professionals. I wish to expand perspectives on Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums ([GLAM](https://glamdatasci.network/)) and advocate for alternative solutions in addition to traditional relational databases. The paper underscores the use of hands-on experience, adaptability, and a willingness to embrace innovation in successfully navigating the intersections between contemporary art, conservation, and the evolving landscape of Digital Humanities, as I understand it.

This short paper aims to demonstrate how virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) can employ 3D archaeological reconstructions to immerse viewers into historical places in combination with digital narrative development in the heritage and tourism sectors. Countless galleries, libraries, archives, and museums have included digitally re-created objects and re-imagined scenes in situ through theatrical sets and live historical re-enactments to help visitors see and contextualise objects from history. What if these techniques were applied to 3D virtual narrative experiences? This scoping review focuses primarily on selected studies that create 3D models for archaeology, VR, and AR that utilise 3D models, and virtual heritage ‘edutainment’ experiences published within the last five years (i.e., 2018-2023). It gives an overview of the current methods and technologies used to create 3D heritage productions for scientific studies, heritage preservation and tourism, and educational applications. Ultimately, this paper discusses how VR and 3D modelling could, in future work, be transformed into narrative experiences based on historians’ and/or archaeologists’ current understanding of the past.

Since Johanna Drucker questioned the existence of a “digital art history” (Drucker, 2013), the last decade has seen a growing number of art historical projects make use of methods such as automatic pattern recognition, confirming the transfer of a technology born in the narrow field of computer vision to a growing number of researchers. However, digital art history remains a fragmented field: until now, these projects have not seriously interacted with each other, as they preferred to develop their own technical and methodological solutions. While the prevailing project-based logic offers fresh insights and original solutions to similar problems, it requires a significant financial and time investment, large quantities of data and technical skills that are not accessible to all research units, let alone all researchers (Romein and al., 2020, 310). Our communities would benefit from pooling together our efforts to help reduce these costs and reduce research obstacles.

Such a project-based logic has for consequence to impose limits on the standardization of digital practices, both in terms of data recording and algorithm training. In particular, image segmentation - an operation which involves detecting and grouping pixels according to zones of interest by recording their coordinates, which is at the heart of computer vision and pattern recognition tasks - is not subject to any standards or harmonization. However, the adoption of standards is not totally missing from the field of digital art history: there are, for example, standards such as DublinCore (DCMI Usage Board, 2012), or projects such as Metadata Culture, for the registration of metadata (Näslund & al., 2020). The production of ontologies, such as IconClass (Posthumus & Brandhorst, 2005) or SegmOnto (Gabay et al., 2023) to describe image content, is also developing. However, there is no collective program to standardize the data produced during the process of cultural images segmentation.

It's not so much a question of trying to standardize the description of image content - an attempt that falls within the realm of ontology, and whose terms vary from one project to another, from one work of art to another - than proposing a way of harmonizing the recording of elements's coordinates within these images. Such initiatives are being produced in the field of literary studies, with projects such as HTRUnited (Chagué, Clérice and Romary, 2021), but in digital art history, the question remains little addressed (Bardiot, 2021). Yet having a corpus of segmented images, whose elements have been identified by their coordinates, recorded in a hierarchical and standardized way in a document, would make it possible to create ground truths that would serve as basis for training new algorithms.

Why is this question crucial in our discipline today? The development and training of computer vision algorithms in digital art history is generally based on the technique of transfer learning, which involves using pre-existing algorithms that have already been trained, to adapt them to the specificities of new corpus. While transfer learning can reduce the amount of data required to train algorithms, and at the same time improve the results obtained, its current methods remain ill-suited to art history: the algorithms available are for the most part trained on “natural” images, which means they are not relevant to the specificity and plurality of cultural images. The lack of harmonization of the solutions proposed project after project leads to a bitter conclusion, drawn in the course of our thesis researches: the available tools evolve rapidly and become obsolete in the short term, until they are discarded; many of them are poorly documented or inaccessible to a non-expert public; others are not usable and do not work on trial for a variety of reasons, ranging from operating system incompatibility to the lack of update of the libraries used. Therefore, it appears vital to us today to pool our segmented images so that they can serve as ground truths for future research, minimizing model training while enhancing the results obtained.

However, it is important to keep in mind that segmentation is an intellectual operation, which always proposes an interpretation of the documents it takes as its object, and must be adapted to specific research questions. How can we design digital practices and tools capable of handling segmentation tasks for different data corpora and settings, while remaining relevant to the epistemological requirements of art history and accessible to its researchers? Asking this question implies putting into tension issues of interoperability and reproducibility of patrimonial data, on the one hand, and epistemological reasoning in relation to the tools developed, on the other hand. These questions should not be addressed after tools development but upstream and should accompany the entire workflow (Stutzmann, 2010, 247‑278). To address these tensions, we will identify the specific needs of the discipline of digital art history with regard to questions of image segmentation. We will then offer a quick overview of segmentation tools that can be adapted to be functional for every art historical project. Finally, we will highlight the shortcomings and solutions that need to be developed as a priority.

Pooling cultural ground truths is nowadays crucial if research is to move towards better integration of computer vision and automatic pattern recognition in digital art history projects. In addition to the availability of quality, properly documented and cataloged data, this pooling of resources can encourage all researchers to gradually adopt homogeneous practices allowing a better reproducibility and repurposing of data. The aim is twofold: to produce ready-to-use models and workflows adapted to cultural data, and to share data that enables these models to be produced. For the ground truths of each project to be reusable, segmentation data must be brought about according to norms and standards designed specifically for images of works of art, with a view to conceptualizing them collectively.

Modern day art museums face both ideological and practical questions when dealing with the preservation of time-based media artworks. Instability of technology is a fact and changes occur when new technologies present themselves. Time-based media works are unstable by nature; their technological components become obsolete, they often require adaptation and every re-iteration poses new interpretations and changes in installation. With this development new professions have emerged such as digital archivist, time-based media conservator, curator of new media and others, which all underline the fact that there is need for professionally trained people in this field.

Before, and still, museums are facing the challenge of not having enough storage space for their collection and additionally, museums are now dealing with the same problem digitally; they need more digital storage space, to be able to store large files with the same care as they store classical paintings.

What I want to introduce is how Reykjavík Art Museum is facing the challenge of collecting and preserving works of art that contain complex technical components; works like video works and other technology-based artworks, digital images, sound works and works containing mechanisms relying on electricity and electronics as a basis for the existence of the works.

In 2017, Reykjavík Art Museum embarked on an exhibition project meant to deal with these challenges. The exhibition project was called Bout, where the majority of the time-based media in the museum’s collection was exhibited. The museum had identified gaps in the documentation of its time-based media art and so the project was conceived as a response to that. The title of the project, Bout – Video Works from the Collection, referred to the works being exhibited in four different bouts, each having its own theme which was based on the approach and subjects of the artists.

The exihibtion alllowed the audience to experience recent and historic works from the collection, but also provided the museum staff a chance to revise its archives and technical classifications – to learn from and improve the process behind exhibiting and caring for these works.

It furthermore opened a dialogue about new attitudes towards the collecting and the preservation of video art. As technology has progressed, new means of creation have opened up, and many of the works reflect experimentations with a medium in a constant flux. The artistic content has furthermore expanded in conjunction with technical possibilities at each given moment.

The Reykjavík Art Museum‘s collection holds roughly 17.000 artworks; paintings, sculptures, drawings, video, installations and outdoor sculptures in the city. Around 60 works are registered as time-based media artworks. The collection spans a period from experimental film in the sixties, through the early days of basic video equipment in the eighties, to the elaborate digital installations of the present. The first video works came into the collection around the year 2000.

Seven years have now passed since the exhibition Bout was carried out and the museum has since then had the opportunity to install the works again in different exhibitions. The documents and data gathered in 2017 have proven to be useful when installing the works anew, although there is always room for improvement. Concerning the topic, the only thing I can do is to address it from my point of view, that is, as a registrar with no particular background in technological matters, trying to catch hold of latest developments in audio/video, hardware/software and other things related. What I am concerned with is how to best register these works, and make it possible for future generations to preserve the works and exhibit, according to the will of the artist, but also logistically, with regards to strictly what is possible. It is then up to other specialists to take this information and install the work successfully.

Soundscape ecology is an expanding field that holds a variety of opportunities for understanding our changing ecosystems due to climate change and the impact of anthropogenic noise on natural soundscapes. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) provides enormous amounts of data detailing sound levels, species present, and other information about an ecosystem, but presenting that information in an approachable format is a challenge. I argue that music composition and digital interfaces provide an avenue for creating engaging systems from an interdisciplinary perspective that convey meaningful ecological information to an audience. In this paper, I examine this through the lens of my acoustic surveys in Iceland’s national parks and a sample system that sonifies the data from the PAM surveys and combines it with the field recordings from the natural spaces.

First I examine the kinds of data made available by passive acoustic monitoring, using my acoustic surveys of Ice land’s National Parks as a case-study. My surveys in Þingvellir, Snæfellsjökull, and Vatnajökull national parks were carried out from September 2023-April 2024 producing more than 10,000 hours of audio. This audio was analyzed in multiple ways including using temporal audibility analysis, noise level analysis, multiple acoustic indices, and spectrogram analysis. These analyses provide a window into noise pollution in the areas and the impact of anthropogenic noise on these natural spaces.

Many of the results from the analyses illustrate expected trends, but some defy preconceived notions. For instance, the Normalized Difference Soundscape Index (NDSI)—which is a measure of the ratio of biologic sound (biophony) to human-produced sound (anthrophony)—provides a window into where and when biologic activity occurs compared with human activity (Kasten et al. 2012). At stations close to popular trails in Skaftafell national park, the NDSI shows the expected trend of biologic activity spikes around sunrise and sunset (dawn and dusk choruses). However, in areas far removed from human activity, biologic activity actually rises even higher between the dusk and dawn chorus. The recordings also provide insight into interactions between various elements of the soundscape such as between air traffic and biologic activity.

The results of the noise analyses from the acoustic surveys provides interesting information, but the results can be fairly opaque to an observer outside of acoustic ecology—my solution is a program that sonically maps the field recordings and data so that listeners can experience the soundscape and so gain a deeper understanding of the information gleaned from these analyses. I accomplish this by creating a system where listeners can transverse an acoustic soundscape and experience the impact of various parameters based on changing variables. For instance, by changing season, weather, or time of day the listener can hear a different soundscape. They can also manipulate variables such as the number of people present or the amount of air traffic in a given ecosystem and hear the impact of those sounds on the environment. The system accomplishes this by using the underlying field recordings as sonic material, but also by using the information from the noise analyses to manipulate and process the field recordings to represent the impact of noise on these spaces. For instance, by increasing the number of people present in a space, filters will obscure sounds present, mirroring the real-world effects of noise pollution. In this way, the system makes apparent large-scale acoustic interactions by representing them in an interactive format. The system is built in the Max programming environment, chosen for its high audio quality and ease of creating portable versions of the system, but these same ideas could be adapted to other programming environments.

The longterm impact of this project will be the development of more effective tools for communicating acoustic data to viewers. This system can be presented as a public installation, a webpage, or in a concert setting. The goal is to create a system that can sonify and represent the growing variety of acoustic surveys and soundscape information that is building every day. This project would not be possible without beginning from a fundamentally interdisciplinary perspective and leveraging the capabilities of digital systems to convey information in a portable and transparent fashion.