Tracking the Circulation of Images Digitally. From Artistic Cartography to the Study of Visual Contagions

Tracking the Circulation of Images Digitally.  From Artistic Cartography to the Study of Visual Contagions,
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Chair of Digital Humanities at the Université de Genève

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Abstract
How do images and styles spread out over time and place? Art historians can use digital methods to study “visual contagions”– how images circulate as material artefacts (paintings, sculptures, engravings, etc.…) or in reproductions (in illustrated periodicals, in photography, or on the internet…), through which channels (cultural, geographical, political, social, economical, institutional, human…) and according to which logics. In this video we present how certain sources make it possible to reconstruct the trajectories of images using the historical clues to their circulation. The example of the Artl@s Project (https://www.artlas.huma-num.fr) shows the interest of serial and cartographic methods to study artistic circulations from homogeneous sources such as exhibition catalogues. We also address the new possibilities offered by deep learning and artificial intelligence algorithms applied to images.

Biography
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel is full Professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, as chair for Digital Humanities. She leads the IMAGO Centre at the École Normale Supérieure, a center dedicated to teaching, research and creation on the circulation of images in Europe (www.imago.ens.fr). In 2009, Joyeux-Prunel founded Artl@s, a platform that federates several international research projects on the globalization of art and images and digital approaches. She works on the social and global history of modern art, on visual globalization, the Digital Humanities, and the visual history of petroleum. Among her publications : Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (ed.) with the collaboration of Luc Sigalo-Santos, L’art et la mesure. Histoire de l’art et méthodes quantitatives: sources, outils, bonnes pratiques (ed. Rue d’Ulm, 2010); Catherine Dossin, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (ed.), Circulations in the Global History of a Art (Routledge, 2015). And as sole author : Les avant-gardes artistiques – une histoire transnationale 1848-1918 (Gallimard Folio histoire pocket series, 2016) ; Les avant-gardes artistiques – une histoire transnationale 1918-1945  (Gallimard Folio histoire pocket series, 2017) ; and Naissance de l’art contemporain (1945-1970) – Une histoire mondiale, forthcoming (Editions du CNRS).