PUBLIC ART AND DIGITIZATION PRACTICES

The museum environment as a place for digital art practice: theories, practices, and intersections.
The course, divided into 30 hours, is part of the Master’s Degree Programme in ‘Digital and Public Humanities’ and is connected to the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities (VeDPH) in the Department of Humanities.
The course aims to guide the students through the knowledge of artistic practices, from the avant-gardes of the 20th century to the production of digital art, which led to the conception of the first idea of a virtual museum.

- Knowledge and understanding: the student will be introduced to the art historical context of virtual museums and the development of digital museums through knowledge of art history exhibitions and works by contemporary artists; the methodology adopted by digital artists in the handling of art collections will be analysed.
- Application of knowledge and understanding: ability to recognise the different digital expressions of online collections and to understand the use of specific digital tools adopted by museums for different purposes.
- Understanding: the ability to analyse the digital representation of art in the online and virtual museum, to argue using language and correct formal analysis;
- Communication skills: ability to use appropriate terminology, to comment on and communicate the results of the student's work; to interact with colleagues and professors with respect and effectiveness.

No specific requirements, but knowledge of 20th century art is preferred.

The course analyzes the theories that animate the debate on digital art production, focusing on the segment of public art that addresses the museum space. Starting with the 20th-century avant-gardes, it will examine artists' works that have interpreted the museum as a public space through different techniques linked to audiovisual and digital languages.
The role of the museum institution will be examined. The online component has become an exhibition context, a place for the preservation of digital artworks, from net art to generative art, and a platform for interaction with the public. Finally, recent productions dealing with Artificial Intelligence will be examined, both for creative purposes and for exploring production methods and artistic research.
Attention will be paid to the forms of representation of works of art, highlighting the role of digital productions from the artistic field and the creative cultural industries collaborating in curating and interpreting museum spaces to improve access to knowledge of works of art.
A section of the course will focus on digital art production using artificial intelligence algorithms, looking at the latest trends in artistic creativity.
The aim of the lectures, which complement the study of the texts in the bibliography, is to provide tools for understanding the phenomenology of artistic processes that use digital media and make use of the pool of data made available by the open-access collections of museums.

Chapters and essays will be defined during the lessons.
C. Paul, Digital Art, Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2015.
C. Paul, A Companion to Digital Art, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2016.
T. Giannini, J. P. Bowen, Museums and Digital Culture. New Perspectives and Research, Springer 2019.
L. Manovich, AI Aesthetics, Strelka press 2019.
Cohen, K., Elkins, J., Aronberg Lavin, M., Macko, N., Schwartz, G., Siegrfied L., S, Stafford, B., Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art history, in «Art bulletin», 79, n.2 (1997), pp.187-216.
D. England, T. Schiphorst, N. Bryan-Kins (edited by), Curating the Digital. Space for Art and Interaction, Springer, 2016
Frieling, R., The Museum as producer: Processing Art and Performing a Collection, in New Collecting: Exhibiting and Audience after New Media Art, a cura di Graham, B., London, New York, Ashgate, 2014, pp.133-158.
Grasskamp, W., The Book on the Floor: Andre Malraux and the Imaginary Museum, Getty Research Institute, 2016.
Grau, O. The Complex and Multifarious Expression of Digital Art & Its Impact on Archives and Humanities, in A Companion to Digital Art, a cura di C. Paul, Wiley, Blackwell, Chichester, 2016, pp. 23-45.
Hall, D., The Original and the Reproduction: Art in the Age of Digital Technology, «Visual Resources», 15, nNo. 2(1999), pp. 269-278.

The final exam will consist of an oral presentation of a project developed on one of the topics covered during the course. It will be accompanied by a critical essay of at least 2500 words.
The evaluation will take into account the following elements
- The scholarly quality of the critical essay on the project developed (30%);
- The theoretical depth of the topics (30%);
- The clarity and accuracy of the project presentation (30%).
- The level of interaction in the lectures, seminar activities, and conferences offered (10%).

The exam program for non-attending students remains the same, but they must contact the teacher to agree on the topic to develop.

Attendance is strongly recommended.

The lessons include video and power point projections and cover the history of digital art and public art related to museum exhibition space through the analysis of specific artists and exhibitions. The teaching aims to stimulate interaction between faculty and students, who will be invited to discuss and work on specific AI software for image manipulation and creation.
Lectures will be integrated with seminars, workshops, and in-class student presentations and debates.
The texts covered and discussed in class, with any supporting tools, are provided by the teacher during the course and made available on the Moodle platform. These texts, collected in a list at the end of the course, are an integral part of the exam program.

English

The programme is provisional and there could still be changes in its contents and texts.

written and oral

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Human capital, health, education" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development