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Aesthetics, the field of philosophy, is understood as the science of aisthesis – the sensual cognition, but also as a reflection on beauty, art, experiences and criticism. In both cases, the esthetician can learn a lot from blind people, because their use of senses other than eyesight is peculiarly precise and even amazing for sighted people. The senses of hearing, smell and especially touch play a cognitive role, which is often forgotten today, particularly in times when they are separated from their sources or even prepared in an artificial way. Reflection on the perception of the world by blind people may lead to the conclusion that it is much more concrete and “more powerful” than the seeming world of sighted people as Johann Gottfried Herder noted in the eighteenth century. This causes problems for people who try to translate reality perceived mainly with the help of sight to the language of other senses. Understanding and feeling these kinds of cognition requires the efforts and, above all, it takes time.
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The article deals with an issue of audio description (AD), verbal description of visual content, transmitted with the use of the auditory system to visually impaired people. The analysis covers audio description of works of art. The paper presents the origins of AD of fine arts in Poland and across the world. It describes types of audio description in museums and principles of its creation. Another discussed issue of borrowing visual sensations through haptic, kinesthetic or olfactory senses that accompany AD. The reader may find examples of audio description from Łódź museums: the Museum of Art in Łódź (ms1, ms2, Herbst Palace Museum) and the Museum of the City of Łódź.
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Social integration and activation of people with visual impairment is one of the most important challenges in modern democratic countries. Due to the rise of awareness, there has been an increase in number of projects undertaken by cultural institutions to enable visually impaired consumers receive culture in a broad sense. The process is vital because, culture has become more and more visually oriented. Audio description (a way of translating visual to auditory) is one of the best ways to enable blind people to receive sport and theatrical events but also exhibitions and works of art. The main problem discussed among specialists in the field right now is the question of objectivity, that should be the main rule to follow, while creating a description and what how it should be used. Another vital issue is the participation of people with visual impairment in the cyber environment and exploring the ways in which state of the art technology can help the efforts of audiodescribers, museums and art galleries in matters of enabling. For several years prof. Aneta Pawłowska from the Department of Art History at University of Łódź, has conducted a research project which main aim is to provide audio descriptions for a number of museums in Łódź. The main aim of constant drive for improvement, interdisciplinary character of the works and the cooperation with Department of Spanish and Faculty of Physics and Applied Informatics is to research audio description as a method of enabling, teach it’s basics to the students and create descriptions for cultural institutions in Łódź.
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The article points out some dangers that stem from the comparison of audio description (AD) to ekphrasis. The comparison has been proposed by Robert Więckowski and since then used in the Polish literature concerning the topic. Emphasized are the differences in the reception of the two literary forms: ekphrasis encourages mental visualisation based on the recipient’s own experience, while AD is to evoke aesthetic experience also among people whose imagination is devoted of visual qualities. The two forms of description have other goals as well: ekhprasis aspires to become an autonomous literary work, whereas AD is only a tool directing to the art piece. The reflections proposed are initiated in the practical experience of a text-writer, but come back to the general problems concerned with the goal of AD and its relation to the work of art.
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EU directives or the need to build a wide audience are the main reasons why museums take action to make their exhibitions available to people with disabilities. However the experience of the Museum of City of Łódź related to the dissemination of fine arts, shows that cooperation with people with disabilities is not only a need to adapt to top-down requirements, but also creates a number of educational opportunities for employees and museum guests without disabilities. Projects presented in the paper – implemented by the Museum of the City of Łódź in 2013–2016 – are an example of efforts to adapt the museum’s space to the needs of people with visual and hearing impairments, as well as other types of disabilities. Their analysis – made both from the perspective of a museologist and an educator – presents the opportunities and difficulties associated with cooperation with disabled people and the potential of using the museum space in special pedagogy. Critical evaluation of the tasks carried out may be a commentary on the problem of hidden segregation and inadequate integration of disabled people and thus underline the advisability of applying the principles of universal design and inclusive education.
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The paper is focused on the role of cinemas in culture-led urban regeneration, their potential in the process of place-making and community building. Existing research has shown that there is a link between social and spatial identities based on small town cinemas and that community needs to be at the centre of the regeneration process for it to be sustainable. The paper follows the debate with its objective being to explore this link using a mixed method approach based on a case study. The case study deals with a local community cinema project located in the centre of Košice, Slovakia. It started the process of cinema restoration in 2015 and reflected the collective aspirations of urban inhabitants for the cinema’s survival. The findings conclude that the cinema is an active social actor and cultural asset in the neighbourhood and contributes to the development of a vital and inclusive community. On the other hand, it opens up the debate on the Slovak Audiovisual policies and cinema situation across Slovak districts as potential for further research.
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Hra ako spontánna príjemná činnosť má pre účastníka zmysel, pretože je prirodzene motivujúca zvonku aj zvnútra. Súvisí s rozvojom schopností ako je jazyk, sociálna úloha a tvorivosť. V neskoršom veku vstupujú do hry isté pravidlá, písané aj nepísané (fair play) a tie sprevádzajú hráčov v priebehu hry.
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Interview with Jan Slavík and Vladimíra Slavíková by Veronika Rodová and Kateřina Lojdová.
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This text is an insight into the life of a city gallery during the turbulent period of the last three years, which have been defined by the pandemic and the ongoing crisis associated with, among other things, the war in Ukraine. This is not a tumultuous period in the organization’s history, as it is not shutting down or severely reducing its operations. At least for the time being. Thanks to its status as a municipal contributory organization, Brno Galerie TIC1 has a relatively stable background. In any case, the crisis has accelerated some of the longer-term trends in the gallery’s management; in addition, novel developments and challenges have emerged. These include an increased awareness of the social responsibility of cultural institutions, the search for and verification of functional ways of communicating with audiences, or the abandonment and return of presentation to the exhibition space. Still, this focus on one particular gallery is not intended to be a case study; our ambition is to capture the contemporary development of the production, distribution and, to some extent, interpretation of visual art in a more general sense.
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The curatorial experiment New Archivist (Nový archivář) is a subversive gesture that addresses the current trends in the use of artificial intelligence in the field of art sciences and visual culture. While it is generally accepted that artificial intelligence has been used in recent years to process online databases of cultural heritage as a logical consequence and the ‘next step’ of large projects aimed at digitizing and making accessible the collections of memory institutions (such as Google Art and Culture or Europeana projects), in our project we work with a small dataset containing about 1000 images. While most projects based on the automatic classification of large datasets are framed by the endeavour to create tools for the accurate study of art and cultural history (Digital Curator, Vasulka Live Archive), our project was devoted to a subjective and artistic reflection on the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, without the ambition to generate outputs with the general validity of a sociological probe. We emphasized the personal testimonies of the artists involved and experimented with ways of mediating these accounts through different interfaces and media, with a high degree of added value in the form of a personal interpretation of the collected digital traces of artistic existence.
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The Black Box / Černá skříňka project was a challenge in terms of the circumstances in which it was created, its thematic focus, and its design. During the Covid-19 pandemic, external circumstances in the form of recurrent and lengthy lockdowns necessitated the usage of the internet environment for communication among the creative team as well as the public presentation of the project’s outputs. It was therefore, clear, from the beginning that the project would be presented on a specially designed website. However, the website’s layout, UX design, and visual conception had not yet been decided.
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The act of curating exhibitions online was unfamiliar to the most until mid-2020, when the world was in the midst of the first wave of lockdowns in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Till then, there were a handful of people discussing it — though many were the curators that had operated on the web since the 1990s. And till then, the web was often considered an unusual site for curatorial practice, and web exhibitions a corollary to curatorial work. But after March 2020 this scenario seemed to have undergone a change.
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The spread of COVID-19 at the beginning of the year 2020, put the whole world in a position of forced pause. For a short moment, the global pandemic presented itself as a great equalizer, forcing people across various geographies to reconsider and change their habits and behaviors. However, the social and economic costs of the pandemic did not spread evenly across the globe. Vulnerable people and communities were hit harder, and pre-existing social inequalities were reinforced. In this context, technology played a double role, acting as a social glue among geographically dislocated communities and people, whilst also rendering more palpable the so-called digital divide – a term which is used in the social sciences to refer to the gap between the information ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ and, more generally, to uneven access to technology and network infrastructures.
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Over the last six decades, networked art practices have evolved in response to and in anticipation of changing material conditions of communications systems, infrastructures, and technologies. Whether pre-internet correspondence art, or born-digital software-based, or net art, the material and, at times, ideological dimensions of networked art challenge existing approaches, methods, and protocols of not only the production of contemporary art but also its conservation, which this text seeks to address. Often tactically amorphous, integrated, and inseparable from conditions and questions of (im)materiality (see Lillemose, 2006), networked art resists conservation efforts to trace its edges and boundaries. Therefore, how and should we develop conservation efforts to offer access to the ‘original’ work in context without undermining its unruly materiality and institutional critique, particularly after the digital? Whether these efforts are called ‘conservation’ by museum curators, or ‘preservation’ by librarians and archivists, they share the same intent: making the work accessible. In the words of Peggy Phelan this “ labour […] to ‘preserve’ [performance] is also a labour that fundamentally alters [it]” (Phelan, 1993, p. 148).
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Digitization and digitalization have become fundamental means of transformation of memory institutions and their role in the information society. Not only the collections of artworks, literature, and documents, but also majority of social representations have turned to data formats. Digital media and institutional critique have transformed knowledge processes and organizational ecologies. Archives and galleries have become content providers for digital distribution channels. While they became primarily providers of digital content, the indicators according to which their performance is evaluated are quantity of digital content they produce, its reach, and consumer engagement on digital platforms.
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This chapter attempts to negotiate the contradictions of synthetic curating machines and the resulting exclusion of dominance as a form of synthetic curating of text through semantic and semiotic manipulation itself. The counter-aesthetics of this text are created by intentional structural machine refractions. Content and style reveal the text’s spaces and bends the all too rigid – if not laughable – notion of reality and logic. Processing deforms, transcribes, and transforms this text from its German source, fragments it via automatic translation software, and then translates and optimizes it with the Grammarly digital writing assistance tool.
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This article provides the conceptual basis and examples of the implementation of the group exhibition project AI: All Idiots, which was part of the Other Knowledge exhibition series at the MeetFactory Gallery in Prague in 2021. (for a view of the exhibition, see Figures: 1 and 2). The purpose of the project was to bring the subject of modern artificial intelligence to the attention of the general public while still being artistically stimulating. In lieu of the conventional strategy of curating a selection of artworks created by artists working with AI, we opted to start from scratch by gathering online digital copies of selected artworks by Czech artists, which served as a training dataset for our original AI software. The artists were also involved in the data’s interpretation. The experiment addressed the widespread use of AI for web content analysis, artists, curators, and the art community as a whole, as well as the question of whether AI operates as a source of information to generate stereotypical products that cannot do more than statistically confirm and continously repeat what is already known.
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This publication is a follow-up publishing project initiated by the online curatorial venture Black Box / Černá skříňka, which combines the search for alternative approaches to fulfilling the social and cultural role of brick-and-mortar exhibition institutions, the experience of transforming curatorial practice at a time of the pandemic, but also an experiment with the use of AI as a non-human curator of the exhibited artworks. These three aspects, which have merged within the Black Box project, are discussed separately in this publication from the broader perspective of international online curatorial practice and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in various art projects in recent years.
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Die Publikation stellt einen der ersten Versuche dar, die ganz außergewöhnliche Zeit der globalen Covid-19-Pandemie zu analysieren und zu reflektieren, deren Auswirkungen auf die Kunstwelt mit einem Schock verglichen werden können, der zusätzliche Reflexion als Bedingung für die bewusste Integration dieser Erfahrung zusammen mit einigen Krisenlösungen in die kuratorische Praxis der Post-Pandemie-Ära erfordert. In diesem Buch abbildet und kritisch untersucht das Autorenkollektiv die Erscheinungsformen der Transformation von Ausstellungsstrategien von Gedächtnisinstitutionen und Galerien mit Fokus auf den Zeitraum um 2020, beschleunigt durch die weltweit umgesetzten Anti-Pandemie-Maßnahmen zur Verhinderung der Ausbreitung von Covid-19. In dieser Zeitraum kam es zu einer allgemeinen Verschiebung hin zur Nutzung von Online-Kommunikationsplattformen für die Kunstpräsentation, die in Konvergenz mit dem langfristigen Prozess der Digitalisierung von Kunstsammlungen und der Entwicklung von Kunstpraxis und -kultur unter Verwendung digitaler Medien zur Erprobung neuer kuratorischer Ansätze führte, oft in einer Konfrontation zwischen der Galeriepraxis traditioneller White-Cube-Ausstellungsinstitutionen und den parallelen Online-kuratorischen Projekten, die sich bis dahin in der Entwicklung befanden.
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