University of Melbourne Events Calendar

For the past two decades mass digitisation of collections has been quietly reshaping the practice of art history and curatorship. More recently AI tools launched upon the world have raised challenges and threats to ways of making art, discovering collections and to the ethics of working with collections of art and materials culture.

Within the discipline of art history this question of reproduction and how it changes our practices is, in some sense, the continuation of a much longer debate over the reproduction of art that stretches back at least to Walter Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935) or John Berger who argued in his 1972 ‘Ways of Seeing’ that ‘modern means of reproduction have… destroy[ed] the authority of art. The current hype around AI and machine vision has introduced new challenges to artists themselves and to art historians and curators.

For a long time AI or computer vision seemed to be of more interest to computer scientists who were busy teaching machines to identify paintings in ways that art historians and curators could already do. Often computer vision research (especially when hyped in the press) seemed to be labouring under a misapprehension that most art history was just connoisseurship, finding lost Rembrandts and hidden Raphael’s. But now a range of tools are being proposed to comb through collections, to relabel and re-categorise. They also offer people the chance to remix and reinvent art, challenging the authority of the original image in new ways.

Technologies mediate how we see the history of visual cultures and art history. They are not neutral, they have an impact on discovery, they change the types of questions we ask and yet this shift in practice has often been accepted without critical reflection. This lecture will engage with these challenges, noting the continuity and breaks with traditional art historical and curatorial practice, observing the challenges to ethics and the risk of harm and unexpected consequences. It will also encourage the practice of digital imagination and collaboration as pathways through these uncertain times.

The lecture is supported by the Macgeorge Bequest.

In this talk, we will discuss our recent advances in two areas of nanophotonics: passive cooling and topological phases.

In the first part, we will discuss how we can control thermal radiation and solar absorption by incorporating nanophotonic structures into textiles. Such textiles could regulate our thermal comfort much more efficiently than traditional fabrics. They can lead to significant energy savings in air-conditioning and contribute to a more sustainable and energy-efficient future.

The second topic will address topological insulating phases in nanophotonics. While topological protection is believed to offer robust transport in classical and quantum optical devices against fabrication imperfections, recent experiments reveal that even minor perturbations can cause significant localization and reflection. Here, we theoretically point out the intrinsic limitations in commonly studied topological photonic structures that contravene the expected topological robustness. We will also discuss how these limitations stem from the bosonic nature of photons and propose strategies for leveraging them to our advantage.

There will be a morning tea at 11:30am in the foyer of the level 2 Physics South Building