University of Melbourne Events Calendar

Visit MPavilion after dark and enjoy projections featuring the works of First Nations artists.

Country and Culture is an immersive visual experience that will transform MPavilion Parkville after dark. Featuring works by Indigenous artists from The Torch, MPavilion Parkville will come to life with stunning artworks that explore themes of Country, culture and connectedness.

Drop by MPavilion Parkville from 6 to 9pm daily

• Wednesday 4 September
• Thursday 5 September
• Friday 6 September

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.