Digital Humanities Initiative Talk Series

Date: 3 March 2025 (Monday)
Time: 5 PM (HKT)
Via Zoom

Speaker: Dr. Leonardo Impett, Digital Humanities, University of Cambridge

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About the talk

Despite existing, by some accounts, since the early 1980s, digital art history has an understandable nervousness about its own disciplinary nature. A 2005 collection edited by Anna Bentkowska-Kafel called it a “subject in transition”; Johanna Drucker in 2013 famously asked “Is There a “Digital” Art History?”; and even the first issue of the International Journal of Digital Art History, in 2015, was devoted to the question: “What is Digital Art History?”

As the field is necessarily conditioned both by current technical developments and by the interests and practices of art historians more broadly, we should have no reason to think it will fossilise into the kind of stable methodological discipline that these questions seem to call for. By looking at some of the experiments in digital art history over the past forty years (from, for instance, Marilyn Lavin and Martin Kemp), I will instead try to ask: where is digital art history now, and where might it usefully go next?

One area that is generating significant interest at present is artificial intelligence, and more specifically computer vision. It is clear that having a machine which can understand images with some sophistication ought to be useful to the discipline of art history – yet there are few practical proposals on precisely how this might work. I will argue that the next chapter for digital art history will lie in reversing this relationship: in uncovering the cultural perspectives, the ways of seeing, of computer vision itself. Taking the technology, in other words, from a tool to an object of study.

In this Zoom talk, Prof. Leonardo Impett will introduce us to the world of “Digital” art history. One area currently generating significant interest is artificial intelligence, and more specifically, computer vision. It is clear that having a machine capable of understanding images with some sophistication ought to be useful to the discipline of art history; yet, there are few practical proposals on precisely how this might work. Prof. Impett will argue that the next chapter for digital art history lies in reversing this relationship: uncovering the cultural perspectives and ways of seeing inherent in computer vision itself. In other words, he advocates taking the technology from being merely a tool to becoming an object of study.

About the speaker

Leonardo Impett is assistant professor in the Faculty of English at Cambridge as part of Cambridge Digital Humanities. He has a background in machine learning and computer vision, with a PhD at the Image and Visual Representation Lab of the EPFL, and was subsequently based at Villa I Tatti, Durham University, and the Bibliotheca Hertziana, with whom he continues to collaborate at the intersection of art history and the ethics of artificial intelligence. He is currently writing a book with Fabian Offert at UCSB, and is occasionally forced to write about himself in the first person.