Visual Semantics
Visualizing Global Networks, Circulations and Patterns

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 Presentation

As part of the 10^th anniversary of the Artl@s project, the Artl@s Research Group are organizing an international conference on the digital approach to the circulation of images and forms, in collaboration with the project MoDe(s)2 - Modernidad(es) Descentralizada(s) (universitat de Barcelona) and the LARHA (université de Grenoble).

In his groundbreaking project, the Atlas Mnemosyne, Aby Warburg suggested that some shapes travel, passing times and cultures. On their way, accompanied by processes of mixture, borrowings, transfers and resemanticizations that contribute to their impact, they become acting symbols. Building on this idea, Herbert Read proposed in The origin of forms in art (1965) that artistic forms can be formalized and reduced to certain shapes that carry “lines of beauty” and thus symbolic meaning. Such ideas, we believe, could serve as a starting point for cross-disciplinary research that would bring together art historians, historians, linguists, and computer and cognitive scientists with the aim to discover the basic units of a generalizable “visual semantics” of artistic creation.

More and more art historical sources are available online worldwide. This should not only excite us to reconstruct the global circulation of images and artifacts, but also use these tools to (re-)consider the mobility of images, patterns, and styles. This international conference aims to assess the potential of digital technology in renewing our study and understanding of artistic circulations and in the collective and progressive deployment of alternative narratives which are more de-centered and more inclusive.

The conference will be held in English ; it is open to all and free of charge.

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