"Digital Navigations, Storytelling and Accessible Art History" was the titel of the paper I presented at Nordik 2015 in Reykjavik two weeks ago. To cut it short I talked on "Why do my students not Google enough?". Generally students seems to have low digital literacy. They do look for texts (Wikipedia, exhibition presentations etc.) as a way to find "real" answers to my questions (and perhaps in hope of not having to read textbooks), but they don't seem to search for reproductions of art works or interact with digitised art collections. I foolishly thought they were more skilled than me, but it can be quite challenging to find things if you don't know how to navigate in different digitised environments. One problem is that museums tend to have their own logic archiving collections and this often organises how the collections gets digitised. So now I am planning new assignments that will help future students explore the Internet for art treasures.

This is the abstract:

Digital navigations, storytelling and accessible art history

Digital art collections have improved dramatically in the past decades. Attempts are made to extend existing collections and interaction with on-line visitors is encouraged by making galleries, tagging images with information outside established art terminology that enables new ways of searching etc. There are also other forums for discussing and exposing art: digital archives like Google Art Project, and archives for digitally born artworks like deviantArt. These digital places attract “nerds”, who both interact and engage themselves in the communities. Unfortunately students often are not part of these interactions. In order to make art students use digital art archives better, more research is to be done on the various tools of interaction and the meaning-makings of art blogs, twitter accounts and Facebook-groups etc. This could make the discipline of art history more relevant to social developments by developing new critical methods and educate new kinds of curators and art critics.

Last week I was at Nordik 2015, an art historical conference arranged every third year. This time we had the great fortune of visiting Reykjavik and Iceland. The conference ended with an excursion to "art and nature", and the photos included in this post is from this four hour long trip. More specifically it is from our first stop at Kópavogur Art Museum dedicated to the sculptor and stained glass artist Gerdur Helgadóttir (1928-1975). 

Though the window you can see the church with on of her more famous stained glass windows. Sadly, it was closed on our visit but we could see some of her drawings of it in the exhibition, Birting (Illumination), also including eight contemporary artists inspired of Helgadòttirs work. You can find more on the museum and the exhibition here: http://english.gerdarsafn.is

I will give you more information on the content of the conference, as well as my paper presentation, in coming posts - promise!

While preparing a paper for a Nordic art history conference next week I found myself thinking of photo slides... The sounds of both of the fan of the slide projector and the mechanism of changing slides. The warm, dusty smell and the semi-darkness of the classroom. A sense of nostalgia for sure, but do I really miss them?

Doing digitised presentations do have so many advantages. No colleague can "borrow" your lecture's most important photo, you can have a full archive of all your presentations and still do alterations, and it is a lot easier to travel with a USB-stick than with a tray of 15-50 slides that might accidentally fall upside down, spread across the room, 2 minutes before your important conference presentation. No more reddish versions of medieval wall paintings, violet façades of renaissance cathedrals, or coloured paintings in black and white. More importantly, you can also include other media and use different tools while teaching.

Still... I am thinking of those photo slides, the sound, smell and semi-darkness, and how they were  such an important part of making me an art historian.