A Personal View of EVA London: Past, Present, Future

I first encountered EVA London in 1995 through my establishment of the Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp), part of the World Wide Web Virtual Library. In 2003, I was invited back as a keynote speaker on the subject of website accessibility for cultural heritage resources. Since then I have been involved with every EVA London conference either as an author or since 2007 as a proceedings editor. This paper summarises the developments of the EVA London conference over the past 25 years from a personal viewpoint and celebrates the 30th anniversary of EVA London and the whole family of international EVA conferences. The development of the community around EVA (Electronic Visualisation and the Arts) is evaluated in the context of a Community of Practice. The paper also considers possible future directions for EVA

Computational Culture and A.I.: Challenging human identity and curatorial practice

This paper records a half-day Symposium of invited talks on the first day of the EVA London 2020 Conference. It continues a series from the previous four EVA London Symposiums held since 2016 (Bowen & Giannini 2016; Bowen, Giannini & Polmeer 2017; Bowen, Giannini, et al. 2018; 2019)

Computing the Future: Digital encounters in art and science when da Vinci meets Turing

Computing the future, as life and research moves to the Internet, we are engaged increasingly in digital encounters from present to past and into the future with real people, events and documents. This paper focuses on the newly born-digital relationship between Alan Turing, father of computer science, and Leonardo da Vinci, master of Renaissance art and science – both revered as visionary geniuses, prophets of the future. Given the continued growth of digitised materials that are daily entering global consciousness, it is only relatively recently that both da Vinci’s notebooks and paintings, and Turing’s archive, are online and searchable. Thus we are able for the first time to relatively easily juxtapose and compare their work, and see that they have much in common in terms of what it means to human in science, art and the natural world, from da Vinci’s in-depth studies of the mechanisms of the human body, mind, and soul, foundational to his art, and to Turing’s discoveries in Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and morphogenesis. Considering their points of concurrence in the digital world brings into focus our global network of digital places and spaces, where science, art, and nature, including real and artificial life, become unbounded

Turing’s Sunflowers: Public research and the role of museums

In recent years, public engagement in museums is increasingly being influenced by the paradigm of “citizen science”, that is, active participation in research teams by members of the general public with no formal training in the field of research concerned. This paper provides an overview of citizen science approaches which museums can deploy using online platforms, digital tools and apps. It also aims to highlight challenges and innovations, as well as possible opportunities for cultural organisations to include public participation in research and knowledge creation

Augmented Reality Experience for Inaccessible Areas in Museums

In recent years, new innovations have been introduced into the cultural heritage sector, aimed at offering more engaging and accessible tours to the public. The article discusses the development process of the VirgilTell project, for the visit of inaccessible places in the Racconigi Castle, one of the Savoy residences in Piedmont (Italy), by the UXD Team of Politecnico di Torino. The places assigned to the project are being restored and therefore excluded from the tour. The VirgilTell experience aims to include and make them accessible to visitors, through a virtual tour including multimedia content for the entertainment and involvement of the users. The visit has been realised through mixed techniques between VR and AR for the narration of the spaces in which the user takes part in a journey made of narratives by characters from the past and objects that no longer exist. The VirgilTell visit was also created with the aim of anticipating, in promotional terms, the physical visit to the museum spaces undergoing restoration, so as to attract visitors back inside once the work is finished

O Renascimento Digital de Leonardo da Vinci a Alan Turing

The Italian Renaissance started a rebirth of culture and knowledge not experienced since Roman times. Leonardo da Vinci was arguably the leading polymath of the era. We are now in the throes of a Digital Renaissance, arguably started by Alan Turing in England. The information revolution that we are now experiencing is as disruptive as any change since the Renaissance. This paper draws some parallels between these two periods and speculates on the future of digital developments.   Keywords – Computational culture, Digital culture, Digital identity, Information revolution, Italian Renaissance.    O Renascimento Italiano iniciou um reaparecimento de uma cultura e conhecimento não experimentados desde os tempos romanos. Leonardo da Vinci foi, sem dúvida, o principal polímamo da época. Agora estamos no auge de um Renascimento Digital, indiscutivelmente iniciado por Alan Turing, na Inglaterra. A revolução da informação que estamos experimentando agora é tão disruptiva quanto qualquer mudança desde o Renascimento. Este artigo traça alguns paralelos entre esses dois períodos e traz algumas especulações sobre o futuro do desenvolvimento digital.  

EVA London 2019: Electronic Visualisation & the Arts. Proceedings of a conference held in London 8th-11th July.

The Electronic Visualisation and the Arts London 2019 Conference (EVA London 2019) is co-sponsored by the Computer Arts Society (CAS) and BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, of which the CAS is a Specialist Group. 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of Event One, an early digital art exhibition held at the Royal College of Art in 1969

EVA London 2021: Keynote summaries

This paper records summaries of invited keynote talks and backgrounds of the keynote speakers at the EVA London 2021 Conference (Weinel et al. 2021). EVA London takes place annually, originally starting in 1990 (Bowen 2020; Hemsley 2013). As for the previous year, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, EVA London 2021 is a completely online conference. The conference is broadly based on digital culture (Giannini&Bowen2019b; Bowen & Giannini 2021) with a special emphasis on digital art (Bowen 2013).The conference also includes a symposium panel with three invited panellists presenting position statements (Bowen et al. 2021)

Museum Websites of the First Wave: The rise of the virtual museum

In this paper, we analyse trends of the first wave of museum websites (from the 1990s to the early 2000s) to understand how the characteristics of the Internet (specifically the World Wide Web), of museum staff, and museum audiences shaped the adoption of technology and new forms of participation and what they can tell us about engagement for museums of the future. The early development of online museum resources parallels the development of the EVA conference, which was establishing itself at a similar time