A Cloud-Native Web Application for Assisted Metadata Generation and Retrieval: THESPIAN-NER

Within the context of the Competence Centre for the Conservation of Cultural Heritage (4CH) project, the design and deployment of a platform-as-a-service cloud infrastructure for the first European competence centre of cultural heritage (CH) has begun, and some web services have been integrated into the platform. The first integrated service is the INFN-CHNet web application for FAIR storage of scientific analysis on CH: THESPIAN-Mask. It is based on CIDOC-CRM-compatible ontology and CRMhs, describing the scientific metadata. To ease the process of metadata generation and data injection, another web service has been developed: THESPIAN-NER. It is a tool based on a deep neural network for named entity recognition (NER), enabling users to upload their Italian-written report files and obtain labelled entities. Those entities are used as keywords either to serve as (semi)automatically custom queries for the database, or to fill (part of) the metadata form as a descriptor for the file to be uploaded. The services have been made freely available in the 4CH PaaS cloud platform

Collage as Queer Methodology: The Pleasures and Politics of Trans and Queer Photographic Representations

This practice-led research project is a critical feminist engagement with the messy complexities of making, consuming and exhibiting imagery. I use a range of material processes to develop large-scale photographic series that explore intimacy and a continued reconfiguring of the body. I consider the ethical intricacies of photographic practice and interrogate how a feminist and queer politics of ruining and remaking can inform an approach to my own practice and participation in image culture

Spectres of minimalism

My thesis plays host to a variety of spectres. Taking the peripheral, overlooked qualities of shadows and reflections as a starting point, I show how discourse can narrow one's perceptual focus. 1960s polemics have concentrated the beam of light by which minimalist objects now appear, obscuring the marginal but tangible effect of Donald Judd's reflections. I ask why such reflections were ignored in his own writings, why they were regarded as problematic by contemporary critics concerned about `illusionism', and why they have remained (largely) unexamined since; I conclude that quandaries about seductive illusion were of a similar order to contemporary worries around immersive spectacle. While these `spectres' of minimalism - unacknowledged optical effects and repressed anxieties - have been omitted in historical discourse, they have re- materialised in later works by Susan Hiller, Mona Hatoum, Joanne Tatham and Torn O'Sullivan, and Jan de Cock - works which can be characterised as parades of reflections, shadows, ghosts and avatars. In these artists' negotiations of their minimalist `inheritance', they acknowledge and engage with the optical illusions, uncanny elements, and unspoken anxieties that inhabit Judd's works. Having experienced something akin to a haunting as hitherto hidden aspects of Judd's work have suddenly come to light, I now adopt an art historical methodology that not only takes account of, but is founded on, such spectral revelations. Seeing through the lenses that later artistic practices provide, I offer a contemporary re- reading of Judd's work: I propose a new set of associations with cinemas, cities, crystals and cars, and argue that, after all these years, Judd's works are still well placed to prompt philosophical reflections on contemporary experience

What's in Lisbon? Art Museums, Art Dealers, and Refugees in Portugal between 1933 and 1945

This thesis focuses on the transactions of works of art that took place in Portugal during the period of the Third Reich (1933-1945), the institutions and individuals involved in these transactions, and the works of art that were the object of those transactions. Drawing on American, Austrian, British, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and Swiss primary sources, the thesis sets out to determine the extent of the influence of the refugee flux into the country and of the international circulation of Nazi-looted art on the Portuguese art market. It does so by identifying and studying the actions of specific groups identified as having the higher chances of benefiting from these circumstances: importers and exporters of non-contemporary works of art; national art museums in Lisbon and Porto, cities with international communications and transport networks, which hosted the highest number of refugees; public museums in seaside and spa resorts, where thousands of refugees resided during the war years; and the foreign art dealers who opened businesses in Lisbon. Conceptually, it begins with a large universe of analysis, narrowing its scope as the chapters progress, culminating in the study of the actions of one single figure, and clarifying the provenance of one single painting, in a case study that brings together various areas of research examined previously. While findings confirm the supposition that the Portuguese State and public institutions did not knowingly engage in the acquisition of Nazi-looted art during this period, they reveal that some of their acquisitions require further provenance research, and that the actions of specific individuals in bringing works of art into the country demand further scrutiny

The Digital Prosthesis: between Perception, Representation and Imagination

Through practice-based research, this thesis poses the following question: To what extent can an artist use the digital camera and its processing as a prosthesis for human vision and embodiment in order to produce artworks that propose a relationship to the object world that corresponds to the exploration of a singular vision? Can the moving image operate between perception, representation and imagination? Can the moving image engage its viewers in a manner similar to painting? What forms of installation can correspond to these research questions? Triangulating a fine art practice in moving images with theoretical research into the philosophical analyses of perception, prosthesis, Flux-Image and the Matrixial Gaze, and with comparative studies of the practices of contemporary artists working with the moving image and varieties of installation, this thesis researches the relationship between the human subject, digital photographic prostheses and the external world with specific relation to time. Chapter One provides an analytical account of my work and exhibitions to explain the major questions I explore through practice. Chapter Two proposes a series of theoretical frameworks structured by the cultural and linguistic studies of prosthesis, a study of Paul Cézanne and the phenomenological concerns of being-in-the-world by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Deleuzian notions of cinematic movement/memories/time, Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s Flux-Image and Bracha Ettinger’s the Matrixial Gaze and Metramorphosis. In Chapter Three, works and installation practices of three moving–image–based artists, Pipilotti Rist, Hilary Lloyd and Elizaeth Price, are introduced in order to explore modes of video installation. The thesis concludes with the presentation of the final exhibition See the Seeing (July 2015). Digital prosthesis is not only a tool for generating archives and documentary effects. The thesis concludes that it also provides an alternative way of perceiving and imaging the world. The thesis examines the question of artworks’ escaping from the conventional role of photo-mechanical image in representation and communication to see how moving-image artworks could generate an individual perception of the object, that is not an image of some thing, but a solicitation to viewers to stay with it. The works seeks to generate affection (in Deleuze’s sense) while intervening in the flow of flux–image in the contemporary time

Cultural Maps, Networks, and Flows: The History and Impact of the Havana Biennale 1984 to the present

Since 1984 the Havana Biennale has been known as "the Tri-continental art event," presenting artists from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. It also has intensely debated the nature of recent and contemporary art from a Third World or Global South perspective. The Biennale is a product of Cuba's fruition since the Revolution of 1959. The Wifredo Lam Center, created in 1983, has organized the Biennial since its inception. This dissertation proposes that at the heart of the Biennale has been an alternative cosmopolitan modernism (that we might call "contemporary" or "post-colonial") that was envisaged by a group of local cultural agents, critics, philosophers, art historians, and also supported by a network of peers around the world. It examines the role Armando Hart Dávalos, Minister of Culture of Cuba (1976-1997), who played a key figure in the development of a solid cultural policy, one which produced the Havana Biennale as a cultural project based on an explicit "Third World" consciousness. It explores the role of critics and curators Gerardo Mosquera and Nelson Herrera Ysla, key members of the founding group of the Biennale. Subsequently, it examines how the work of Llilian Llanes, director of the Lam Center and of the Biennale (1983-1999), shaped the event in structural and conceptual terms. Finally, it examines the most recent developments and projections for the future.Using primary material, interviews, and field work research, the study focuses on the conceptual, contextual, and historical structure that supports the Biennale. It presents from several optics the views and world-view of the agents involved from the inside (curators and collaborators), as well as, from an art-world perspective through an account of the nine editions. Using the Havana Biennale as case study this work goes to disentangle and reveal the socio-political and intellectual debates taking place in the conformation of what is call today global art. In addition, recognizes the potentiality of alternative thinking and cultural subjectivity in the Global South