Art and Technology: New Perspectives on African Art

Art and Technology: New Perspectives on African Art examines innovative uses of technology in art historical research and exhibition installation.

Kristina Van Dyke, director of Pulitzer Arts Foundation, and computer engineer Frederic Cloth will discuss their exhibition project, Kota: Digital Excavations in African Art, opening at the Pulitzer in October 2015, with Robert Pietrusko, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at the Graduate School of Design. The project is built around a database Cloth developed that aggregates over 2,000 extant Kota guardian figures from Central Africa, as well as a series of algorithms he wrote enabling the detection of unprecedented historical patterns in the corpus. The presentation and discussion will address the design challenges of creating a coherent aesthetic experience for exhibition visitors, one that allows for an appreciation of the works of art as well as a critical interaction with the digital tools that informed their selection.

Frederic Cloth

Cloth is based in Liège in Belgium and studied computer engineering at the Liege University. An autodidact in the field of African art and ethnography, he has spent the past 15 years studying the sculptural traditions of western equatorial Africa. He designed and maintained the van Rijn African Art Archive at Yale University and is currently working on a book about Mahongwe figures. He is co-curator of Kota: Digital Excavations in African Art, an exhibition presented at Pulitzer Arts Foundation in October 2015.

Kristina Van Dyke

Van Dyke is the Director at Pulitzer Arts Foundation and co-curator of the upcoming exhibition Kota: Digital Excavations in African Art. Van Dyke received her master's degree in art history from Williams College, Williamstown, Mass., and her Ph.D. in Art History from Harvard University in 2005, writing her dissertation on the nature of representation in the oral traditions of Mali in West Africa. Van Dyke was formerly Curator for Collections and Research at the Menil Collection in Houston.

Robert Gerard Pietrusko

Pietrusko is a designer and composer whose work explores the technologies of spatial measurement-classification-representation and their interaction with techniques of the body. He has exhibited internationally in a variety of museums and galleries including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, and the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design.

Agency for Critical Inquiry

Art and Technology: New Perspectives on African Art is part of the CCVA initiative Agency for Critical Inquiry, an open invitation to academic and Boston-area communities to connect with the Carpenter Center, forging a site for collective learning in the public realm.