Giselle Beiguelman, Bruno Moreschi, Bernardo Fontes
»(De)composite Collections« is an ongoing investigation into the formation and updates of the colonialist gaze in museum collections. Developed in the context of the intelligent.museum residency (2022), its starting point are artistic collections organized in the first half of the 20th century.
Our main questions are:
What other art histories might emerge from AI’s readings of the images an Artificial Intelligence (AI) reading these images? How to elaborate methodologies based on AI to map the constitutive elements of the representations of historical colonialism? Can AI systems contribute to understanding the gaze as a historical construct?
For that, we analyzed the collections of two important Brazilian museums, both from the University of Sao Paulo: the Paulista Museum, a historical museum, and the Contemporary Art Museum (MAC USP) focusing on artworks produced between 1920 and 1950. This is the period related to the constitution of Modernism, often described as the first counter-hegemonic aesthetic in Latin America.
Following the post-colonial thought studies, which have been questioning this approach, we decided to confront both collections by compiling a series of datasets, organized according to some recurrent themes in historical painting and Brazilian Modernism: indigenous people, people of color, white people, and tropical nature.
Algorithmically processed with GANs, those datasets allowed us to identify some common elements and differences between both collections, despite the authorships and typologies of traditional art history. Because AI technologies read images by images, they can reveal hidden patterns in the iconographic sets, including paintings, engravings, and draws, going beyond traditional categories based on historiographic narratives and formal styles.
Through machine learning technics, we could understand the persistence of the colonialist imagination in the artworks, contradicting some canonical statements about Brazilian Modernism’s aesthetic and ideological ruptures. These continuities range from the nude black malen body associated with plantation work, the patriarchal semblance of the white men, usually portrayed alone and with formal clothes, to indigenous peoples as generic entities without particular characteristics.
Nevertheless, changes are evident in the figuration of the white women… More.
Related: Continuum histórico e normatizações em acervos de arte e datasets
Modos: Revista de História da Arte, v. 6, 2, 2022
Autores: Bruno Moreschi, Amanda Jurno e Giselle Beiguelman