EVA 93: Electronic Imaging and the Visual Arts Conference,

Tutorials and Exhibition: A Review [1994]

Jennifer Durran

The fourth EVA conference was held in London, July 26 – 30 1993. I

attended the conference as part of a research tour of Britain, Europe and
America to investigate digital image acquisition, processing, storage and
dissemination. The conference aims primarily "to provide an international
meeting place for users, suppliers and scientific researchers involved in the
application of electronic imaging and the visual arts." It draws delegates
from museums and libraries, the education sector and from multimedia
companies and suppliers of advanced technology products. Whilst the
number of people attending was small (approximately 100) in comparison
with major conferences in the library and technology fields, the EVA
conference, like the CHArt (Computers and the History of Art) conference,
is a showcase of vanguard projects related to technology and the provision
of visual arts information. The three-day conference was preceded by two
days of exhibition and tutorials held at the Charing Cross Hotel.

Exhibition
Fourteen exhibitors (multimedia companies, institutions and organisations)
displayed a variety of wares: Athens Technology Center presented their
Electronic Guide for the Museum of Dion which was commissioned by the
Department of Archaeology and the History of Art at the University of
Thessaloniki; the French company Avelem demonstrated image processing
techniques derived from their work with the NARCISSE project as well as
their system for pyramidal tiled JPEG images called SCOPYR ; the
Commission of the European Communities' Directorate-General XIII
provided information about their R & D programs which had funded many
of the projects discussed during the conference itself; Birkbeck College
showed a student project from its MA in Computer Applications for the
History of Art; Primagraphics displayed VARSITY, a high-performance
workstation for archiving digital images.

Tutorials
The tutorial sessions covered a range of topics and were divided into
three streams: Fundamentals, Advanced and General Interest and
covered a range of topics. These intensive sessions were conducted by
high-profile individuals and numbers were limited. In most instances,
extensive notes and technical documentation were also provided.
Introduction to Electronic Imaging was an overview of the technical issues
involved with creating and running a digital image database system.
Advanced Image Processing covered image resolution, resampling,
filtering, contrast enhancement and data compression. Photo-CD as a
New Practical Standard was concerned with future directions of this
technology and those in the group who had begun trials with Photo-CD
gave overviews and/or demonstrations of their projects. Image and
Multimedia Telecommunications looked at networking options e.g. LANs,
WANs & MANs, ISDN, application architecture, database interconnectivity,
hypermedia and multimedia. Electronic Publishing and Copyright covered
European and American perspectives. Management issues considered
technology risk assessment, user needs determination, budgeting,
financing, etc. The experience of discussing these issues with colleagues
from Europe, America and Japan, was extremely rewarding.

Conference
The conference was held in the auditorium of the new Sainsbury wing of
the National Gallery. The 3 days were divided loosely into five themes.

Wednesday 28 July was devoted to "Case studies of systems small to

major" - eight papers covering electronic publishing, public access
systems in museums, university teaching systems and collection
management systems from around the world. The first paper was
delivered by Jeremy Rees of the International Visual Arts Information
Network, who described the interactive multimedia project 'Brancusi' which
is only at the prototype stage. The project is planned to culminate in 1995
with the publication of a CD-I which will allow users to explore biographical,
historical and bibliographical information using text, still and moving
images and sound. Bent Kure's paper "Digital image database as a
teaching tool in art history" described the difficulties involved in setting up
such a system at Oppland College, Norway where a database of 3,000
digital art images is connected to the lecture theatre and student study
rooms by the College local area network. Photo-CD was investigated for
image storage but found to have limitations.

Holly Witchey discussed the Interactive Multimedia Art Guide (IMAGE)

designed for the San Diego Museum of Art by Cognitive Applications who
were responsible for the Micro Gallery at the National Gallery in London.
Still at the prototype stage, it will eventually contain about 200 works
representing the highlights of the Museum's collection. The system will be
based on the recently completed hardcopy catalogue. About 30 works will
have in-depth, interactive features. A demonstration was given of a still
life painting by Spanish artist Juan Sánchez Cotán which very cleverly
explained the use of perspective in the painting. The application of HDTV
(High Definition Television) to Japanese Art Museums was presented by
Tadoru Kato. The Hi-Vision Still Image Picture system using HDTV
technology was first used in the Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu in April 1989.
Now there are 50 of these systems in museums and libraries throughout
Japan and by 1995 this figure is expected to have doubled. One company,
Tokyo Hi-Vision Inc, has received commissions from a number of Japanese
museums to produce programs and image databases based on their art
collections. The company is now half-way through a four year project
called "The World of 19th Century French Painting" which will contain 114
different programs covering about 1,000 Impressionist and Post-
Impressionist works. Hi-Vision's other HDTV still image products include
"Arata Isozaki 1960-1990" (1991) and "Millet and the Barbizon School"
(Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art, 1991).

Thursday morning's theme was Image and Multimedia

Telecommunications, a new session this year. Dominique Delouis of
Télésystèmes and Fabrice Lemessier from the Musée d'Orsay described the
progress of RAMA (Remote Access to Museum Archives), an EC consortium-
based project which aims to interconnect the image and text databases of
the consortium's museum partners by a common interface. Jan van der
Starre then described the VAN EYCK (Visual Arts Network for the Exchange
of Cultural Knowledge) project which covers similar ground to the RAMA
project. Its eventual aim is to design a scholarly workstation for art history
researchers which can retrieve text and image from several museum and
library databases in real time. One of its work packages is related to the
establishment of a core set of record structures for artist identification,
object identification and subject identification to be derived by comparing
standards and practices across institutions involved in the project. It will
also use the results of the RAMA telecommunications research and include
an image recognition component developed from work done by Professor
William Vaughan at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Einar Petterson from the University of Oslo gave a most interesting paper
on ScanArtForum, a Nordic initiative to promote the use of electronic
imaging and telecommunications for art history research and education.
He proposed to establish a system based on developments in digital
technology currently used for newspaper image distribution. The current
impediments to Scandinavian art historians being able to use such a
system to exchange images effectively and inexpensively were then
discussed e.g. the majority of institutions do not have access to the
necessary hardware and software and the tightening of copyright laws in
Scandinavia.

Thursday afternoon focused on Image Acquisition and Storage. This was

the most technical and perhaps least accessible for many delegates. The
papers included "Colour Manipulation and Separation Techniques:
Applications in the MARC project" by Lindsay MacDonald, "3D Modelling at
Telecom Paris" by Francis Schmitt, "Conservation of Electronic Imaging on
Glass CDs" by John Matthews and an update on the VASARI (Visual Arts
System for Archiving and Retrieval of Images) system by David Saunders.
The day concluded with an eloquent presentation by James Casha of Kodak
entitled "Making Photo-CD a Practical Reality". He presented an overview
of the technology's development from its origins as a consumer product to
the forthcoming range of formats and application software products
designed specifically for commercial users. Casha also outlined the
significant potential Photo-CD has for museums and libraries as well as for
education and marketing.

The Friday morning session was concerned with Display, Publishing and
Retrieval. Hervé Derrien gave a paper on the MARC (Methodology for Art
Reproduction in Colour) project and its applicability to art book and
catalogue publishing. The project aims to improve the quality of art
reproductions for publication using the high quality scanner developed in
the VASARI project and producing an improved portable version. Malcolm
Lewis of Media Projects International and Catherine Draycott of the
Wellcome Centre discussed the management process of creating a laser
disk of medical images derived from paintings, prints, drawings,
manuscripts and printed books: the feasibility study, user needs
identification, system definition, project management structure, production
path, documentation, the image capture process and the importance of
team work.

A well-known author in the Information Technology field, Tony Cawkell,

gave a somewhat disappointing paper on "Developments in indexing
picture collections. He described the components of the typical image
database system and the ways in which each of those components can
affect the retrieval of images. The need for file staging, especially in large-
scale systems was mentioned. He then looked at conventional indexing
methods e.g. controlled vocabularies such as ICONCLASS and AAT, and
then at the use of visual search keys such as icons. He failed to
acknowledge the fact that techniques for the intellectual control of images
have not kept pace with the advances in image management technology.
New developments in pattern recognition and neural networks could be
applied. He dealt only superficially with alternatives to retrieval by text
description and did not acknowledge much of the research in this area, e.g.
measurement of effectiveness of indexing methods, how the structure of a
database can affect browsing, how the type of visual information required
affects search strategies -- relationship between keyword, specific
browsing and information needs, influence of the user interface.

"Copyright protection of artistic materials in electronic form: the CITED

approach" was the title of the paper given by Sarah Keates and Graham
Cornish from the British Library. It looked at the threat to intellectual
property rights posed by using digital technology to produce, store,
manipulate and distribute information. The CITED project involves a five
nation consortium and it aims to control the copying of copyright materials
whilst at the same time allowing appropriate access to such materials, and
to develop a generic model of copyright protection for digital information.

Friday afternoon, devoted to "The Future", saw a mixed bag of papers. The
last presentation "Building towards image resources and user
environments in the visual arts ", given by Michael Ester, ex-director of the
Getty Art History Information Program, was basically drawn from his
writing on the subject and did not offer any new insights. It was followed
by a panel discussion where some of the dissatisfaction and frustration felt
by delegates was voiced. There were clearly a number of issues which
had not been addressed. It was my opinion that users, for example, art
historians, were under-represented, both as delegates and paper-givers, at
the conference which was dominated by developers and intermediaries.

Conclusion
For those interested in leading-edge developments, attendance at
conferences like EVA is essential, although electronic discussion groups like
VRA-L and MUSEUM-L are becoming increasingly useful sources of such
information. My only criticism would be that those papers dealing with
electronic imaging developments in other disciplines such as astronomy,
medicine, archaeology often failed to indicate the relevance of their
particular visual information system to the visual arts and delegates were
left to draw their own conclusions. Many of the papers were concerned
with the "proof-of-concept" demonstrators, prototypes, pilots and projects
which are proliferating worldwide. It remains to be seen how much of this
groundwork research will be applied to the development of practical
solutions to real-life problems in the visual resources field.

About the Author

At the time of writing, Jennifer Durran was Visual Arts Librarian, Monash
University, Australia.

About this Paper

This paper was published in:

ARLIS/ANZ News 39, November 1994, pp. 71-75.

This paper was cited in:

Greenhlagh, Michael. “Art History”, in A Companion to Digital Humanities,
ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell,
2004.
www.digitalhumanities.org/companion