The Institute of Fine Arts presents “The Machine Gaze: AI in Art Conservation and Analysis”.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence tools is profoundly transforming cultural production and our approaches to preserving humanity’s shared past. Machine learning and computational techniques have already begun to assist conservators, scientists, and scholars in decoding complex datasets, revealing hidden features in artworks, restoring lost elements, and forging new connections between historical art and modern artistic practices. AI has even been used to consider an artwork’s authenticity through image analysis.
Yet, these advances also raise pressing ethical and philosophical questions about the implications of this new machine gaze—AI’s ability to observe, analyze, and interpret. How can we trust that AI processes information and presents conclusions accurately? What safeguards are needed to mitigate biases inherent in training datasets and algorithms? And to what extent should AI be considered a reliable collaborator in art-related decision-making processes?
This roundtable brings together experts in computer science, conservation, and art history to examine the application of AI in cultural heritage conservation and art analysis, exploring both the successes and limitations of these technologies. The discussion will further consider the future of AI in this field, emphasizing the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration to ensure these technologies responsibly shape the cultural landscape of tomorrow.
Panelists:
J. Cabelle Ahn is a New York-based art historian, journalist, and non-profit director. She received her PhD in History of Art from Harvard University, where she conducted a data-driven analysis of early exhibition strategies and the corresponding changes in the secondary art market. She holds MA degrees from the Courtauld Institute of Art and Bard Graduate Center and has held fellowships at the Harvard Art Museums, The Morgan Museum and Library, and the Cooper Hewitt, among others. She presently specializes in connecting historical art and its markets to their contemporary counterparts. Her bylines can be found at the Art Newspaper, Artnet News, Master Drawings, Journal18, and in several edited volumes and periodicals. She is currently working on a series of articles that looks at how contemporary artists are rescripting Old Masters through the lens of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. She is currently the President of the Association of Print Scholars, where she has been an officer since 2019.
Nicholas Eastaugh is a leading scientific art expert. He is recognized as a global authority for art forensic analysis that combines scientific precision and cutting-edge technology with art historical scholarship for the analysis, attribution, authentication, and appreciation of artwork. He is currently the CEO of Vasarik Ltd, a new company focused on developing novel approaches using AI and machine learning to solve problems around attribution of art and risk in the art market. Dr. Eastaugh has appeared regularly on programs such as the BBC’s Britain’s Lost Masterpieces as an expert art scientific advisor. He co-founded the Pigmentum Project and published The Pigment Compendium, which quickly became a standard reference text in the field. Previously, Dr. Eastaugh was the Founder and Chief Scientist of Art Analysis & Research, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He originally trained as a physicist before going on to complete a PhD in scientific analysis and documentary research of historical pigments at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Carol Mancusi-Ungaro served as the Melva Bucksbaum Associate Director for Conservation and Research at the Whitney Museum of American Art and was the Founding Director of the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art at the Harvard Art Museums. As Chief Conservator of The Menil Collection, she founded the Artists Documentation Program (adp.menil.org) in 1990. In 2009 she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, marking the Academy’s first recognition of art conservation, and in January 2016 her work was featured in a New Yorker profile entitled “The Custodians.” In 2016 she was awarded the Forbes Prize by the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works and in 2021-2022 she was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy in Rome. She continues to engage in research and writing about issues pertaining to the conservation of modern art.
David G. Stork is an Adjunct Professor in two departments and two programs at Stanford University and widely considered the founding pioneer of the application of sophisticated computer vision and artificial intelligence to problems in the history and interpretation of fine-art paintings and drawings. He published the earliest technical scholarship in the field, taught its first courses (at Stanford), co-founded its first conference (now called Computer Vision and Analysis of Art), and published its first book, Pixels & paintings: Foundations of computer-assisted connoisseurship (Wiley, 2024). He has lectured at dozens of leading museums worldwide and taught computer methods at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He has published over 220 scholarly works and 64 issued patents and is a Fellow of eight international professional/scholarly organizations and a 2023 Leonardo@Djerassi Fellow. He is completing his tenth book, Principled art authentication: A probabilistic foundation for representing and reasoning under uncertainty.
Moderated by:
Lisa Conte is Assistant Professor of Paper Conservation and Co-Chair of the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
*The program will be presented onsite at the James B. Duke House and live-streamed. Please note we have transitioned from Zoom to a new, web-based live-streaming platform for our events. You can now access our public programs directly through your browser. Kindly RSVP below to receive the live stream link.
Advance Registration is required.