Stalking Traces
How to Model Artworks in the Humanities?

Project by

Inge Hinterwaldner
Senior Fellow 2023–2024

Programmed digital online art poses serious challenges for critical analysis. Complex linking structures, coded behaviours, and anchors in diverse internet strata are dimensions that easily lay beyond any intuitive registration. New methodological paths, as well as modes of communication, seem opportune to complement insights from phenomenological dimensions with those about what is somehow occluded, withdrawn, and in need of a conceptualisation from a humanities perspective.

Heath Bunting’s early iconic work of networked art, Visitor’s Guide to London from 1995, serves as a case study for theoretical and methodological conceptualizations. To grasp the tectonics of the work, Inge Hinterwaldner developsspecific aids such as visualisations and explanatory models. Modeling in the humanities is usually done through the elaboration of concepts, and less often through vivid three- or four-dimensional configurations to touch. Inge will systematically explore which types of corresponding hands-on models exist in the humanities in order to be able to classify and critically reflect on her own approach. This will also be done with recourse to disciplines in which modeling is already a long-established practice.