Wölff: Art at Your Fingertips

Wölff is a mobile and web app for art historians who teach and conduct research with digital images. Named after Heinrich Wölfflin, who popularized the comparative slide lecture format by means of two magic lanterns, Wölff embraces the tactile aspects of handling tangible images on tablets' touch screens. Rather than with a disembodied mouse cursor, we can pan and zoom into digitized artworks for the scrutiny of fine details, which for decades have lurked behind the blurry shadows of poor photographic reproduction. With Wölff, the original work of art is closer to our "fingertips" than ever before. Paying tribute to technology's deep historical relevance to the discipline of art history, this talk by Penn alum Gregory Bryda will also address the potential methodological implications of future technological developments, which aim to advance the study of visual culture.

Gregory C. Bryda is a doctoral candidate in Yale's Department of the History of Art. He holds master's degrees in art history and medieval studies from Yale, and bachelor's degrees in art history and economics from Penn's College of Arts and Sciences and Wharton School. His dissertation concerns vegetal themes and media in the art of late Gothic Germany, specifically in the works of the painter Matthias Grünewald and sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider. His research has been supported by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Berlin State Museums, and the DAAD. Additionally, he has published and delivered academic papers on the digital humanities. For Wölff, an app for art historians, Apollo Magazine named him 40 Under 40 USA in a 2015 volume dedicated to the forty most influential and promising projects/people in the US art world under the age of 40.