Compositional Interface

Hiroaki Yamane, digital artist and researcher, presents Compositional Interfaces: Navigating Digital Archives through Art, the second event of the 2025–2026 academic year of ARCHiVe Online Academy.

The lecture addresses a central paradox of digital preservation: as our ability to collect and store data and images grows exponentially, our capacity to meaningfully engage with such vast collections appears to diminish. In this context, Yamane introduces the concept of Compositional Interfaces – computational frameworks that transform digital archives into living materials for experimentation and artistic expression.

Through a selection of prototypes and research projects, the lecture explores innovative approaches to the use and reinterpretation of digital cultural content. These include semantic extraction applied to more than 20,000 images from the photo archive of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, enabling the exploration of content as navigable visual landscapes, and a project focused on the life of Giacomo Casanova, developed in collaboration with artist Sara Francesca Tirelli. In the latter, techniques such as Gaussian Splatting, depth estimation and large language models are employed to generate new narratives from archival fragments.

Going beyond simple categorical organisation, these interfaces embrace ambiguity, unexpected associations and alternative paths of meaning, opening up new reflections on the creative possibilities of digital cultural heritage.

The lecture will be held in English.
Free admission upon registration.