Spreading visual culture: a digital project for contemporary art, literature and visual culture. State of the art, perspectives and collaborations

The article will present some of the already reached results (one year after the official start, in March 2013) of the Firb project Spreading visual culture: contemporary art through periodicals, archives and illustrations (http://www.capti.it), shared by four Universities (Scuola Normale Superiore as P. I., Genoa University, Siena University and Udine University), lasting three years and financed by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. The project address contemporary art in innovative ways, bringing together different humanistic fields and developing new informatics tools. The web platform (and of course the project) aims to become a point of reference in the field of visual studies in general, and in contemporary art and literature in particular, allowing the user (either the academic community or a non-specialist audience) to do cross-searches, discovering, as in a real archive (a huge web-archive), different materials such as letters, periodicals or original illustrations, which had been previously catalogued, “tagged” and digitalized.