1,720,977 research outputs found
Lo sguardo panoramico. Tecnologia, media e cultura visuale (1870-1918)
No full textDalle nascenti pratiche fotogrammetriche alla moda del safari, passando per i campi del turismo alpino, dell’esperienza bellica e della navigazione, a cavallo tra Otto e Novecento i rapporti visuali tra osservatore e ambiente sono segnati da una profonda trasformazione. A legare ambiti apparentemente lontani tra loro è la presenza di uno sguardo panoramico, una condivisa tensione verso una “visione totale” che consenta non solo la rappresentazione del paesaggio, ma anche la sua misurazione e il suo attraversamento
[Recensione a:] Archeologia dei media. Nuove prospettive per la storia e la teoria della comunicazione. Roma, Carocci, 2019, 282 pp., ISBN 978-88-430-9604-6
No full textDecomposing Light into Spectra: Nineteenth-Century Spectroscopy as a Cultural Technique
Full text linkIn addition to its phantasmatic meaning of ectoplasmic presence, the term spectrum refers to a harmonic composition of a variable quantity over time, whose initial field of study was Newtonian optics and the related experiments on visible light. From Newton to the present day, spectroscopic, -graphic, and -metric practices have been established in many scientific areas, ranging from astronomical to chemical and medical studies. Such fecundity cannot be limited to the field of scientific observation alone but also affects numerous other fields of knowledge and culture. Within this stratified tradition, my contribution intends to focus on a decisive historical moment for spectroscopy—the second half of the 19th century—marked by a theoretical and experimental ferment that follows and justifies the production of the first spectroscopic devices, including those of Fraunhofer (1814) and Kirchhoff-Bunsen (1861). Looking at the rich variety of instruments and applications by leading scientific figures such as Wollaston, Brewster, Talbot, and Janssen, one can note the impact that similar researches had on the manufacture of optical equipment, with particular attention to the dialogue with the instances coming from the photographic world. From this discursive and techno-experimental network spectral images seem to assume the role of mediated articulation of the real, in a manner similar to those doors and grids that Bernard Siegert conceives as cultural techniques. In the case of spectroscopy, such technique is structured along an operation of mediation of the gaze that breaks down and recomposes a harmonious subject, the light, in the attempt to bring out from this fractionating process not an augmentation of the visible, but rather the possible cognitive gaps we have on it
Il traforo del Sempione e l’Esposizione di Milano 1906. Fratture epistemiche nei meccanismi di visione e rappresentazione del panorama motorio
No full textL’Esposizione del Sempione, tenutasi a Milano nel 1906 per celebrare il completamento del traforo italo-svizzero, costituisce un luogo privilegiato di analisi per rintracciare alcune delle profonde trasformazioni in corso nel primo Novecento per quanto riguarda i rapporti tra un osservatore in moto e il paesaggio che attraversa, sia esso reale o simulato. Tanto nell’oggetto stesso della celebrazione, il traforo, quanto nella composizione dei poli fieristici è possibile ravvisare il contrasto tra una tradizione rappresentativa e fruitiva del viaggio e un suo profondo ripensamento, contraddistinto in primo luogo dalla presenza dei moderni mezzi di locomozione, con i loro corpi di metallo e le inusitate velocità.
A generarsi è una nuova forma di sguardo panoramico segnatamente motorio, per il dinamismo che sottende, e di cui si trovano molteplici tracce nella produzione mediale e visuale dell’Esposizione. Una casistica sfaccettata ed eterogenea, da cui tuttavia emerge una serie coerente di criticità che implicano sia un nuovo modello topologico di rappresentazione del territorio, aggiornando i precedenti canoni di distanza e durata del viaggio, sia un aggiornamento del coinvolgimento cinestetico del passeggero-osservatore, sempre più teso tra input adrenalinici e logiche di imbrigliamento nel corpo macchinico.The Sempione Exhibition, held in Milan in 1906 to celebrate the achievement of the Italian-Swiss tunnel, provides a privileged analytical terrain for tracing some of the profound transformations taking place in the early twentieth century in terms of the relationship between a moving observer and the landscape they pass through, whether real or simulated. Both the object of the celebration itself, the tunnel, and the composition of the exhibition centers reveal a contrast between a representative tradition of travel and a profound rethinking of it, distinguished first and foremost
by the presence of modern modes of transportation, with their metal bodies and unusual speeds.
What results is a new form of panoramic gaze that is noticeably motor, due to the dynamism that underpins it, and of which multiple traces can be found in the media and visual production of the Exhibition. A multifaceted and heterogeneous case study, but from which emerges a coherent series of critical issues that imply both a new topological mode of representation of the territory, modernising previous canons of distance and duration, and an update of the kinaesthetic involvement of the passenger-observer, increasingly tense between adrenaline-fi lled inputs and logics of harnessing in the machinic body
The Unbearable Cost of Development and Printing Plants: Technospes, Litmus Paper on Techno-industrial Problems in the 1970s Italian Cinema
No full textResult of the merger in 1973 between Spes and Tecnostampa, the two most important Italian film development and printing societies, Technospes constitutes a complex case study to re-investigate the deep crisis that subverted the cinematographic industry since the 1960s, shifting the focus from socio-cultural to techno-industrial dynamics. In the rapid decline of Technospes during the 1970s, one can read not only the epilogue of two great protagonists of the technical history of Italian cinema, but the emergence of new material and technical needs and patterns that marked the audiovisual industry of the late 20th century. The factory—to be understood as a site of aggregation as wells as an urban building, an infrastructure, and a set of costs—is the place in which resonates the most the collapse of the old system and the emerging of new industrial criticalities (safety rules, maintenance costs, technological updates, production flexibility)
[Recensione a:] L'età dello schermo panoramico. Il cinema italiano e la rivoluzione widescreen. Pisa, Edizioni ETS, 2018, 214 pp., ISBN 9788846754455
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Il Panorama internazionale in Italia. Strategie distributive, esperienze spettatoriali e il legame con il cinematografo (1891-1905)
No full textIn the last decade of the 19th century, international panoramas became widespread in major Italian cities: multi-place booths in which views could be admired in series. Although the phenomenon has been recognised by film historians, it has often been delimited in studies to the German case of the Kaiserpanorama or flattened to general considerations regarding the decline of the main 19th century optical devices in the face of the advent of cinematography. On the contrary, the albeit fragmentary sources of the time attest to a proliferation and specificity of international panoramas at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. A proliferation that, in its relative brevity (about a decade), is nonetheless symptomatic of the profound visual and media changes taking place. The essay intends firstly to provide a historical framework of a phenomenon still largely under-studied, and then to reflect on the significance of the International Panorama in the complex multimedia offerings of the time. In particular, in its relationship with the cinema it is possible to identify a significant osmosis that, rather than going in the direction of competitiveness, seems to have been at least initially an effective partnership
Lo sguardo panoramico e le altre varianti di visione mediata. La sfida ottocentesca ai limiti dell’immagine
No full textArcheologia dello sguardo periscopico. Variazioni tecnologiche dalle scienze militari al grande schermo
No full textIl saggio analizza le principali forme di tecnologia periscopica apparse nel periodo a cavallo tra Otto e Novecento. A partire da una ricognizione media-archeologica dei primi dispositivi scientifi ci e militari, vengono presi in esame alcuni casi emblematici all’interno del contesto della produzione cinematografica per riflettere intermedialmente sull’emersione in quegli anni di uno ‘sguardo periscopico’ e sul suo significato nel contesto storico-visuale del tempo.Archaeology of the Periscope Gaze. Technological Variations From Military Science to the Silver Screen The essay analyzes the main forms of periscope technology that appeared at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning with an archaeological media survey of early scientific and military devices, some emblematic cases within the context of film production are examined in order to reflect intermediately on the emergence in those years of a ‘periscope gaze’ and its significance in the historical visual context of the time
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