La fotografia come ‘misura’. Il rilievo attraverso le immagini e la fruizione interattiva / Photography as ‘Measurement’. Surveying through Images and Interactive Fruition

The collaboration between Niépce and Daguerre in the first half of the nineteenth century gave rise to daguerreotype and opened new horizons in image-making processes. It was the result of a long course of geometric-projective studies on optics and catoptrics that originated in classical antiquity. In addition to the obvious effects in the field of art, photography also had direct consequences in the operational sphere. From the first years after its discovery there were many attempts to use it in the field of surveying. French Colonel Aimé Laussedat is considered the inventor of photogrammetry. Between 1859 and 1861 he developed the first topographic surveys and in 1858 made the first experiments in aerial photogrammetry using hot air balloons. Beginning in the early 20th century, photogrammetry was also applied to architectural surveys, opening up a field of application that by later developments has led to modern ‘image-based’ techniques. There has been a shift from single photographic images that allowed a subjective interpretation of reality to a collection of multiple images. They allow an ‘objective’ and ‘measured’ representation of reality through the summation of multiple viewpoints and projective correspondence between homologous points. The widespread availability of computerized instrumentation has made such surveying and modeling techniques increasingly accessible, facilitating the transition from a Newtonian physical world to a new ‘hybrid’ environment, in which material and informational content coexist, where it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the real world from the infosphere. Indeed, digital and interactive fruitions of increasingly realistic three-dimensional models prompt us to reflect on the issue of duplication of the real. Eidomatic images are gradually moving further and further away from their ‘catoptric dimension’ as a critical mirror of reality and gradually moving toward a ‘duplication’ involving the emotional sphere. It is a process of dematerialization that also challenges the very criterion of ‘existence’. The Renaissance perspective that ordered objective reality according to a rational conception gives way to a new spatial dimension in which man ‘adapts’ to the new informational nature of the environment that welcomes him. This paper deals with the evolutions of optical and catoptric techniques for the representation of space: from optical cameras to photogrammetry to modern image-based techniques. The potentialities related to the issues of cultural heritage inclusion and enhancement, the risks and resources of recent experiments in the field of deep learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI), the consequences on contemporary modes of perception, and the mutations related to an interactive fruition are highlighted.