The communication and access systems to information are closely linked to photography – as is evident visiting the exhibition. Indeed, photography has played an essential role in the development of global industries and governmental apparatuses. In other words, images become a true form of capital. Image Capital, precisely.

The MAST exhibition spaces host archival images, publications, interviews, videos, other original objects. They are very different materials, exhibited without hierarchies and divided into six sections, offer an immersive narrative-experience, that allows everyone to discover and follow his original narrative path.

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  Armin Linke, CERN, Large Hadron Collider (LHC), cabling, Geneva, Switzerland, 2019

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  University of Rochester, Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation (RBSCP), Kodak Historical Collection. Photographer unknown, aperture card, ca. 1960

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  Edo Collins, Radhakrishna Achanta, Sabine Süsstrunk, Deep Feature Factorization for Concept Discovery, paper presented at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Munich, Germany, 2018

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  A scanning and measuring table (IEP – Instrument for the evaluation of photographs) for bubble chamber photos, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 08.03.1963

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  University of Stuttgart, High-Performance Computing Center (HLRS), Stuttgart, Germany, 2019

Memory

Photographs can collect and store information. The intrinsic nature of photography as a recording tool is investigated. Its potential has been widely expanding since the mechanical reproducibility to the advent of digital technology.

Access

On the filing procedures, archiving and indexing images. The association between photography and text have always been key to the success of this medium as an information technology. Metadata are not only useful for organizing images in ordered systems, but also for being able to find and use them.

Protection

Strategies for the long-term preservation of images and the information they contain. The images are like deposits of potentially perishable information, so they must be protected not to be dispersed. This section shows the strategies for the protection of images, from archives to back-up systems.

Mining

On image analysis and their use in automatic recognition technologies. These processes entail the possibility of using large quantities of similar images for the development of automatic recognition technologies, that are pivotal today, especially in the industry and security fields.

Imaging

On photography as a visualization system for the existing or one of its projects. The analysis begins from its ability to go beyond the limits of the human eye to its use for the development of rendering and digital modeling techniques. With a reversal with respect to its historical connotation, that is as a proof of reality, photography becomes the basis from which reality is designed and built.

Currency

On the value of the images. From the association between photography and currency to computer capitalism, the section enlights the processes of attributing value to images, today particularly linked to the ability to accumulate large quantities and to associate broad sets of information to each.

Let’s now take a step back in time, to the Roman civilization that inhabited the Pompeii area.
No doubt, photography didn’t exist then. But images were important in ancient times, too, as it can be seen in the exhibition The Painters of Pompeii at the Museo Civico Archeologico, also in Bologna. The exhibition shows more than one hundred works from the Roman period from the collection of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, which preserves the most important pinacoteca of ancient times.

The focus is on the ‘pictores’, that are the artists who decorated the houses in Pompeii, Ercolano and other cities around Vesuvius. Their role is still shrouded in mystery. The exhibition also highlights the very important heritage of images they left us. They are frescoes that depict scenes from mythology and the family’s history, landscapes and gardens, architecture, and offers us a new perspective from which to explore the tastes and values of that world.