Redrawing the city and its historical transformations: two examples in Palermo

Abstract

The representation area is nowaday called upon to face new challenges for new computer technologies that have developed over the last few years. Visual communication and multimedia language experienced a radical change: representation and visualization, thought and image are based on the branch of communication and therefore on the trasmission of knowledge that cannot be separated from the interdisciplinarity. Digital imagery challenges more and more analog imagery, creating a scene that is independent from the constructed reality and sometimes reaching to overlap and merge with it: therefore the representation is no longer just a repetition of the real, but becomes itself an autonomous reality, reiterating its heuristic power and causing the crisis of that truthful, although subordinate character that was attributed in the past. In this study we are interested in urban representations, and we ask the question of mending between past and present.