Representation and Interpretation of Complex Environments

Images are becoming increasingly powerful in the twenty‐first century, confirming the already
central role played in the twentieth century. But what is an image and what can an image be?
Exploring issues on the production, transmission and reception of images and the formation of critical judgement enhances students’ awareness about the ways things acquire value and significance. The course will particularly focus on the practices of mapping, because maps remain one of the main thinking paradigms, a fertile ground where to explore space, representation and praxis.

No prerequisites are required except a personal interest in communicating facts and data through images.

1. Introduction
   Aims and purpose of the course
   Syllabus presentation
   Presentation of teaching tools, resources and course execution
   Students' obligations
   Study instructions and suggestions

2. Basic concepts – Short treaty on Creativity
   The principle of creative act will be considered, contrary to its mythology which considers it as a product of a mysterious and hidden mental faculty, as a response to a crucial challenge of our minds: how to apply the rule to an infinite number of cases? Is there something that unifies the invention of a tool by the prehistoric hunter and the paintings of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel?

3. First steps – The limits of representation
   Historical excursus on the concept of Frame with the aim of enhancing the aesthetic and interpretative understanding of visualisation phenomena. The course will explore the topic through fundamentals of semiotics and cognitive sciences, through some exemplary analytical methodologies;
   Geo epistemological excursus of mapping (the birth of space and renaissance perspective versus contemporary mapping processes and founding of landscape concept).
   Lectures will systematically illustrate the evolution of the relationship between subject and object of the observation.

4. Methods – Generators of Visualisation
   From the alchemies of the look (projection, perspective etc.) to the techniques of composition and different language tools, student will explore the privileged scenarios that gave shape to the Possible during the last two centuries.
   Methods and devices: perspective/projection, copying/compilation, overlapping/dislocation, cutting/montage, accumulation/categorisation
   Tools: grid, scale, legend, inventory
   Scenarios or discursive strategies: Utopia, Atlas, Example, Comment, Citation, Situation, Residuals, etc.

5. Intertwine of digital and real life experience – The Life of Images
   Transmission and intermittence: outlines of the working strategies from A.Warburg to G. Debord will be illustrated to explore the relationship between the image and the experience. Why and how the experience (of movement, of history etc.) is obtained by the image, and why the images themselves are charged with these different potentials?
   Memory and orientation as restorers of the possibilities: examples in the field of sensory substitution/augmentation devices and the functionality of meta data/sense data will be presented. Which is the form of the threshold between narrative and real life experience and is this still necessary?
   Mind/World Interfaces Agency and the spatial perception/spatial control function: What are the creative potentialities of Digital Control Media?
   The final outcome of the lectures will be the tentative building up of a new interface based on new apperception (a new way of being in the world) as the fundamental preparation for the applied work phase.

6. Interpretation (applied work) – Processes and organs of visualisation
   Individual work. Students will explore the potentials of the intertwine between visual and verbal languages. * Observation In situ
   Exercise in observation/perception and transmission of seeing (i.e. portrait)
   Training curious eyes and the empowering attention * Representation/Interpretation (generation of images)
   interpretation and transmission of knowing (i.e. map)
   Training methodological eye and the construction of the invisible evidence

Images are becoming increasingly powerful in the twenty‐first century, confirming the already central role played in the twentieth century. But what is an image and what can an image be?
Exploring issues on the production, transmission and reception of images and the formation of critical judgement enhances students’ awareness about the ways things acquire value and significance. The course will particularly focus on the practices of mapping, because maps remain one of the main thinking paradigms, a fertile ground where to explore space, representation and praxis.

Marin, Louis. On representation. Stanford University Press, 2001.
Farinelli, Franco. La Crisi Della Ragione Cartografica. [The Crisis of the Cartographical Reason.] Einaudi Torino, 2009.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor‐Network‐Theory. OUP Oxford, 2005;
Buci‐Glucksmann, Christine. L'Oeil Cartographique de L'art. Galilée, 1996.
Monmonnier, M. How to lie with Maps? University of Chicago Press, 1996.

The additional text and bibliography will be given during the lectures.

Seminar work with discussion in order to evaluate the ability of representation and interpretation of different contexts within a selected practical problem. Written exam, which assesses knowledge of the fundamental concepts.

Saša Dobričič is founding director of the doctoral programme in Economics and Techniques for the
Conservation of Architectural and Environmental Heritage, which has been jointly established
between University of Nova Gorica and University IUAV of Venice. She is vice president of the
UNISCAPE (European Network of Universities for the Implementation of the European Landscape
Convention) and IAES (International Academy for Environmental Sciences) scientific committee
member. Her research interests and contributions are related to the interpretation of urban
phenomena in relation to landscape, heritage and environment. She has promoted several
international meetings and initiatives within her research field : in 2010, Creative Cities, which
historic urban landscape? In 2012, Common Goods: out of property which rights for users?