Ebook: The Aura in the Age of Digital Materiality: Rethinking Preservation in the Shadow of an Uncertain Future

This publication focuses on Factum Foundation’s work to promote the use of high-resolution recording, digital restoration and creative re-materialisation while bringing into focus the changing attitudes towards owning, sharing, preserving and displaying cultural artefacts. It accompanies the exhibition La Riscoperta di un Capolavoro at Palazzo Fava in Bologna, which has reunified the sixteen original panels that still exist from the Polittico Griffoni, a remarkable example of painting from the Bolognese Renaissance.
The altarpiece stood in the Griffoni Chapel in the Church of San Petronio until it was broken up in 1725. The 16 tempera paintings by Francesco del Cossa and Ercole de’ Roberti will be exhibited together with 16 facsimiles arranged in what is thought to be the original configuration of the altarpiece – allowing it to be seen as its patrons and makers intended.
The aim of the collection of thoughts and images in this book is to encourage reflection on the ways that digital technologies in virtual and physical form, are changing our approach to the preservation and conservation of the material evidence of the past.
The Aura in the Age of Digital Materiality brings together recent projects by Factum and a wonderfully diverse collection of essays, many written especially for this book, by collaborators and friends. Their widely different backgrounds and disciplines only illustrate the importance of this subject and the huge range of its relevance.
Contributors include Hartwig Fischer, Director of the British Museum; Mari Lending, the author of Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power of Reproduction; Nadja Aksamija, Professor of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture at Wesleyan University; Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves; Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers; Shirley Djukurnã Krenak, Indigenous activist from the Upper Xingu; philosophers Bruno Latour, Brian Cantwell Smith and Alva Noë; Simon Schaffer, Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge; architect Charlotte Skene Catling; Jerry Brotton, specialist in cartography and the Renaissance; and Chiara Casarin, Director of the Musei Civici di Bassano del Grappa.