Frameless scans: on unimages circa 1753 and 2024

Main Article Content

Paolo Patelli
Jussi Parikka

Between 1750-1753, Giambattista Tiepolo painted the world’s largest continuous ceiling fresco in Würzburg, Franconia, commissioned by Karl Phillip von Greiffenklau. This monumental artwork, spanning 600 square meters, depicts Apollo and the Four Continents. Paolo Patelli’s film project, The Countable Parts of the World, uses a 3D digital model of the fresco to explore historical and media contexts, presenting both as “unimages”. The film project shifts focus from visual to data representations, transforming the fresco’s organized composition into a dynamic globe, revealing new perspectives and distortions through data manipulation.

Keywords
fresco, scan, point cloud model, unimages

Article Details

How to Cite
Patelli, Paolo; and Parikka, Jussi. “Frameless scans: on unimages circa 1753 and 2024”. Artnodes, no. 34, pp. 1-9, doi:10.7238/artnodes.v0i34.424655.
Author Biographies

Paolo Patelli, Aarhus University

Paolo Patelli is a postdoctoral researcher with the Design and Aesthetics for Environmental Data project at Aarhus University. With a background in architecture and an interest in multimodal methods, he previously developed projects investigating the materialities, scenes and atmospheres at the intersections of space and society, technologies and environments as a Research Associate at the Research Center for Material Culture in Leiden (2020-2022). He was a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (2020-2021), a research fellow at Het Nieuwe Instituut (2019/2020), artist-in-residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (2017/18). He collaborated with the Programme d’Expérimentation en Arts Politiques (SPEAP) at Sciences Po (2016–2018), and taught at The New School’s Parsons Paris, Design Academy Eindhoven (2017-2021) and Sandberg Instituut (2019-2022). He holds a PhD in Architecture and Urban Design from Politecnico di Milano (2015).

Jussi Parikka, Aarhus University. Academy of Performing Arts in Prague

Jussi Parikka is a cultural historian and a theorist who works as a professor of Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University. He is also the director of the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre and co-director of the Environmental Media and Aesthetics research program. In addition, Parikka is a visiting professor at the Academy for Performing Arts (Prague) as well as at the University of Southampton. His recent books include Operational Images (2023) and the co-authored Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media (2024) and The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (2022). In 2022 he co-edited the Words of Weather book. Parikka has also worked as a curator, including the curatorial teams of Helsinki Biennial 2023 and transmediale 2023, as well as the co-curator of the two exhibitions “Weather Engines” (2022) and “Motores del Clima” (2023-2024).

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