Virtual images, Models and Copies: prototyping Textures

Digital technologies changed the design strategies. Previously the designer plotted drawings on paper sheets and used mock-up to develop and materialize his ideas. Transforming concepts in real shapes, the design process acted with reality of shapes. Then, the power of the 3D modelling has subdued design to virtual images, until the actual construction or the prototype making. The new representation tools push to different relations between reality and its models, changing the meaning of original and copy, then the concept of reproduction. A case study stresses the concepts and meanings that express the relationships among model, copy and representation, then the ambiguity between image and shape. The experience concerns a reproduction of a wooden statue of a puppeteer, a monument on the artist's grave, which was replaced by a copy to allow the preservation of the restored memorial, now in the artist's museum. The preservation’s needs impose a change in the material, therefore bronze is rather to other matter. The copying fusion in a mould, obtained by digital acquisition of three-dimensional digital laser scanner, stressed several problems, related to the material. Indeed there isn’t any technical problem, but a cultural one. The reverse modelling after 3D scanning could generate a mould with 3D printers. It is a routine process that gives exactly the same texture of the model, that is those of the original stuff, with the spurs left by the manual tools of sculpture. The high-pressure metal casting in silicon mould reproduces whatever texture, but if you change the material, what do you have to reply at the working texture from the original