Cryptographic City by Richard Coyne

Author:Richard Coyne [Coyne, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cryptography; cities; urbanism; code; encryption; smart city
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2023-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 9.2

Reconstruction of Alberti’s map of Rome as it appeared in Descriptio urbis Romae, by architect Luigi Vagnetti (1915–1980) in Lo studio di Roma negli scritti albertiani (1974). The outline of the modern city is shown in grey. Redrawn by the author from Jessica Maier, Rome Measured and Imagined: Early Modern Maps of the Eternal City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

I attempted in the previous paragraph to describe without pictures how a particular technical apparatus appears and operates. That is another response to iconophobia. In the current proliferation of images and uncertainties about intellectual property, it is sometimes more convenient to describe in words than incur the costs and risks of copying pictures from other sources, though I have succumbed with my own version of the map so produced in figure 9.2.

Alberti’s plan illustrates further his apparent interest in codes. After all, without the benefit of a computer, his tables of numbers did not allow anyone to actually see the city plan without some specialized labor translating those numbers to a drawing. I think his method of illustration fits nicely with his interest in ciphers. It is a vivid illustration of Rome rendered in code as a prototypical “cryptographic city.” The tools and the method served to provide pictorial access to an otherwise opaque table of numbers.

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