This paper discusses the possibility of representing research activity as a narrative path starting from an experimentation field. The aim is to test and verify connections between social space and the construction of images of the world through the building and perception of specific language in the narrative dimension of research. The field work we present has been carried out as an installation art in Borromini’s Crypt in Rome, and is the example of rendering the story-dimension of research through a medium, a narrative technology in constant progress and evolution. In this way research activity can be presented as ascent and descent, as a mix of light and darkness, in multiple symbolic ways and different values. The Research and Inhabited Image Project (RIA) is in this dimension conceived as a story of stories, not as a research communication work

Avveduto, Sveva

Fornasari, Fabio

Scholarship@Claremont

The STEAM JournalVolume 1Issue 2 The Quantified Self Article 35February 2014Research and Inhabited Image (RIA): a spatialhypothesisSveva AvvedutoNational Research Council, CNR-IRPPS ‘Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche’ (CNR), Institute for Research on Population andSocial Policies (IRPPS), sveva.avveduto@cnr.itFabio FornasariNew Academy of Arts or ‘Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti’ - NABA, fabiofornasari@gmail.comFollow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steamPart of the Architecture Commons, and the Arts and Humanities Commons© December 2014 by the author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivativesLicense.STEAM is a bi-annual journal published by the Claremont Colleges Library | ISSN 2327-2074 | http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steamRecommended CitationAvveduto, Sveva and Fornasari, Fabio (2014) "Research and Inhabited Image (RIA): a spatial hypothesis," The STEAM Journal: Vol. 1:Iss. 2, Article 35.Available at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol1/iss2/35Research and Inhabited Image (RIA): a spatial hypothesisAbstractThis paper discusses the possibility of representing research activity as a narrative path starting from anexperimentation field. The aim is to test and verify connections between social space and the construction ofimages of the world through the building and perception of specific language in the narrative dimension ofresearch. The field work we present has been carried out as an installation art in Borromini’s Crypt in Rome,and is the example of rendering the story-dimension of research through a medium, a narrative technology inconstant progress and evolution. In this way research activity can be presented as ascent and descent, as a mixof light and darkness, in multiple symbolic ways and different values. The Research and Inhabited ImageProject (RIA) is in this dimension conceived as a story of stories, not as a research communication work.Author/Artist BioSveva Avveduto, is research director of the Institute for Research on Population and Social Policies of theItalian National Research Council. Her main research interests concern science and education policy and arefocused on studies on higher education and research and particularly on human resources for science andtechnology, gender issues, science and society, new media and social aspects of technology. She is the Head ofthe CNR Research Unit on Human Resources and Knowledge Society. She is an Italian delegate to theOrganization for Economic Cooperation and Development, (OECD), Paris, for the activities stemming fromthe Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy. She has worked and is currently working, in the severalEuropean projects and Networks funded by the European Commission as chief scientist at Italian level. Shehas been a professor at the Graduate School ‘Socialtrends’ of the University of Rome 'La Sapienza'. She hastaught at the Master on Science, Technology and Innovation at the Scuola Superiore della PubblicaAmministrazione in Rome and Bologna. She is the author of many books and articles.Fabio Fornasari is an architect and artist who carries out activities dealing with projects that place the‘displaying’ and ‘telling’ at the center of the work on ‘museological’ or museum installations and exhibitionprojects. He participates in cross-media projects studying the role of images in human culture in a continuousrelationship between art and science. He made the Nineteenth Century Museum- Modern Art Gallery (2006)in Via Palestro - Milan, the Museum of the Twentieth Century (2010) in Milan, at the Arengario, theCaracalla Museum in Rome and several exhibitions i.e. on the Emperor Augustus at Scuderie del Quirinale.He has been a professor at NABA - New Academy of Fine Arts - Milan and at the Faculty of Sociology,University of Urbino "Carlo Bo". He has taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna.KeywordsResearch, art, images, spaceCreative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0License.This article is available in The STEAM Journal: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol1/iss2/35Research and Inhabited Image (RIA): a spatial hypothesis Sveva Avveduto and Fabio Fornasari  A statement by Saul Steinberg defines in a simple way the Research and Inhabited Image (RIA) hypothesis: he used to affirm that his work can explain something about something other than what the image is itself. The hypothesis is to move the research glance in space and not over the body that is watching. Neuroscientists look at the brain. We should look at the image that the brain produces and at the way people live in this image.  If we look at space, we realize that the attitudes of the artist, the scientist, become forms. Referring to these attitudes, we find the way to inhabit images that someone else has built around us and in our imagination. We should build our mindscape and put out the images in form of space (Giedion, 2002). Our work is centered on the RIA Research Project to build paths and passages, to follow research activity in its different expressions: science, poetry, music, art; to study and produce objects to implement new models and new perspectives on art-science relationship. The hypothesis put forward is that to understand the environment and the space around people, we should think that it is a memory about their consciousness. It tells us all about their thoughts. The space around people is a large part of experiences, and narratives. We can recall what Wittgenstein affirms: “the human body is the best picture of the human soul” (Wittgenstein, 1974, p. 178). We must look not only inward, into the recesses of our insides, but also the ways in which each of us, as a whole animal, carries on the processes of living: in, with and in response to, the world around us. The environment built by anyone is the best image of his/her thoughts (Downs & Stea, 2005). 1Avveduto and Fornasari: Research and Inhabited Image (RIA): a spatial hypothesisThe research work on ‘RIA’ Following these principles it is possible to carry out investigations on others’ research, and their results become the inhabited form. Representing research activity as a narrative path gives us the experimentation field to test and verify connections between social space and the construction of world images through the building and perception of specific language in the narrative dimension of research. The output of our ongoing research activity has up to now been expressed in a series of art installations that put together the art dimensions, the research definition and description, through the exhibition of different research contents. The installation (see photos) consisted of an oval ‘water mirror’ made possible by using a special pool built inside the site. It has been made using black matt wood to create a basin that occupied most of the walkable space of the site itself but with small edges, and reflected (in a dark created 2The STEAM Journal, Vol. 1, Iss. 2 [2014], Art. 35http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol1/iss2/35environment) the walls and the roof made of white plaster (the typical renaissance stucco) and/or the people that gazed at it bending on the pool.  The effect was a mix of opening the space towards a dark depth behind the pool while at the same time multiplying the space towards the reflection of walls and roof. Ascent and descent in space, images and research Our imagination can be moved along two ideal and real lines: the horizontal and the vertical one.  The horizontal line makes it possible to travel, even dreaming of new frontiers trying to move ‘further and further’ on a planet that we have suddenly discovered finite. Moving through a horizontal line means using only one possible dimension, albeit a very relevant one, and using the spatial possibilities only in a linear direction. We travel on a sphere that, after all, has a surface that can be expressed by a mathematical formula which can make humans aware that it is finite and expressed by a number. On the other end it is possible to make our ideal journey moving our imaginary on a vertical axis: from the center of the earth towards the infinity. The point of view we express on the horizontal journey on the blue planet, is expressed as a pilgrimage in the already known: although we may not know what is there, someone before us has known it and seen it and our path has anyway been traced and followed by other people before us. The horizontal journey on Earth is essentially a real physical one. The vertical travel is a journey that moves above all on a symbolic level. It is the journey from darkness to light, for example. It is a journey to the extreme. The dichotomies between different alternatives either on theoretical and real level, travel on the vertical axis. The vertical axis represents the possible different assumptions of opposites: radicalizing the concept good and evil, black and white, and contextualizing the concept to a 3Avveduto and Fornasari: Research and Inhabited Image (RIA): a spatial hypothesisspecial dimension it symbolizes the possibility of transcending the boundaries. The verticality is also the first real achievement of man: after crawling we won our erect position, the conquest of the axis of stability of all things, the opposition to the force of gravity. It is a path that breaks many certainties. Moving along the vertical axis makes some spatial/time concepts (such as day night) even disappear. The day has a meaning only if we live in close contact with the mother planet. It makes sense in relation to a geographic space. If this space disappears also the spatial/time concepts disappear and have no meaning. The installation in the Borromini’s Crypt How can we render all this in displaying art and science? We tried to perform and portray our research vision in the ‘horto concluso’ of a little Paradise Lost, where the fallen angel Francesco Borromini has provided us the ideal location to set the three-dimensional environment and the many, sometimes divergent concepts linking research and space, light and darkness, discoveries and disillusion. The topography of the site reflects, in the geometric solitude of the environment, the emergence of an underground space, of a thought, a conception of an invention. It is an immersive space through architecture that is structured in two opposites, the visible and the hidden created by Borromini, this was his last effort before his tragic death. The crypt, made for the Falconieri family as a shrine, is hidden under the main altar of the Church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini in Rome. This crypt enhances the duality of light and darkness that is common in Borrominian architecture (Fehrenbach, 2005).  Mind and space that represent a duality of tangible and intangible that in turn become more or less evident and important become the easy metaphor of research and the condition of the artist or researcher that looks for space alone to work. Both the artist and the researcher share the condition of going through the everyday life as anyone while for their job or passion they have to 4The STEAM Journal, Vol. 1, Iss. 2 [2014], Art. 35http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol1/iss2/35pursue a path of continuous change towards something new, still undiscovered or to be created by themselves. This may be called: the restlessness of the new. Both the artist and the researcher even if they wish so, are not easily destined to succeed. Every true artist or researcher is a visionary and this makes him or her different: the individual may not be seen by the other as a through our installation we made people enter the science and art dimension through several elements: - Research and the representation of the idea of living images, made visible through a continuous flow of images of research in various areas and disciplines displayed through a screen activated automatically on loop - The space transformed into an image itself for being inhabited, i.e. the art installation of the oval back pool filled with 5cm of water that changed the still space of the crypt by becoming a reflecting mirror for those who entered the crypt and at the same time a lens that made the space behind the floor of the crypt an endless well. - The visionary artist, starting from Borromini’s visions to reach the modern ones. - The researchers and their activity were present only as a continuous noise, a mass-sound. A sound device broadcasted continuously the ‘sound of research’ made by a collection of different sounds (or even noises) and voices produced by different research activities and researchers coupled with a music composed by a musician for the installation itself. Water was the key element that made it possible to connect all the different elements (tangible or intangible) that were settled in the crypt. Water became a sort of the connective tissue that was linking the elements either physically, through vision and touch, or emblematically through all the symbolic meanings of water (an amniotic liquid, renaissance, life, nourishment but also danger and even death. A water mirror was located in the crypt, at the 5Avveduto and Fornasari: Research and Inhabited Image (RIA): a spatial hypothesiscenter of its oval space, so wide that it was almost touching the walls: a black low basin, almost a floor in itself, filled with clean water that looked like thin foil filling almost the entire space of the crypt. The water mirror was there to show what we cannot otherwise see. The unfinished space was reconstructed in a reflected image which is a relic of the space itself. The screen, water lens and mirror virtualized the space, back into an unstable image. On touching it the water surface was modified and activated a low-tech but immersive interactivity: you can see yourself in a mirror, you can enter it and you can live in it. The installation was conceived following an idea of interactivity that is mostly virtual although not being digital, nor electronic, but conceptual and hands-on. The light was studied to be very weak and point toward the white ceiling, and was visible in the lens of the water, while a continuous sound-mass brought the voices of the researchers to those present at the installation. Conclusions Architecture had a central role in many models: the human attitude to fly, to go beyond, to research. The invention of the wing and the scale of the shaman or the steps of the ziggurat1 are only rough artificial flight. For this reason all these are already symbolic means of purification: they allow elevation. Ascent and descent, light and darkness, not to mention all the corresponding imaginary, in their symbolic values are at the heart of research and can be rendered as we did in the Borromini’s Crypt in Rome.                                             1 As the Merriam Webster dictionary defines it the ziggurat is an ancient Mesopotamian temple tower consisting of a lofty pyramidal structure built in successive stages with outside staircases and a shrine at the top. 6The STEAM Journal, Vol. 1, Iss. 2 [2014], Art. 35http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol1/iss2/35This work (a part of our ongoing research project), offers a descent, a trip down towards the depth of images. The descent to the crypt suggests an approach towards something "less known" a journey that becomes a metaphor: the door on the threshold of a world that is not real but is virtual because it is a double of reality without possessing its substance. It suggests, to people gazing at it, an attitude towards research that becomes an image in the water mirror in the shade. It becomes the threshold between a high-ceilinged space, an endless fall and the possibility of coming back. Representing research as a narrative path gives us the experimentation field to test and verify connections between social space and the construction of world images through the building and perception of specific language in the narrative dimension of research.              7Avveduto and Fornasari: Research and Inhabited Image (RIA): a spatial hypothesisReferences Downs R. M., Stea D. (eds) (2005). Image & environment: cognitive mapping and spatial behaviour. Piscataway N. J.: Aldine Transaction Publisher.  Giedion S. (2002). Space, time and architecture: The growth of a new tradition. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 14th printing.  Fehrenbach F., Bernini's Light, Art History, Volume 28, Issue 1, pages 1–42, February 2005 Retrieved on line http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0141 6790.2005.00452.x/pdf   Wittgenstein, L. (1974). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.    8The STEAM Journal, Vol. 1, Iss. 2 [2014], Art. 35http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol1/iss2/35

Research and Inhabited Image (RIA): a spatial hypothesis

Keck Graduate Institute

The STEAM Journal
Volume 1
Issue 2 The Quantified Self Article 35
February 2014
Research and Inhabited Image (RIA): a spatial
hypothesis
Sveva Avveduto
National Research Council, CNR-IRPPS ‘Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche’ (CNR), Institute for Research on Population and
Social Policies (IRPPS), sveva.avveduto@cnr.it
Fabio Fornasari
New Academy of Arts or ‘Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti’ - NABA, fabiofornasari@gmail.com
Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam
Part of the Architecture Commons, and the Arts and Humanities Commons
© December 2014 by the author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivatives
License.
STEAM is a bi-annual journal published by the Claremont Colleges Library | ISSN 2327-2074 | http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam
Recommended Citation
Avveduto, Sveva and Fornasari, Fabio (2014) "Research and Inhabited Image (RIA): a spatial hypothesis," The STEAM Journal: Vol. 1:
Iss. 2, Article 35.
Available at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol1/iss2/35
Research and Inhabited Image (RIA): a spatial hypothesis
Abstract
This paper discusses the possibility of representing research activity as a narrative path starting from an
experimentation field. The aim is to test and verify connections between social space and the construction of
images of the world through the building and perception of specific language in the narrative dimension of
research. The field work we present has been carried out as an installation art in Borromini’s Crypt in Rome,
and is the example of rendering the story-dimension of research through a medium, a narrative technology in
constant progress and evolution. In this way research activity can be presented as ascent and descent, as a mix
of light and darkness, in multiple symbolic ways and different values. The Research and Inhabited Image
Project (RIA) is in this dimension conceived as a story of stories, not as a research communication work.
Author/Artist Bio
Sveva Avveduto, is research director of the Institute for Research on Population and Social Policies of the
Italian National Research Council. Her main research interests concern science and education policy and are
focused on studies on higher education and research and particularly on human resources for science and
technology, gender issues, science and society, new media and social aspects of technology. She is the Head of
the CNR Research Unit on Human Resources and Knowledge Society. She is an Italian delegate to the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, (OECD), Paris, for the activities stemming from
the Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy. She has worked and is currently working, in the several
European projects and Networks funded by the European Commission as chief scientist at Italian level. She
has been a professor at the Graduate School ‘Socialtrends’ of the University of Rome 'La Sapienza'. She has
taught at the Master on Science, Technology and Innovation at the Scuola Superiore della Pubblica
Amministrazione in Rome and Bologna. She is the author of many books and articles.
Fabio Fornasari is an architect and artist who carries out activities dealing with projects that place the
‘displaying’ and ‘telling’ at the center of the work on ‘museological’ or museum installations and exhibition
projects. He participates in cross-media projects studying the role of images in human culture in a continuous
relationship between art and science. He made the Nineteenth Century Museum- Modern Art Gallery (2006)
in Via Palestro - Milan, the Museum of the Twentieth Century (2010) in Milan, at the Arengario, the
Caracalla Museum in Rome and several exhibitions i.e. on the Emperor Augustus at Scuderie del Quirinale.
He has been a professor at NABA - New Academy of Fine Arts - Milan and at the Faculty of Sociology,
University of Urbino "Carlo Bo". He has taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna.
Keywords
Research, art, images, space
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0
License.
This article is available in The STEAM Journal: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol1/iss2/35
Research and Inhabited Image (RIA): a spatial hypothesis 
Sveva Avveduto and Fabio Fornasari 
 
A statement by Saul Steinberg defines in a simple way the Research and Inhabited Image 
(RIA) hypothesis: he used to affirm that his work can explain something about something other 
than what the image is itself. The hypothesis is to move the research glance in space and not over 
the body that is watching. Neuroscientists look at the brain. We should look at the image that the 
brain produces and at the way people live in this image.  
If we look at space, we realize that the attitudes of the artist, the scientist, become forms. 
Referring to these attitudes, we find the way to inhabit images that someone else has built around 
us and in our imagination. We should build our mindscape and put out the images in form of 
space (Giedion, 2002). 
Our work is centered on the RIA Research Project to build paths and passages, to follow 
research activity in its different expressions: science, poetry, music, art; to study and produce 
objects to implement new models and new perspectives on art-science relationship. 
The hypothesis put forward is that to understand the environment and the space around 
people, we should think that it is a memory about their consciousness. It tells us all about their 
thoughts. The space around people is a large part of experiences, and narratives. We can recall 
what Wittgenstein affirms: “the human body is the best picture of the human soul” (Wittgenstein, 
1974, p. 178). 
We must look not only inward, into the recesses of our insides, but also the ways in which 
each of us, as a whole animal, carries on the processes of living: in, with and in response to, the 
world around us. The environment built by anyone is the best image of his/her thoughts (Downs 
& Stea, 2005). 
1
Avveduto and Fornasari: Research and Inhabited Image (RIA): a spatial hypothesis
The research work on ‘RIA’ 
Following these principles it is possible to carry out investigations on others’ research, and 
their results become the inhabited form. Representing research activity as a narrative path gives 
us the experimentation field to test and verify connections between social space and the 
construction of world images through the building and perception of specific language in the 
narrative dimension of 
research. 
The output of our 
ongoing research activity 
has up to now been 
expressed in a series of art 
installations that put 
together the art dimensions, 
the research definition and 
description, through the 
exhibition of different 
research contents. 
The installation (see 
photos) consisted of an oval 
‘water mirror’ made 
possible by using a special 
pool built inside the site. It has been made using black matt wood to create a basin that occupied 
most of the walkable space of the site itself but with small edges, and reflected (in a dark created 
2
The STEAM Journal, Vol. 1, Iss. 2 [2014], Art. 35
http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol1/iss2/35
environment) the walls and the roof made of white plaster (the typical renaissance stucco) and/or 
the people that gazed at it bending on the pool.  The effect was a mix of opening the space 
towards a dark depth behind the pool while at the same time multiplying the space towards the 
reflection of walls and roof. 
Ascent and descent in space, images and research 
Our imagination can be moved along two ideal and real lines: the horizontal and the 
vertical one.  The horizontal line makes it possible to travel, even dreaming of new frontiers 
trying to move ‘further and further’ on a planet that we have suddenly discovered finite. Moving 
through a horizontal line means using only one possible dimension, albeit a very relevant one, 
and using the spatial possibilities only in a linear direction. We travel on a sphere that, after all, 
has a surface that can be expressed by a mathematical formula which can make humans aware 
that it is finite and expressed by a number. 
On the other end it is possible to make our ideal journey moving our imaginary on a 
vertical axis: from the center of the earth towards the infinity. The point of view we express on 
the horizontal journey on the blue planet, is expressed as a pilgrimage in the already known: 
although we may not know what is there, someone before us has known it and seen it and our 
path has anyway been traced and followed by other people before us. The horizontal journey on 
Earth is essentially a real physical one. 
The vertical travel is a journey that moves above all on a symbolic level. It is the journey 
from darkness to light, for example. It is a journey to the extreme. 
The dichotomies between different alternatives either on theoretical and real level, travel 
on the vertical axis. The vertical axis represents the possible different assumptions of opposites: 
radicalizing the concept good and evil, black and white, and contextualizing the concept to a 
3
Avveduto and Fornasari: Research and Inhabited Image (RIA): a spatial hypothesis
special dimension it symbolizes the possibility of transcending the boundaries. The verticality is 
also the first real achievement of man: after crawling we won our erect position, the conquest of 
the axis of stability of all things, the opposition to the force of gravity. It is a path that breaks 
many certainties. Moving along the vertical axis makes some spatial/time concepts (such as day 
night) even disappear. The day has a meaning only if we live in close contact with the mother 
planet. It makes sense in relation to a geographic space. If this space disappears also the 
spatial/time concepts disappear and have no meaning. 
The installation in the Borromini’s Crypt 
How can we render all this in displaying art and science? We tried to perform and portray 
our research vision in the ‘horto concluso’ of a little Paradise Lost, where the fallen angel 
Francesco Borromini has provided us the ideal location to set the three-dimensional environment 
and the many, sometimes divergent concepts linking research and space, light and darkness, 
discoveries and disillusion. The topography of the site reflects, in the geometric solitude of the 
environment, the emergence of an underground space, of a thought, a conception of an invention. 
It is an immersive space through architecture that is structured in two opposites, the visible and 
the hidden created by Borromini, this was his last effort before his tragic death. 
The crypt, made for the Falconieri family as a shrine, is hidden under the main altar of the 
Church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini in Rome. This crypt enhances the duality of light and 
darkness that is common in Borrominian architecture (Fehrenbach, 2005).  
Mind and space that represent a duality of tangible and intangible that in turn become more 
or less evident and important become the easy metaphor of research and the condition of the 
artist or researcher that looks for space alone to work. Both the artist and the researcher share the 
condition of going through the everyday life as anyone while for their job or passion they have to 
4
The STEAM Journal, Vol. 1, Iss. 2 [2014], Art. 35
http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol1/iss2/35
pursue a path of continuous change towards something new, still undiscovered or to be created 
by themselves. This may be called: the restlessness of the new. Both the artist and the researcher 
even if they wish so, are not easily destined to succeed. Every true artist or researcher is a 
visionary and this makes him or her different: the individual may not be seen by the other as a 
through our installation we made people enter the science and art dimension through several 
elements: 
- Research and the representation of the idea of living images, made visible through a 
continuous flow of images of research in various areas and disciplines displayed through a 
screen activated automatically on loop 
- The space transformed into an image itself for being inhabited, i.e. the art installation of 
the oval back pool filled with 5cm of water that changed the still space of the crypt by 
becoming a reflecting mirror for those who entered the crypt and at the same time a lens that 
made the space behind the floor of the crypt an endless well. 
- The visionary artist, starting from Borromini’s visions to reach the modern ones. 
- The researchers and their activity were present only as a continuous noise, a mass-sound. 
A sound device broadcasted continuously the ‘sound of research’ made by a collection of 
different sounds (or even noises) and voices produced by different research activities and 
researchers coupled with a music composed by a musician for the installation itself. 
Water was the key element that made it possible to connect all the different elements 
(tangible or intangible) that were settled in the crypt. Water became a sort of the connective 
tissue that was linking the elements either physically, through vision and touch, or 
emblematically through all the symbolic meanings of water (an amniotic liquid, renaissance, life, 
nourishment but also danger and even death. A water mirror was located in the crypt, at the 
5
Avveduto and Fornasari: Research and Inhabited Image (RIA): a spatial hypothesis
center of its oval space, so wide that it was almost touching the walls: a black low basin, almost a 
floor in itself, filled with clean water that looked like thin foil filling almost the entire space of 
the crypt. 
The water mirror was there to show what we cannot otherwise see. The unfinished space 
was reconstructed in a reflected image which is a relic of the space itself. The screen, water lens 
and mirror virtualized the space, back into an unstable image. On touching it the water surface 
was modified and activated a low-tech but immersive interactivity: you can see yourself in a 
mirror, you can enter it and you can live in it. 
The installation was conceived following an idea of interactivity that is mostly virtual 
although not being digital, nor electronic, but conceptual and hands-on. The light was studied to 
be very weak and point toward the white ceiling, and was visible in the lens of the water, while a 
continuous sound-mass brought the voices of the researchers to those present at the installation. 
Conclusions 
Architecture had a central role in many models: the human attitude to fly, to go beyond, to 
research. The invention of the wing and the scale of the shaman or the steps of the ziggurat1 are 
only rough artificial flight. For this reason all these are already symbolic means of purification: 
they allow elevation. 
Ascent and descent, light and darkness, not to mention all the corresponding imaginary, in 
their symbolic values are at the heart of research and can be rendered as we did in the 
Borromini’s Crypt in Rome. 
                                            
1 As the Merriam Webster dictionary defines it the ziggurat is an ancient Mesopotamian temple 
tower consisting of a lofty pyramidal structure built in successive stages with outside staircases and a 
shrine at the top. 
6
The STEAM Journal, Vol. 1, Iss. 2 [2014], Art. 35
http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol1/iss2/35
This work (a part of our ongoing research project), offers a descent, a trip down towards 
the depth of images. The descent to the crypt suggests an approach towards something "less 
known" a journey that becomes a metaphor: the door on the threshold of a world that is not real 
but is virtual because it is a double of reality without possessing its substance. It suggests, to 
people gazing at it, an attitude towards research that becomes an image in the water mirror in the 
shade. It becomes the threshold between a high-ceilinged space, an endless fall and the 
possibility of coming back. 
Representing research as a narrative path gives us the experimentation field to test and 
verify connections between social space and the construction of world images through the 
building and perception of specific language in the narrative dimension of research. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
7
Avveduto and Fornasari: Research and Inhabited Image (RIA): a spatial hypothesis
References 
Downs R. M., Stea D. (eds) (2005). Image & environment: cognitive mapping and spatial 
behaviour. Piscataway N. J.: Aldine Transaction Publisher. 
 
Giedion S. (2002). Space, time and architecture: The growth of a new tradition. Cambridge 
Mass: Harvard University Press, 14th printing. 
 
Fehrenbach F., Bernini's Light, Art History, Volume 28, Issue 1, pages 1–42, February 2005 
Retrieved on line http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0141 
6790.2005.00452.x/pdf  
 
Wittgenstein, L. (1974). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.  
 
 
8
The STEAM Journal, Vol. 1, Iss. 2 [2014], Art. 35
http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol1/iss2/35


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Research and Inhabited Image (RIA): a spatial hypothesis

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