VIRTUAL UNFOLDING
Description: "In A.D. 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted violently, spewing pyroclastic flows across the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The eruption has become one of the most famous in history because the speed of the hot gases caught the locals unawares. The intense heat captured many features of city life, including individuals as macabre still-lifes. Much of this detail was then preserved beneath huge volumes of ash that rained down on the region. One of the discoveries made in 1752 in Herculaneum was of an intact library. This contained large numbers of papyrus scrolls of philosophical texts, many associated with the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara. This is the only complete library that has survived from antiquity. And while many of the rolls were destroyed by workmen at the time and by scientists and archaeologists later, some 1,800 rolls survive, most of them in the Naples National Archaeological Museum in Italy."
Relevance: Today the scrolls are somewhat visible (mediated by technology) only because of their physical structure. "The material itself is built up from crisscrossed papyrus fibers that form a perpendicular grid. If the team assumes this grid must have originally been regular, then any distortions visible now must be the result of the bending and twisting and crushing the papyrus roll." Read more in MIT Technology Review.
I have thought that if a photographic image takes a subtle three dimensional form, like that found on an etching plate, another layer of future-proofing would be added.
