From Still Life to Living Picture

This paper revolves around the issue of contemporary photorealistic representation, specifically exploring digital depictions obtained from high-definition reality-based scans. This research aims to participate in the current debate about the state of digital technologies, and outlines the ability that such contemporary tools have provided to widen the iconic visual repertoire of Nature. The research takes as a point of departure the notion of "Still Life", referring to a pictorial genre that crossed centuries and cultures and represented a pedagogical routine for artists to learn how to perfectly and faithfully represent reality. As digital technologies are offering the possibility to interact with matter in digital environments, faithful depictions of Nature become instrumental for investigations on figurative experiences that assume realism, familiarity, narrative, involvement of the audience as crucial ingredients, and re-opens the debate about a new level of photorealism that can be achieved through "Living Pictures".