Abstract
The article situates Kittler’s view on the question of visual technology within his general media theory and critically examines Kittler’s optical paradigm with regard to questions of (visual) technology, discourse, strategy and style. Focus is given to the link between visual technology and the Renaissance period.
And he went on to talk about a well-known lithograph which showed the entire royal family engaged in edifying occupations: Louis-Philippe had a copy of the Code in his hand; the Queen a prayer-book; the princesses were doing embroidery …. This picture, which was entitled ‘A Good Family’, had been a source of delight for the middle classes, but the despair of the patriots. (Flaubert 1964: 62) It seems to me that this straightforward text needs no interpretation, but I would like to emphasize two points: first, it shows how effectively the politics of images functioned after the switch to indefinitely reproducible and printable lithographs, and second it shows that media have repercussions on what they represent. In the mass medium of lithography, the royal family cast off all of its sovereign attributes and aligned itself with the mass of French bourgeois families. (Kittler 2010: 138)
Kittler’s comment on a passage of Flaubert’s Education sentimentale makes a good point of departure to comment on Kittler’s modus operandi. Firstly because the passage, which is taken from a literary text, against the disciplinary grain of philological studies, is apparently in no need of interpretation. The German original here speaks of ‘Klartext’, 1 one of Kittler’s preferred metaphors when addressing the apparent obviousness of a technique a priori. Secondly, Kittler’s comment that he only wishes to ‘emphasize two additional points' certainly does not stand in the way of ‘Klartext’ but rather stresses the obvious to strike the blind reader, who in Kittler’s case is assumed to be a ‘philologically trained’ reader and as such lacks interest and hence understanding of technology in general. This in particular should be kept in mind, because one of the strengths of Kittler’s writing is to make technology ‘speak’ as if it were literature. Hence a warning is hidden in (t)his comment: if literature can be ‘Klartext’, academic writing can often be in dire need of interpretation. Thus the challenge Kittler’s texts pose is also the reward they promise.
I. Media
To begin with, I would like to frame Kittler’s approach to visual media within its general theoretical setting as it pertains to: the question of technology, the question of discourse, the question of strategy, and the question of academic style.
This is no attempt to mirror Derrida’s fourfold philological framing of painting (Derrida 1987). The fourfold approach here is more of a technical coincidence.
Ad a) Ernst Kapp, who has been credited with coining the term philosophy of technology (‘Technikphilosophie’) in the 19th century, freed the question of technology from being a mere adjunct to the seemingly more impressive concepts in German philosophy at the time such as ‘labour’ (Marx), ‘Geist’ (Hegel), or ‘Bildung’ (Humboldt, Schiller), and gave it centre stage with reference to the human condition. With Kapp, every invention of technology becomes an unconscious organ projection (‘Organprojektion’), which in hindsight finds its rationalization; and this has to be true not only for tools and machines but also for systems (Kapp 1877). 2 Pivotal initiators of 20th-century media theory – Walter Benjamin, Harold Innis or Marshall McLuhan – have never abandoned Kapp’s anthropological set-up per se. Kittler’s theory, on the other hand, sees no need to couple the questions of technology and anthropology. His observations mostly pertain to technologies as self-referential objects, which take place and occupy these places, so to speak. And Kittler’s descriptions of how these occupations take place precisely reflect the strength and originality of his commentary.
With reference to the question of visual media and their discourses, we shall see that it is the imposition of the optical paradigm on all things visual which rules over visual form in general. This imposition coincides with the technical invention of perspective and the camera obscura as facilitators of the optical paradigm. And the optical paradigm thus replaces the paradigm of the image, and with it, the history of the image as it has always been told, and consequently been subjugated by words – as seen in the historiography of painting, for example. At the same time the optical paradigm, as we shall see, is complicit with the overriding digital paradigm as focal point of all media theory today in that both abandon any notion of the relevance of visual ‘content’ and therefore any historical master discourse about such ‘content’.
Ad b) ‘All libraries are discourse networks, but all discourse networks are not books. In the second industrial revolution, with its automation of the streams of information, the analysis of discourses has yet to exhaust the forms of knowledge and power’ (Kittler 1992: 369). 3 Kittler follows Foucault in arguing that knowledge is essentially connected to power, or more seemingly simplistic: is also always a form of power in itself. But while Foucault’s archaeology is limited to the textual paradigm, the technology of print, Kittler’s focus shifts to the informational paradigm of data processing. According to Kittler, the digital realm has now occupied the spaces which encompass knowledge and power. That has two implications for Kittler’s optic: firstly, optical media today are also primarily subjected to the digital paradigm, which is a non-discursive paradigm. And, as such, visual forms are facing the same fate as textual forms, that is, these former entities have now been dissolved into the digital realm, their respective content as such has become irrelevant (viewed from the technological perspective). And therefore secondly, the traditional difference between word and image needs to be re-addressed within and beyond the fact that they share the same digital platform. Foucault’s library as paradigm for discourse praxis had differentiated and combined word and image, 4 whereas Kittler’s digital paradigm needs to re-address the difference between the visual forms of pictures, texts, diagrams, or mathematical formulae – simply because these differences, hidden by technology today, are at stake. In other words, the difference between meaning and technology is always at stake in Kittler’s commentary while at the same time being commented on.
Ad c) One way to address these tensions is to focus on Kittler’s use of the term strategy. Not only are media linked to political or military strategies to the point that Kittler describes a technical medium at times as an unintended by-product of military development, but his own history of communication media is strategic in that the philologist Kittler has shifted his interest to the media theorist Kittler, a move which is reflected in his historical narrative of media itself: the distinction Kittler draws here between the history of scripture (from manuscript to print) and the history of technical media (from analogue to digital) (Kittler 1993: 172) revisits Kittler’s earlier attempts to shift the discipline of philology from hermeneutics to discourse analysis (Kittler 1980). Consequently this strategy has its equivalent in reference to visual media: the excess of hermeneutical interpretation in philology is much the same as the excess in pictorial interpretation, most notoriously in the hermeneutically disciplined style of art history; in both cases the materiality of communication is lost in the hermeneutical approach. There is no ‘divine act’ of interpretation of either words or images, or in philosophical terms, there is no ‘thought’ about words or images without the respective medium imposing its form onto that ‘thought’ and thus becoming that ‘thought’. Kittler’s strategic interest here is not aimed simply at traditional forms of literary criticism in order to do interpretative justice to aesthetic objects but – as we shall now see – to do justice to the form of academic commentary itself.
Ad d) Traditional hermeneutic perspectives have predominantly stressed style 5 as a formative power to guide the process of interpretation of words and images, so if we know a particular style of painting or literary text we have a frame within which possible meaning about the aesthetic object can be constructed (cf. Luhmann 1986). And the contingency of any critical interpretation was thus limited by the notion of style itself. With Kittler the question of style now becomes a derivative of technical media. The change of styles in literature after the First World War (after the ‘victory’ of modern media) now depends on technical forces (‘technische Mächte’). Literary style is a direct function of available channel capacities (‘direkte Funktion der verfügbaren Kanalkapazitäten’, Kittler 1986a: 361). The competition between media regulates the new positioning of old and new media: new media do not make the old media obsolete, but they allocate new positions to them. 6
Kittler’s description of new dependencies between old agencies – literature and technology – thus brings with it a change in academic commentary, which cannot be immune to the impact of media technology on itself. Where literature had once occupied the space of positive uncertainty, technology has taken over. Not literature – as Paul de Man put it – is deconstruction but technology, one might say, reading Kittler’s texts. The undecidability between literal and figurative meaning, which has been a fundamental marker for the recognition of literature, it seems, has now been occupied for Kittler by the question of technology: good technology is technology where literal and figurative meaning are in a state of indecisiveness. That is the style, the power whereby the meaning of technology and the technology of meaning become endlessly converted into each other. And thus a reader of Kittler should always be alert to the ‘power play’ that where Kittler speaks of strategy his own text becomes strategic, where he speaks of cryptology his text becomes cryptic. In short: theoretical concepts are also always stylistic devices to the credit of self-referential awareness in relation to Kittler’s theoretical approach. Kittler has always been not only a code breaker, as baptized by close colleagues (Berz et al. 2003: 12), but also a cryptic encoder.
II. Optical media
Kittler has addressed the question of technology and visual media in two major publications: Grammophon, Film, Typewriter (1986) and Optische Medien (2002). The earlier text set the tone: ‘How what is written in no book came to pass may still be for books to record’ (Kittler 1999: x–xi). 7 The German original notes that books may be ‘just’ capable of recording what is not meant any more for books. The English translation changes the text to ‘still’ be capable of recording what is not meant for books any more. But ‘just’ seems adequate since digital data have eroded the paradigm of the printed word and subverted any older technology of scripture. Hence, and in a swipe against McLuhan, Kittler adds that ‘understanding media’ is impossible because today everything is remotely controlled by information technology (Kittler 1999: xi; ‘Nachrichtentechnik’, 1986: 4–5). 8 Books might just take notice of that, but to understand this as a hermeneutical act has become superfluous, or simply inadequate and therefore plainly wrong. This form of subversion directed against a 19th-century style philological tradition forces Kittler’s own attempt into a paradox – writing about the un-writeable. This paradox between media is also applied to the visual medium ‘film’, which right from its inception is described by Kittler as a ‘manipulation of optic nerves' (Kittler 1999: 115). And the cut and edit technique further erodes the history of film as a medium itself, since cutting is the beginning of ‘visual data processing’ (p. 117) and thus opposes its own account being delivered through another medium: that of the printed word. Another pivotal parallel Kittler draws at this point is that of the simultaneous development of film camera and automatic weaponry (p. 124). This suggested historic development is as strategic as Kittler’s comment itself, as we shall see later. To borrow a term from Musil’s The Man without Qualities, Kittler’s ‘parallel action’ between historical and theoretical strategies in relation to film will also feature prominently in his book on optical media in general. I will concentrate on optical media as the overriding paradigm in the following, and return to the fourfold framework set out at the beginning of this article.
Technology A
To express it in one sentence: today images are transmissible; however, over the course of history images, at least in principle, could only be stored. An image had its place: first in the temple, then in the church, and finally (to Heidegger’s dismay) in the museum. And because this place – according to Benjamin’s theory of the aura – was far away – perhaps even ‘the unique phenomenon of a distance’, there was at best a possibility of a museum visit or an image trade and at worst the possibility of an image theft. (Kittler 2010: 47)
9
Literature, on the other hand, contrary to the processes of image-making, has always also been transferable (‘übertragbar’) via the earlier development of copying technologies: thus literature, Kittler laconically remarks, has always also been posted texts (postal service). From this technological point of view there is no difference between a bible and a postcard. The same testament Kittler wishes to deliver to the making of images 10 – but strictly speaking only the invention of photography will finally allow pictures to be transferable, to become postcards too. Everything else is avant la lettre. Despite this technical factum the Renaissance will take centre stage in the narrative on ‘optical media’, and with it another apparatus is given the responsibility for shaping optical media in general: the camera obscura.
As is to be expected, the start of Kittler’s investigation into visual technologies is not to ask how pictures signify, what they signify or how these processes of signification vary through history and through different contexts, but to ask what technology within the realm of vision means and how the technologies themselves impact on the process of generating meaning as visual forms. Pictures per se in this frame become irrelevant – they gain relevance only as possible condensations of a technological a priori. While Hegel in his aesthetics still distinguishes between different visual forms by applying the distinction between form and content to different art forms through the history of architecture, sculpture or painting and thus arriving at a meaning of visual forms themselves, Kittler leaves no doubt that meaning in visual media is not something that can be obtained by looking for a particular visual content in relation to form.
The difference Kittler’s text sets up here is one between optics and images. Thus within Kittler’s narrative 11 optics is not limited to pictures but pictures have to adhere to optics, and the intended hierarchy of this asymmetrical distinction becomes obvious. Kittler’s account of the history of visual media is a history of optical media only, as the title suggests, and not of visual culture. Hence his account is not one of societal meaning ‘we’ produce by ‘using’ optical media but rather, at best, an account of how optics, as a strategic bundle, imposes what is meant by words such as ‘we’ or ‘usage’.
The historical take-off for optical media is the Renaissance. While Kittler mentions Euclidian optics, Arabic apparata (camera obscura) and makes reference to antique and medieval theories of vision, it is the ‘revolution in vision’ in the Renaissance which provides the platform for Kittler’s narrative of optical media as paradigm. The ‘revolution’ of vision that starts his narrative is due to two technical inventions and a ‘black box’: although, according to Kittler, the inventions of weapons and the camera obscura enable the introduction of the linear perspective, we have no empirical evidence to support this hypothesis. 12 ‘Klartext’ is missing here. And it is Brunelleschi who provides the missing link for Kittler between Roger Bacon’s descriptions of the camera obscura and military weaponry and Leonardo’s technologically implemented model of the camera obscura. Brunelleschi is the ‘black box’ between these two white boxes precisely because we have no proof and can only assume (via circumstantial evidence) that he used a camera obscura to produce his first perspective paintings (Kittler 2010: 59–61). Ironically, it is just such a black box that functions as ‘Klartext’ here.
In any case, what Brunelleschi’s first perspective drawings do prove for his time is that the human eye works in much the same way as a camera obscura: both are centred around a hole through which light produces images, either at the opposite side of a dark room or the ‘dark’ side of the human pupil. Kittler then deduces from this technological a priori that it is this mathematical eye which replaces God’s eye. While God’s eye had made man in his image as a cultural imperative, the mathematical eye makes the adoration of pictures (‘Bilderverehrung’) obsolete and replaces it by the analysis of pictures (‘Bilderanalyse’). 13 The technology of perspective and the mathematical eye thus make all Christian iconography superfluous through analysis of its components, i.e. the points, lines, and spaces of the image. At the same time Kittler points out that uncanny similarities can be found in parallel developments: the dissection of the Bible in printable letters and the dissection of the human body through ‘gunpowder’ (2010: 57–8).
Discourse B
With Brunelleschi as black box – fed by images produced by a camera obscura and spilling out perspective drawings – a beginning is marked. From here Alberti takes centre stage in providing the mathematicization of perspective and thus of every visual form, according to Kittler. Following Brunelleschi’s process of imitating nature by copying the image that a camera obscura projects, the process of image-making in general still had been limited to ‘real’ objects. Alberti’s treatise on painting now replaces the model/metaphor of the camera obscura by his invention of the ‘window’ (fenestra apperta). Alberti’s window, which allows for geometric rules to be strictly applied following the gridlines within the window frame, opens up the possibility of painting virtual objects too. 14 Beyond this observation Kittler has no further interest in Alberti’s treatise. Whether its structure is taken from humanist rhetoric (and for what purpose) or whether its central concept of istoria is to be taken as the surplus of meaning, which is produced by paintings in relation to their technical-rhetorical part of compositio, is irrelevant for Kittler’s argument. Instead Kittler follows Alberti’s second groundbreaking project, one that art historians usually don’t take into account at all, that is, Alberti’s invention of modern cryptology by applying mathematical principles to the coding-encoding process of messages. From here Kittler’s narrative follows the historical markers one can expect, from the apparatus of the laterna magica to the metaphorical implementation of images in the literature of romanticism and philosophical phenomenology. But these ‘illusions and shadow images' (2010: 116) or the images of ‘Ghost-Seers' (2010: 98) will finally have to give way to the invention of the ‘real’ new image delivered by a ‘real’ technology that produces the type of image which at the beginning of Kittler’s narrative was defined as transferable. And it is the technology of photography which not only provides us for the first time with such pictures, but also marks the beginning of the end of the paradigm of a textually defined history of pictures in general.
So what discourse is at stake in Kittler’s narrative? And what is Kittler’s construction offering instead? Noticeable from the start is what is excluded in Kittler’s grasp of optical media. The Renaissance produced an endless discourse in which image and word, technology and meaning, are negotiated. While Kittler offers a cohesive shape for the latter distinction, I would like to remind the reader of other pathways the Renaissance period created for contextualizing visual media. As previously mentioned, Alberti is the initiator of mathematicizing image and word, and also the disseminator of scholarly knowledge on the relation of rhetoric, imagery and philosophy to a wider non-Latin reading audience. As such he also plays a central part in the development of the paragone-genre in general – the trattato della pittura, the dispute between painting, poetry and sculpture – which will give rise to art history through the commentaries of Giorgio Vasari.
Parallel to and often entangled with the artistic discourse, a large number of books about medicine, optics, astronomy and engineering used images, graphics and diagrams to illustrate and explain their theoretical problems as well as trying to establish a particular form of knowledge that had consistently been neglected by the universities: knowledge produced by the mechanical arts in general (Stafford 1994). This knowledge threatened the monopoly of the church in all matters pertaining to the canon taught at universities. In particular, the intellectual battles fought by iconoclasts to ban pictorial representations of holy icons that produced a highly polemic and interesting literature on the meaning of visual representation in relation to words can give testimony to this (Schnitzler 1996). Also in the realm of philosophy in general a revived tradition of rhetoric and ars memoria as well as neo-platonic positions produced a complex discourse on mental images, figures of speech and visual topoi – all of which again address the distinction between visual form and word (Schmidt-Biggemann 1983; Rieger 1997; Neuber 1993). 1501 also saw published the first monograph about imagination by Pico della Mirandola, which started a debate on image and psychology avant la lettre (Mirandola 1997).
And the quest to link image, memory and ethics produced of course the bestsellers of the time: the emblem books. Images played a further part in the realm of political representation; visualizing political power, for example, in currency, fire-works or processions became an important factor in gaining and stabilizing political power (Fähler 1974). All of these discourses sparked interest in intellectually systematizing the various debates: in 1673 Claude François Menestrier tried to work out a systematic analysis of the most important internal and external images, how they could be related to the different capabilities in human understanding, and in the second part of his book Le veritable art he tried to analyse the production of knowledge in every faculty with the aim of proving that all knowledge is derived from thinking in images (Menestrier 1981).
None of the above mentioned discourses plays a role in Kittler’s narrative. When addressed at all, Kittler makes them speak through technology: whether religious propaganda (Kittler 2010: 72) or poetry of the Enlightenment (p. 89), every aspect of cultural production Kittler traces back to the technical aspects of optical media. And the reason why that is not only a possible description but the desired one seems to be best summarized in a swipe Kittler again takes against hermeneutics in general: ‘rather we will stress that the number of drawings and images generated with the aid of the camera obscura is probably beyond the wildest dreams of a hermeneutic theory of art’ (p. 63).
Against the hermeneutic inauguration of the modern subject as authority and source of all things understandable, subjects are subjected to the media: ‘Nothing against this mixture of power and powerlessness, the sublimity and absurdity of people according to Freud and McLuhan; but their unquestioned assumption that the subject of all media is naturally the human being is methodologically tricky’ (2010: 30). 15
Kittler’s discourse needs no subjects to get things going. He constructs a discourse where hermeneutical and anthropological concepts meet technology on its own ground. So that it is not the hermeneutical question which gives technology its place in ‘understanding the world we live in’ but rather technology that speaks for itself and thus makes hermeneutical concerns at best an adjunct to its own modus operandi. But how does technology speak, metaphorically speaking?
Strategy C
Despite Kittler’s rhetoric of a technical a priori and its imposition on all things cultural, he explicitly doesn’t advocate a linear progress of scientific technology (2010: 72). His writings don’t allow for the understanding of a technical object as a pure theoretical construction either. And that is because theoretical concepts, Kittler hints, could be the result of media developments themselves: … whether the basic concepts of current theories are absolutely independent and thus true frames of reference or rather a direct result of the media explosion of our own epoch. Lacan’s notion of the symbolic as a syntax purified of all semantics, meaning, degrees of figuration, and thus also every conceivability could in the end coincide with the concept of information in telecommunication. (2010: 41)
16
Kittler is vague here: theoretical concepts could be a result of media but they might not be. This indecisiveness is strategic. Kittler arrives at this point by looking at in-formation as ‘the basis and goal of all technical media’ (p. 41) and as a replacement of the older philosophical concept of form. While form was coupled with matter (‘Materie’), information is data without being bound to matter. The example Kittler chooses here to demonstrate the impact of information over form and matter is taken from the history of photography. In 1859 Oliver Wendell Holmes suggested that the crucial point of photography is that there is no further need for matter to exist after a photograph (is taken): ‘Pull it down or burn it up, if you please’ (p. 41). Kittler extrapolates from here without further proof that the ‘chemically pure information’ that photography ‘is', is also already a ‘correlate’ of ‘chemically pure destruction’ (p. 41). In other words, the term ‘information’ for Kittler carries always a strategic component in itself – and for that reason it is no coincidence that our century of media technology is also the century of technological warfare.
What role does this fundamental and strategic concept of information play for the Renaissance in Kittler’s writing? His strategic point of departure has been the threefold spectacle of perspective, book print and gunpowder, a Holy Trinity. All three inventions dissect an apparent whole (in hermeneutic terms) that images, texts and human bodies seem to have represented. Then one might call Kittler’s set-up of the optical paradigm in the Renaissance strategic because it reflects the overall breakdown of form into information avant la lettre: while images, texts and gunpowder are still bound to matter, their understanding also as ‘data’ avant la lettre enables Kittler’s narrative to open up new directions and ignore traditional pathways from the outset.
Thus the strategic set-up itself leads Kittler to investigate Alberti’s role in inventing new cryptic systems rather than placing him within a well-controlled context of art history. Rather, Kittler wants the traditional approach to be at stake and to fail in this respect. And it is Alberti, in turn, who figures as witness for Kittler’s own project: ‘Alberti transferred the coldness of numbers to the sacred realm of the everyday grammatical sense of semantics' (2010: 65). 17 What Kittler’s passage here reveals is that Kittler’s texts themselves want to be read as the ones which first introduced the cold objectivity of counting into the realm of philology (and art history in this particular case). As much as the concept of information is strategic in general, Kittler’s texts are strategic in every single case. That is their style: technology is deconstruction.
Style D
When it comes to Kittler’s writings, the question of their own academic style – between cryptic and ‘Klartext’ – has not yet had sufficient attention that would allow us to go beyond the rhetoric of accusation from his critics or the admiring imitation of his followers. But looking at style in the future might just shed a little more light on the layers of meaning his texts carry within them, while at the same time denying they exist.
Winthrop-Young has observed the prolific use of adverbs as markers for ‘Klartext’: in this way Kittler’s texts seem to reduce complex questions, which are usually groomed in the fields of philosophy and the mind, to the apparent simplicity of a technological framework. But technology in itself is just not that simple. Kittler’s texts here rely on the lack of interest and knowledge of technology one might expect in academic circles within the humanities. As such, Kittler appears as a debunker of the hyperbole that one can find in a certain type of discourse in the humanities (Winthrop-Young 2005: 68–9). Why then should we read Kittler’s debunking polemics? For starters, Kittler’s approach introduces new genres of texts to challenge the cultural canon. These texts not only give rise to different perspectives (with reference to the necessary blindness) towards our canonical frames within the humanities but also offer re-readings of canonical texts, which are now guided by ‘Klartext’ texts and as such open up every terminological crust that has ‘subliminally’ set on research methods, if they are not questioned at times at their most basic level.
Let’s address Alberti here one last time: his central role in the development of cryptic systems – something that most commentaries within art history probably fail to mention for the seemingly obvious reasons of disciplinary constraints – makes re-reading the roles of istoria, the central and most enigmatic concept of Alberti’s treatise, and compositio, a new use of the term Alberti introduces to the process of image-making at the time, 18 a very different endeavour. Alberti’s text, which proposes to the reader that it is written as ‘Klartext’ (without ornatus/eloquentia) (Alberti 2000: 231), becomes, if we start our reading with Kittler’s eyes, an exercise in learning how to turn the inside out: istoria then is no longer restricted to being the content of a compositio and as such is no longer the pivotal element through which meaning in a picture is generated. Istoria might be taken literally as the cryptic part of any picture or might even be extended towards a definition of pictures at the time as cryptic (technology) per se. Alberti thus becomes the debunker of the notion that every picture is just a lesser version of biblical words, hence a debunker of overzealous biblical words.
Thus pictures, as they do not adhere to the supremacy of the word any more, become a cryptic language within themselves. While traditional analysis of images forces istoria to be defined by a biblical narrative, Kittler’s optics allow for questioning the role of the image as istoria altogether. And this fundamental de-framing of canonical texts, metaphorically speaking, will always be a worthwhile benefit to a reader of Kittler’s texts. Hence Kittler’s assault on traditional discourses in the name of technology will always sharpen one’s view of the technological aspects of discourses themselves and their respective shapes and forms.
The conclusion of Kittler’s narrative will again prove just that point: no discourse without medium and vice versa. And like everything else, Kittler notes, optical media had to disappear into the computer. Film had been the last optical medium, television already has superseded the optical paradigm by consisting simply of electronic signals. And the circuits (‘Schaltkreise’) of a computer have finally swallowed optics altogether: ‘For this reason, visible optics must disappear into a black hole of circuits at the end of these lectures on optical media’ (2010: 225). 19 Kittler is Brunelleschi or Alberti or the other way around – it does not seem to make a difference in view of the latest technology.