Abstract

This is a reflection on the implications involved in the transformation of a designed object into a digitized image in preparation for an exhibition celebrating a hundred years of Mexican design history. An extensive description: Based on the project History of Graphic Design in Mexico and the compilation of more than seven hundred original pieces that have required photography and digitizing, the issue of physically altering the object has been faced. The previous has implications of form and depth, the first referring to physical aspects of the objects’ re-presentation and the latter being related to the receiver’s interpretation of this collection in which the opportunity to appreciate the paper’s texture, the object’s antiquity, the design’s physical characteristics and other morphological attributes such as colour, definition of the form, sharpness of the photograph, etc., has been lost. Likewise, a visual rhetoric is generated parallel to direct visuality, we could speak of the forming of a virtual visual rhetoric in which sense is altered by the object’s conditions of observation, the change of proportionality, the transformation of sensorial bonds with the receiver, and the dialogic alterations between the internal issuer and the one who interprets the image’s meaning, considering that there is a metamorphosis between the original object - for example, a poster or a book – and its digitizing, which henceforth is considered a fixed, two-dimensional and flat image.