The collaboration between Oliviero Toscani and the Polytechnic of Turin, formalized in 2023, is now seeing its first results thanks to the activity carried out in the Systemic Design Research Education Center (SYDERE) and Artificial Intelligence Hub (AIH) laboratories.
Starting in May 2024 – in collaboration with the archive specialist company Promemoria Group – the project to census the photographer’s existing heritage began, estimated at over 500,000 negatives, 210,000 slides, 200,000 positives of various formats, 100,000 prints, posters and covers.
Of these, approximately 2,000 documents have been digitized and catalogued to become part of Toscani’s digital archive. This is a pilot project, supported by experiments carried out using Artificial Intelligence technologies, aimed at managing all the phases of processing on a limited sample of the Milanese photographer’s services and projects, examining every single step of the process: from the search for original materials, to the digitization of films, slides or other media, up to the collection of backstage footage from the shootings.
The added value of this project is represented by the fact that the cataloguing of all the available information goes beyond the boundaries of Oliviero Toscani’s heritage and contextualises his projects by connecting them with other documents – articles, promotional materials, bibliography – in order to tell the impact of his works on the society of the time and on specialist criticism. The last step of this phase was the creation of a demo version of the digital archive to validate the database structure and find an optimised management system for all the assets and related information.
The collaboration between the SYDERE Center of the Polytechnic of Turin and Promemoria Group has as its further aim the understanding and analysis of the relationship between archives and Artificial Intelligence. The proposal put forward – made possible by the study of the heritage created and made available by Oliviero Toscani – is to rethink archives as a reliable and verified knowledge tool available to scholars.
Starting from 2027, the results of this work will flow into the WDL (World Design Library) – a spin-off of the Polytechnic University of Turin and the Civic Library of the City of Turin, for public use within the Civic Library, currently under construction at Torino Esposizioni.
“I never thought that my work could become of public interest – comments Oliviero Toscani – and I am very honored that it interests a network of public libraries. All this is totally in line with my point of view on art that must be accessible and democratic”.
“The partnership with Oliviero Toscani allows the Polytechnic to explore new methodologies for the digitization, cataloguing and use of a rich deposit of photographic materials – explains Professor Pier Paolo Peruccio, director of the SYDERE Center – By working with Artificial Intelligence on extraordinary documents that tell fifty years of transformations in society, we intend to innovate the ways of doing research in archives tout court by providing new tools to scholars who are dealing with the great theme of sources. Experimentation with AI will accompany the entire archive digitization project, both because over time the amount of material available to researchers and AI will grow, and because we will continue to witness, in the coming years, the evolution of Artificial Intelligence and its potential applications”.
Silvia Barbero, Vice Rector for Communication, concludes: “This project represents a great opportunity to work closely with materials of great historical and artistic value by a master of photography such as Oliviero Toscani in a totally innovative way, exploiting the potential of Artificial Intelligence. The collaboration with Promemoria Group not only enriches the cultural heritage available to society in an inclusive way, but also contributes to training a new generation of professionals capable of innovating and creating sustainable solutions for the future”.
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