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In 1985 in Genoa Rosa Leonardi - who had already been involved in the direction of various avant-garde galleries in the previous decades - opened a new exhibition space called Leonardi V-Idea with the exhibition Nel vuoto del ritorno, which presented computer videos made by the Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici collective. This is the beginning of a twenty-year activity that will see the gallery qualify itself as one of the most important venues in Italy for the promotion of computer art, through exhibitions, events, conferences, and debates. In addition to group exhibitions that documented the constant updates in the sector (in 1989, for example, La Bellezza dei Frattali), the gallery hosted personal exhibitions of experimental artists such as Massimo Contrasto, the aforementioned Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici, PostMachina and Tommaso Tozzi. The material relating to this particular area of interest of the gallery, consisting of documents still partly unpublished and including works of computer art by various Italian artists, is today conserved in Genova at the Leonardi V-Idea Archives and the University of Genoa Archives of Contemporary Art. Through the study of these materials, the essay intends to offer a contribution on the history of computer art and its diffusion between the eighties and nineties of the last century.

The digital photography represents not only an immediate medium for data communication, but also an effective instrument for surveying and monitoring the architectural buildings. In this context, 2D images allow to acquire multi-scale geometrical and material data in a few time. This peculiarity makes this technique very suitable for the survey of cracks distribution in emergency condition, for example immediately after an earthquake. Referring to this specific application, the article suggests a process of 2D images acquisition, data management and representation for surveying crack distribution inside an historical building in Ferrara, Palazzo Renata di Francia, seriously damaged by the seismic events happened in May 2012.

In this article we will discuss how the aesthetic values, that the digital imaging provide, has influenced in drawing and architecture in a historical reading of the evolution of each means of architecture expression. In painting art and photography have been happening genres and styles that have adopted criteria of one or another discipline. When photography became independent from painting as an artistic discipline, its relationship to the architecture affected both the acceptance of its stylistic canon and the broadcast area. With technological development and the emergence of the new concept of digital imaging, it has become an indispensable tool in the whole process of contemporary architecture, which should not contaminate the true sense of the architectural drawing.