| This issue comes at a time when people are migrating to an artificial intelligence called Claude. The reason for this migration is not only technical: it is political. Some technology companies have chosen to align themselves with power. Others have
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This second issue comes at a moment when the alignment of some major technology companies with political power has led many users to reconsider their choices. Claude — Anthropic’s artificial intelligence — carries the name of Claude Shannon. This is not a decorative coincidence: it is an intellectual lineage that this issue sets out to honor. Shannon taught us that information is what reduces uncertainty. Noise is what increases it. Propaganda is noise with intention. The belinograph transmitted images through telegraph wires: the same technology carried family portraits and regime photographs. The channel is neutral. The content never is. Information theory illustrated with a belinograph Claude Elwood Shannon was born in 1916 in Petoskey, Michigan. He died in 2001, after years of chosen silence. In between, a single paper changed the way the world thinks about communication: A Mathematical Theory of Communication, published in the Bell System Technical Journal in 1948. It is neither a paper on physics, nor on pure mathematics, nor engineering. It is something rarer: a shift in conceptual scale. Shannon asked a question no one had formulated with that precision: how much is a piece of information? Not what it means, not whether it is true or false — how much. The answer is the bit: the elementary unit of choice between two possibilities. One letter or the other. A light point or a dark one. A high current or a low one on a telegraph wire. This issue of Partita Doppia uses a concrete object to illustrate the theory: the Wirephoto machine — or bélinographe, named after its French inventor Édouard Belin, who in 1907 transmitted a fixed image over a telephone line for the first time. The device rotates a photograph on a cylinder and scans it point by point with a photoelectric cell, converting grey levels into variations of electric current. At the other end of the line, a second synchronized cylinder reconstructs the image on photographic paper. It is slow, imprecise, marvelous.
The belinographe does not know Shannon — it predates his theory by forty years. But Shannon knows the belinographe perfectly, and knows the problem it poses: how to transmit an image through a noisy channel without losing what matters. Shannon introduces five concepts: The bit. Every point scanned by the belinographe corresponds to a grey level. If the device distinguishes only black and white, one bit per point suffices: 0 or 1, dark or light. Sixteen grey levels require four bits. Two hundred and fifty-six — as in a modern digital file — require eight. The bit is not a technical convention: it is the minimum measure of resolved uncertainty. Entropy. Entropy measures the average unpredictability of a source — the higher the entropy, the more information each symbol carries, and the harder it is to compress or predict. A uniform image — a gray sky, a neutral background — varies little from one point to the next. The grey level of the following point is almost always predictable. Average uncertainty is low: entropy is low. An image rich in detail — a face, a crowd, a texture — is difficult to predict point by point. Entropy is high. Shannon showed that entropy measures exactly the average quantity of information contained in each transmitted symbol. A monotonous image carries little information. A complex one carries much — and requires more time, more wire, more channel.
Noise. On the telegraph wire, current does not travel undisturbed. Electromagnetic interference, thermal variations, cable defects introduce parasitic fluctuations that overlay the useful signal. The received signal is never identical to the transmitted one. On the belinographe, this translates into points lighter or darker than they should be, into striations, into zones of degradation. This is noise — in Shannon’s precise sense: random perturbation that increases the receiver’s uncertainty. Redundancy. The response to noise is not to shout louder: it is to repeat what matters, to distribute information so that the loss of one part does not compromise the whole. Shannon shows that redundancy, used intelligently, allows approaching the theoretical channel limit without errors. Natural language is redundant by nature — approximately fifty percent, according to his estimates for written English. Photographs transmitted via belinographe exploit spatial correlations between neighbouring points: a light point is often surrounded by light points. This local predictability is a form of redundancy — and a resource.
The channel was neutral.
PARTITA DOPPIA is a small hand‑made seasonal journal of art, photography and architecture. This first issue includes a tribute to André Jammes and essays on William Kentridge, the Baselitz collection in Budapest, early photographic erotica, frontier photography in Senigallia, archival church account books and the first photographs of Greenland. It also opens a series of investigative photo stories, written almost like detective inquiries. The first of these appears as a feuilleton in this inaugural issue, and future numbers will continue this line of research and narration. This magazine is also available as editable text. For automatic translations, you can: copy the text and paste it into DeepL; use the DeepL browser extension to translate the PDF online; or view the digital version on our website: partitadoppia.org. With a little delay, each previous issue will be made freely available to everyone, while subscribers always keep one issue ahead.
PARTITA DOPPIA – Journal of art, photography and architecture ISSN 3103-5183 Subscription “D” for Digital Subscription “C” for Carta (Paper) Subscription “S” for Support or Surprises Single copies – available in city of Senigallia and the surroundings Modalità di pagamento / Payment method 1. PayPal 2. Bonifico bancario / Bank transfer Fatturazione e spese PayPal Per i pagamenti tramite PayPal è richiesto un supplemento del 5% per coprire le commissioni, oppure è possibile selezionare l’opzione “Amici e familiari” (quando disponibile). For payments via PayPal, a 5% surcharge is required to cover fees, or you can select the “Friends and Family” option (when available). La Fotografia è la più bella delle collezioni … Senigallia, città della fotografia, ospitera nuovi spazi dedicato alla ricerca e promozione della fotografia. Atelier 41 si trova 41 via fratelli Bandiera. Senigallia diventerà la Città delle collezioni. Any question : fotografia
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