Doron Altaratz on the Wall as Interface

DINÂMIA'CET-Iscte associate researcher Doron Altaratz will give a talk on this subject on 23 September 2026, from 2 to 6 PM, room 104 (Building 4 Iscte).

Abstract:

A wall is not a neutral carrier of the marks left on it. It is an interface: it determines what a body can do to it, under whose authority, and what trace survives. This talk follows that claim across three sites and three kinds of surfaces: the physical wall, human traces, and the digital surrogate.

In the Chapel of Saint Helena in Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre, thousands of engraved crosses were long read as Crusader graffiti. Reading their position rather than their form revealed an orderly institutional practice of the late medieval and early modern periods, in a building whose divided custodianship governed what could be carved and where. At the medieval chapel of Apostolos Andreas in Cyprus, successive plaster layers record devotional writing that survived Ottoman, colonial, and independent rule and stopped in 1974. Those inscriptions are now largely invisible, and the computational surrogate produced through multiscale photogrammetry and digital enhancement is the only surface through which the wall can still be read. In Gujarat and Rajasthan, India, documented stepwells and mosques pose an additional challenge in a different register: who has the rights to record heritage artifacts, and after the act, who owns the digital material? 

Biography:

Doron Altaratz is Director of the Photographic Communications Program at the Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College and an Associate Researcher in the Cities and Territories group at DINÂMIA'CET-Iscte. He is also a Senior Researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Research and Digital Documentation of Cultural Heritage. His work joins computational photography with the study of inscribed surfaces, using photogrammetry, RTI, Gaussian splatting, and computational enhancement to document graffiti and engravings at sites where access is contested or restricted. Recent fieldwork includes the Chapel of Saint Helena in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and, for UNDP, the medieval chapel of Apostolos Andreas Monastery in Cyprus.