Stefan Helmreich is Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of
This short interstitial chapter examines histories of Venice that focus on threats to the city's built environment from recurring wave action in the Adriatic and from sea level rise. It revisits an essay written by the Scripps oceanographer Walter Munk and his wife, the designer Judith Munk, in which they speculate, based on their stay in the city in the 1970s, on how the technology of holography might be used to record and preserve Venice's aesthetic heritage. They also speculate on how the technology's deployment of diffraction might provide inspiration for controlling water wave action in the city's canals.
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