"Mimesis Journal" is a journal of theatre studies, founded in 2012, published twice a year (June and December), at the Department of Humanities of the University of Turin. The subtitle "Writings of Performance" indicates that it brings together authors from different countries and generations, academics, artists and researchers, interested in the present and the future of theatre and the performing arts - that is, a plexus that includes modernity and contemporaneity, as well as the most advanced research and theories of the present - in a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspective, thus not exclusively historiographic but oriented in a phenomenological sense. The journal is divided into three sections: 'Essays', 'Viewpoints' and 'Readings and Visions'.
The Digital Engagement: An Approach to Design the Ecology of Post-Digital Performances
In 2023 Digital Research in Humanities and Arts (DRHA), one of the subjects explored critically and under several perspectives was digital engagement, thus many scholars questioned how digital technologies can trigger the development of innovative strategies designed to socially and culturally empower the audience experience. Those investigations faced a broader range of practices in which digital engagement was assumed as a purpose for activating creative processes to promote tangible and intangible cultural heritage.
Copyright (c) 2024 Letizia Gioia Monda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
New Frontiers for Museum Spaces in the Phygital Dimension:
The article explores the transformation of the design of the museum experience, focusing on the centrality of the dialect between tangible and intangible and the interweaving of the digital layer into the phygital scenario. In this transformation, digital technology plays a central role, superimposing as a subtle, narrative, and interactive layer, activated by the bodily gestures as intimate appropriation of the space and the artworks on display. The digital becomes phygital, conceived as a simultaneous overlapping of real and digital, enhancing narrative processes staged in a museum space embodied by the dynamic movements of the visitors.
Copyright (c) 2024 Alessandra Miano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
In the contemporary era, digital media is pivotal for researching, disseminating and promoting Cultural Heritage within communities. This article, centered on the Parish Church of Saint John the Baptist of Foz do Douro, highlights the value of employing 3D reconstruction and a 360º virtual tour for effectively communicating and promoting local heritage. Capitalizing technological advancements, these tools enhance understanding of the specificities and historical importance of built heritage, fostering bilateral relations between civil society and their collective Cultural Heritage.
Copyright (c) 2024 Tiago Cruz, Marisa Pereira Santos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Visiting a Neighborhood of Medieval Silves Using Virtual Reality and Non-Player Characters
We present a virtual reality (VR) project where a medieval neighbourhood was digitally recreated using advanced 3D technology. In collaboration with the Museum of Silves and with University of Lisbon students, the initiative sought to revive a section of the historic Xilb (medieval Silves in Portugal) through a 3D/VR simulation with AI-driven virtual characters. The simulation featured autonomous characters (nonplayer characters) and dynamic events, offering an immersive experience. The article highlights insights gained from visitors' immersive encounters with the simulated medieval streets of Xilb and their virtual inhabitants, emphasizing the potential of such approaches for connecting individuals to collective memory and cultural heritage, while acknowledging associated responsibilities.
Copyright (c) 2024 Rui Antunes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Digital Heritage and Its Implications for Global Citizenship Education
Digital media technologies provide endless possibilities for disseminating and preserving cultural heritage, opening new avenues to intercultural exchange. Digital-heritage applications have the potential to bring global communities together by providing creative opportunities for cultural exchange and enabling diverse forms of interactions in a culturally specific context of digital-heritage representations. The article presents an immersive experience based on Egyptian heritage developed in a multidisciplinary graduate specialization program at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, Canada. We propose using an educommunication approach to heritage in which students and teachers act as partners to explore new ways of transformative cultural-learning experiences to contribute to intercultural exchanges as implications of global citizenship education (GCED). We investigate how integrating digital-heritage experiences in citizenship education and collaborative student-centered instructional design can promote GCED and enhance intercultural dialogue in university classrooms. Finally, this article aims to fill the gap in the limited literature that connects heritage education and global citizenship and advance the understanding of the implications of virtual reality and interactive 3D-multimedia in taking forward GCED’s mission of promoting intercultural communication, open-mindedness, mutual understanding, and respect.
Copyright (c) 2024 Amira Ahmed, Aleksandra Dulic https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The article explores the integration of technology in cultural heritage, focusing on how youth engage with digital tools in museums. Using a socio-material approach, the article examines how youth interact with technology in their daily lives and its impact on their cognition and engagement with cultural heritage. Our findings highlight the role of technology in shaping youth's perspectives on heritage, pointing toward future-oriented methods in cultural heritage research. The article contributes to discussions on empowering youth with digital tools, suggesting a new direction for museum practices and heritage education.
Copyright (c) 2024 Dr. Adahl, Dr. Träskman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Exploring Symbolic Narratives in Virtual Spaces
The article proposes the conceptualization, development, and exploration of a virtual reality (VR) project centered on symbolic storytelling. Drawing inspiration from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, especially the city of Tamara, the article delves into realms of creating an immersive VR narrative experience. The experience merges interactive narrative and puzzle elements, encouraging users to explore Tamara’s story through symbolic objects. It incorporates curiosity-driven design and the attention value model to captivate, and maintain, users’ attention with interactive features to deepen their engagement through a symbolic narrative. This research is valuable for museum educators and educational technology researchers, demonstrating an innovative method for creating immersive, interactive virtual experiences that effectively convey symbolic stories and concepts.
Copyright (c) 2024 Shirin Hajahmadi, Seyedali Ghasempouri, Gustavo Marfia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Digital Fabrication for Cultural Heritage Enhancement
Technologies of digital fabrication (DF) facilitate methods to form the physical reproductions from 3D digital models. In recent decades, we have seen a vast development of those technologies, which have surpassed traditional methods because of fast replicability, flexible scalability, and data digitability. In the field of cultural heritage (CH), because of the ability to enhance the authenticity of antiquities, human-centric and experience museum design are now considered as effective tools of information delivery. The goal of the article is to create a common workflow for applying digital fabrication in three cases and assess their effectiveness through context, objectives, technologies used, inclusivity and accessibility, interactivity, and narrativity.
Copyright (c) 2024 Quang Huy Nguyen, Marialetizia Tramontin, Marianna Belvedere https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Between 2022 and 2024, English Heritage partnered with university and community colleagues to explore immersive XR technology alongside promenade theatre to interpret challenging narratives around enslavement and colonialism in the National Heritage Collection. The Mixed Reality project engaged a youth panel as paid consultants to help engage with, challenge and inform the project. Asking communities to help steer a project is sometimes considered a risk to authenticity, institutional expertise or research innovation. The article offers a risk framework in which community partnership is seen as a strategy for risk mitigation, aligning the aims of communities with heritage practitioners and researchers.
Copyright (c) 2024 Dominique Bouchard https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Bathing in Glitter, Swimming in Neon Lights, Dipping in Cloudlike Ball Pits
This article explores, from a philosophical-semiotic perspective, the quasi mass-cultural phenomenon of Instagram Museums. Unlike most critics of these museums, anchored within a museological framework, my work prioritizes, instead, a dive into the paradigms feeding the concept by drawing attention to their recurrent features. Through the help of three Italian case studies, namely, the Museum of Dreamers (Milan), the Beautiful Gallery (Bologna), and the Balloon Museum (Rome), the article examines their shared feature of the pop-up format, questioning the theoretical implications of their relationship with time and the urban space. This study aims to be the first step of a multidisciplinary inquiry that addresses the common tendency of Instagram Museums to set childlike atmospheres, offer synesthetic experiences, and embody the essence of the immersivity paradigm, starting from their unfaltering plastic ball pits.
Copyright (c) 2024 Carola Del Pizzo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Should Holograms Be Displayed Next to Papier-Mâché Models?
The article reflects on the development of interactive artefacts portraying digital scans of taxidermy artefacts and using creative technologies to bring the museum collection to life. The intervention describes two interactive experiences designed to facilitate audience engagement with novel interfaces and the digitalization of Portsmouth’s Cumberland House Natural History Museum store artefacts. We describe the deployment of a dynamic low-cost holographic display of 3D digital models and the showcase of an interactive experience leveraging real-time motion-capturing and Wizard-of-Oz performative methods to animate a conversational holographic animal that engaged with visitors via voice interaction, creating narratives around the museum’s collection.
Copyright (c) 2024 Argenis Ramirez Gomez, Claire Bailey-Ross https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The emerging interest in Extended Realities within the digital-arts realm is predominantly driven by their integration into festivals and museums as arenas of cultural legitimization. This article aims to delve into the significance of VR social documentaries within these cultural-validation spaces and to comprehend the distribution channels of such works along with their potential impact on social perceptions. I will delineate the landscape of VR documentaries showcased at festivals from 2021 to 2023, with a particular focus on five of the world's largest Extended Reality events. Subsequently, I will explore how immersive social documentaries might shape the aesthetic paradigms that have been prevalent in festivals. Finally, I will examine two case studies from a distribution standpoint: The Key (Tricart 2019) and All Unsaved Progress Will Be Lost (Courtinat 2022).
Copyright (c) 2024 Anja Boato https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The article presents the concept and strategies through which the OutMuseum, an LGBTQI+ arts and media virtual museum, originated from university film organizations and festivals, focuses on the engagement of diverse audiences through a digital platform centered on queer cinema and topics. To grasp the novelties of the model the first section provides an overview of the development of digital museums focused on the cinematographic heritage. The second section examines how exploring various forms of mediation shapes the performative-oriented digital museum model. The final part offers an overview of the digital exhibitions as valuable reference points for future applications.
Copyright (c) 2024 Giovanna Santaera https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Toward a New Culture for Immersive and Participatory Projects
Today, innovation is closely linked to collaboration. Co-design between professionals and amateurs fosters a new culture of participation, where innovation is perceived as an intersection of networks and connection nodes that reflect a decentralized and mobile reality. Thus, there is a need for fresh perspectives to reshape the constellation of interests within established systems. To this end, the article analyzes case studies such as the DesignNet projects to develop new methodologies. The study concludes with the Forms of Culture research project at MNCARS, discussing “disorientation strategies” that aim to dismantle prevailing hegemonic models. The next step is to explore new orientation systems to define alternative “cartographies,” focusing not on physical locations but rather on systems of relationships.
Copyright (c) 2024 Pedro Medina Reinón https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Digital Curatorship Practices for Fashion-Heritage Experiences
Fashion corporate archives are considered engines of innovation and active culture resources for contemporary forms of branded communication yet continuously integrated into the company’s production and design process and construction. Companies’ owned archives have always displayed and collected objects like products, visuals, photographs, and prototypes in museum-like settings in-house to illustrate the history of the company itself and its operations to employees, customers, or other visitors, especially for public relations and marketing strategies, without completely disclosing and disseminating them to wider publics because of competition and protection of intellectual property.
Copyright (c) 2024 Federica Vacca, Angelica Vandi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Participation and Inclusion with Digital National Collections
The Sloane Lab: Looking Back to Build Shared Collections project is funded by the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Council program as part of Towards a National Collection (TaNC), a major investment using digital technology to create a unified national collection of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums in the United Kingdom. The project is focused on the vast collection of Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) held at the British Museum, Natural History Museum, and British Library. It aims to employ advanced computational and digital humanities approaches augmented by a participatory co-design methodology to reunite the collection records online for the first time.
Copyright (c) 2024 Alda Terracciano, Julianne Nyhan, Andrew Flinn https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The article posits attention care as a potential new role of exhibition spaces and exhibition-related cultural practices, in the context of attention-economy models of online digital-media platforms. Outlined and examined are the possible negative consequences of extractivist attention-economy models, which may produce adverse impact on the attention of the users of platforms, particularly their creative attention as conceptualized by Yves Citton (2019). This short analysis is followed by considering and speculating upon several areas of possible experimentation, including events and activities such as exhibition-making practices, expanded drawing workshops, and their potential role as sites of attention care.
Copyright (c) 2024 Renata Pekowska https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Engaged or Not Engaged, That Is the Question: The Impact of Duality on the Participatory Experience of Augmented- Reality Interventions in Cultural Spaces
The fundamental power of augmented reality is its ability to utilize both physical and digital contexts to co-create meaning at their confluence and to deliver experiences that are greater than the sum of their parts. The article seeks to examine the theoretical and practical implications of the relationship between the physical and digital and to offer insight into how their interaction can impact, both positively and negatively, upon the participatory experience of visitors to cultural spaces. The article develops a framework to conceptualize and examine this relationship referred to here as duality. Duality, as a measure, is then applied to a number of case studies, two of which were created by the author, one being an interactive artwork, the other a site-specific educational application at a U.K. heritage site.
Copyright (c) 2024 Liam Jefferies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Some recent digital performances on online platforms make it urgent to reassess the nature of being online, together with a recontextualization of the concepts of reality, simulation, liveness and community. The article proposes the analysis of two examples of digital performance in 3D online environments, following the user experience design philosophy. The experiences were designed by implementing native UX design: artists follow hedonic UX design, associated with highly positive emotions, to subvert the system's native mental model and imagine non-commercial forms of storytelling, interaction and participation, and to build diverse communities.
Copyright (c) 2024 Federica Patti https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The Documentation, Conservation, and Sharing of Cultural Heritage
This article is the introduction to the Section dedicated to Documentation, Conservation, and Sharing of Cultural Heritage.
Copyright (c) 2024 Gabriella Giannachi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
From Digital (Art) Curation to Networked Co-Curating
The article combines personal experiences, collaborative projects, and critical analyses to explore the evolving landscape of cultural heritage in the digital realm. Emphasizing the interplay among digital curation, digital art curation, and networked co-curating, it examines three art projects and addresses key considerations, including technology’s impact on digital heritage, the evolving role of users in co-curating, and narrative exploration of historical events in the digital space. Through these examples, the article provides insights into the transformation of cultural heritage practices online, encapsulated in the dynamic interrelationship between humans and technology.
Copyright (c) 2024 annet dekker https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The article considers the possibility of adopting a feminist perspective as the theoretical backbone for performance-based art conservation. Starting from the consideration of how a feminist epistemology could support the grounding of a coherent theoretical field for conservation studies, the interesting and yet overlooked intersections between preservation, performance studies and feminist materialism are traced and systematized. The article also proposes some original paths for interweaving feminist materialism and performance-based art conservation considering the concepts of vulnerability and care. In conclusion, the contribution shows how feminist methodology can strengthen a critical and ethical perspective in preservation practices for cultural institutions.
Copyright (c) 2024 Irene Pipicelli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The I_PAD project (Italian Performance Archive in Digital) brings together scholars from two Italian universities (University of Milan and Link University in Rome) as well as the CNR Institute-ISTI (Pisa). It was awarded under the PRIN 2022 call for Research Projects of National Relevance, funded by the Ministry of University and Research (MUR). The project is coordinated by the University of Milan and is centered on the archive of Italian artist Giacomo Verde (1956–2020), who was active in video art, technological performances, and interactive installations. The project's goal is to demonstrate the importance of documenting, monitoring, digitizing, and disseminating the memory of Italian video theater and video art from the 1980s and 1990s.
Copyright (c) 2024 Anna maria monteverdi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The spatial dimension (both visual and acoustic) plays a central role in the conception, creation and theory of the performing arts. However, there is no audiovisual documentation material that allows us to investigate this elusive but fundamental aspect of the performative act. The project FORMA. Representing space was set up to develop a prototype for the audiovisual recording of a live show to document the spatiality and represent the first step towards this immersive archive. A path that aims to identify the best practices for the creation of materials, their cataloguing and their use.
Copyright (c) 2024 Diego Schiavo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Adopting a sociological perspective, this article focuses on the value of the artwork and its conservation, specifically delving into issues related to the relationship between art and society. The discussion starts from the complex system of value attribution to distinguish, on the one hand, the human factors involved from the moment of the work's creation until its fruition and, on the other hand, how to manage them through new conservation methods that can support museum strategies suitable for the management of complex works. To that end, the DIAL (Digital Index of an Artwork's Life) is proposed as a case study.
Copyright (c) 2024 Raffaella Tartaglia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Digital Valorisation of Cultural Memories
Cultural heritage serves as a medium through which a community represents itself. To effectively communicate its legacy, thoughtful reflection on the values to be conveyed is essential for its enhancement. In this context, digital media have supported the creation and visualization of semantic connections for several years. The article presents three projects based on distinct realities in Emilia-Romagna, each utilizing digital technologies to communicate and preserve heritage through compelling narratives. By leveraging various digital storytelling methodologies, these projects have successfully enhanced cultural heritage in close collaboration with their respective communities.
Copyright (c) 2024 Federica Collina, Francesca Fabbri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Participatory Experiences as a New Way to Access Conservation Data in Museum Contexts
The article explores the integration of participatory experiences in museum contexts to enhance access to conservation data. Following Simon’s principle of participatory museum, this contribution analyses the prototypes of two interactive experiences, BrancacciPOV and MyTISSE, developed in the framework of the research activity of CNR ISPC. The observation of the results of their evaluation sessions shows that both collaborative exploration in guided virtual tours and creative engagement are a possible answer to this research question.
Copyright (c) 2024 Manuele Veggi, Sofia Pescarin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Digital Resources for Manuscripts: Between Fragmentation and Development Prospects
The path that has led to the digitization of a large part of Italy’s Cultural Heritage has been very uneven and has caused a considerable level of fragmentation in its management and delivery to the intended public. The purpose of this contribution is to briefly assess the digital resources currently available for research on manuscripts, to highlight the problem of the fragmentary nature of these resources and the ways in which attempts have been made to resolve the problem also expanding the user base, and to propose a possible way of achieving these goals based on the EVT software tool.
Copyright (c) 2024 Chiara Senatore, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco, Paola Pisano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
DARIAH.it: Data Integration Strategies and Solutions for Digital Resources Management and Research in the Arts and Humanities
The article details the work carried out within the DARIAH.it research infrastructure, based at the Istituto Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, exploring EU-funded projects such as the SSHOC cluster (www.sshopencloud.eu), EOSC-related activities (specifically, the EGI-ACE project: https://www.egi.eu/project/egi-ace/), and the IPERION-HS project (www.iperionhs.eu). DARIAH.it focuses on enhancing access to cultural resources managed by public cultural institutions and national stakeholders, with an emphasis on data curation and the creation of interoperable ecosystems. The article highlights the design and implementation of the RESTORE project as a successful use case, initially conceived as a research pilot within the SSHOC project consortium, which has since evolved into a functional digital suite to assist humanities and heritage science scholars in data collection and integration. The implemented workflow includes data integration strategies tailored to various digital humanities (DH) disciplines, tools supporting linguistic data workflows, and models that promote resource interoperability, reuse, and sustainability within the humanities and cultural sectors.
Copyright (c) 2024 Alessia Spadi, Emiliano Degl'Innocenti, Carmen Di Meo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The article presents the partial results of an ongoing project whose aim is the implementation of a web application (CHIt) for the valorization of the Italian cultural heritage. This tool retrieves existing resources belonging to the Italian cultural heritage available on online platforms, reusing and integrating the gathered data and metadata according to the FAIR principles. Metadata are mapped and, if needed, formatted according to the DCMI in order to uniform consultation and ensure interoperability. The aggregated objects can be visualized and annotated thanks to the provided tools. The result is an open-access tool suitable for a varied audience.
Copyright (c) 2024 Giulia Fabbris, Alessandro Bertozzi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Grandmother, Mother, Daughter: A 19th Century Egyptian Inheritance
The article describes an intervention that aims at presenting research based on the application of 3D-projection mapping to create an exhibition prototype to convey the history of a private family archive in a private house. The archive is housed in the Sabit Villa in Cairo. The archive and collection span two centuries of interrelated Egyptian military, political, and diplomatic public figures and are relatively inaccessible to the public. The exhibit narrative tells of three generations of independently wealthy Egyptian Muslim women, matrilineal inheritance, Islamic inheritance laws, and trusts between 1830 and 1980. The article concludes with reflections on the impact of the exhibition on a variety of audiences.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sally Ann Skerrett https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Starting from the analysis of Reperto AntropoLogico UNO NOVE NOVE SETTE (1997) by Giacomo Verde and Cordata (2020) by Chiara Bersani, the article focuses on the ability of some technological works to highlight what philosopher Jacques Rancière calls “distribution of the sensible,” something that reveals who can have a share in the community and defines who can be visible or not in the making of culture.
Copyright (c) 2024 Flavia Dalila D'Amico https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Sensoriality, Art and Scenographic Culture in the 16th-18th Centuries
Given the importance of the digital in today's society, an online exhibition is a suitable medium for the transmission of the knowledge derived from research in the scenographic culture of the past, especially when parts of the original artistic productions were ephemeral. A consequence of this conception is the emergence of new, wide-ranging, integrating, and involving research perspectives that, based on the digital, are committed to the reconstruction of the extraordinary scenographic culture (material, sensorial, and performative) of festivals and performances during the early modern period. One of the main objectives of this virtual exhibition is to promote a participatory and inclusive experience, taking into account that users approach these artistic manifestations through a virtual space that favors interaction. The use of high-resolution images, animations, videos, and sounds is a key element of this virtual exhibition. At the same time, strategies are being planned to encourage user participation by designing their own tour or sending suggestions and materials to complement the virtual visit.
Copyright (c) 2024 Carmen González-Román https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This article provides a summary of the investigations about Portuguese painter Tullio Victorino. The research delves into the study of the artist's life and inventories of his creative output—characters and scenarios portrayed throughout his artistic journey. Digital resources are employed to facilitate the recording and systematization of data, emphasizing the preservation and communication of this heritage to develop a digital collection about the artist's life and work.
Copyright (c) 2024 Elaine Karla de Almeida https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Challenges and Opportunities for the Digital Enhancement of Religious Cultural Heritage
The article focuses on the enhancement of religious cultural heritage in its original context, taking the Arca di San Domenico as a case study. Moreover, it offers a hypothesis identifying the digital as the most suitable tool for the enhancement of the artwork. Specifically, digital enhancement has been implemented as a Web site prototype, L’Arca di San Domenico Digital, which seeks to promote the work online, as well as being useful during the on-site visit. If used properly, the digital can guarantee effective mediation of the historical-artistic contents without impacting the spiritual function of the shrine by excessively musealizing its chapel.
Copyright (c) 2024 Melissa Macaluso https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
A major part of museum collections is not displayed, because it is kept in storage. As a consequence, collections are not available to people. One possible solution to enhance the accessibility of stored collections is to digitize them. Indeed, if digitized, all collections are potentially reachable by anyone, at any time, and everywhere. This article aims to highlight to what extent museums with archeological collections and those with historical items have embraced the digitalizing process to improve the accessibility of collections. Data were collected in thirty-one countries by disseminating a survey to the offices of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and by direct invitations to museums. The study estimated that at least one item out of ten (70 percent of archeological and 75 percent of historical collections) was stored. The findings suggest that historical collections made available in the digital realm outnumber archeological collections two to one (42 percent and 21 percent of stored collections, respectively). The leading museums adopting the digital procedure are in Europe, as opposed to those with a slight degree of digitalization in Africa. The findings suggest that the museums with small collections digitize more stored items (77 percent for archeological museums and 57 percent for historical museums) than those with extensive collections (3 percent and 29 percent, respectively). Finally, the study underlines different channels through which collections are made accessible. Among them, social media (70 percent) prevail over the others, thereby allowing people to participate and interact with museums actively.
Copyright (c) 2024 Lara Corona https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The article explores how the use of artificial intelligence (AI) transforms the ways in which knowledge is being organized in museums and suggests that AI’s ability to integrate diverse knowledge systems and resources from different ontological fields requires a comprehensive approach to the museum as a whole and enables a self-reflexive view of this institution. However, the article argues that the museum’s growing dependency on external stakeholders, such as AI and big-data-related industries and governmental and global institutions, has a significant impact on the growing process of museums' platformization, which results in a gradual erosion of its traditional alleged autonomy
Copyright (c) 2024 Yael Eylat Van Essen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
My Father’s Song: Interaction Design Installation
In My Father’s Song: Interaction Design Installation, the choreographer and media artist invites participation with and submersion in a digital media landscape, contributing to a wider range of ways of appreciating and understanding the intersections between our tangible and intangible heritages. The installation juxtaposes large-scale public projection with private experience, and reflective content with the grandeur of nature, the elements, ancestry and generation. Interacting with a Kinect Xbox, the user makes editing decisions in real time – drawing and overlaying cursive and block text poetry, changing video dimensions and generating animated leaves from their fingertips. During each immersive installation cycle the video scenes appear in a new, randomized order; the work is never the same twice. At the Banff Centre, the artist’s research included creating software code that could mix, in real time, video with other digital elements via interactive participation. Conceived for projection in large screen installations and exhibitions, the artist conceived, recorded and edited the 19 video scenes with themes that examine generation, scale, and nature’s elemental cycles – from clouds to mist, from snowflakes to water; from leafy aspens shimmering in the wind, to leaves falling and returning to earth. Adding to their experience, user participants are able to overlay two poems, in block and cursive text – “My Father’s Song” by Simon J. Ortiz describes generational lessons, and “The Flap of the Wallet” by Jalal al-Din Rumi explores metaphors about nature and the elements to unveil the timeless beauty and mysteries of life.
Copyright (c) 2024 Joan Karlen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Guiding the “Authentic” Storytelling of Cultural Heritage in Virtual Reality and Extended Reality: A Trust Framework
Copyright (c) 2024 Ke Zhao, Xiaoguang Wang, Yi Zhang, Qiyun Zhang https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Peaceful Places, Margherita Landi and Agnese Lanza reimagine the hug through VR, emphasizing human connection post-pandemic. Bodies are depicted as "peaceful places", creating a safe space for experiencing proximity and fostering intimacy and empathy. Users engage in a VR experience mimicking hugs, promoting introspection and shared presence.
Copyright (c) 2024 Margherita Landi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Antonio Pizzo; Gabriella Giannachi, Letizia Gioia Monda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This article is the introduction to the section dedicated to Performance and Cultural Heritage.
Copyright (c) 2024 Antonio Pizzo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The Re-use of the Classics as Intangible Cultural Heritage:
The theatre company Dead Centre was founded in Dublin in 2012 by Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd. The group has based its plays on the re-working of great Classics of literature, theatre and philosophy, combining the thinking and the biographies of authors from the past with the most modern languages and technological tools. The significative point in company's work is the use of different languages: the intersection between actorly performativity, objects and machines; the use of headphone audio and the resulting immersion for actors and spectators; the role of the constant presence of videos on stage; the investigation about bodies.
Copyright (c) 2024 Andrea Malosio https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
From the hybridization of imaginaries to stage reworking through digital technologies, the reinvention path of operatic heritage carried out by Davide Livermore’s direction and D-Wok’s video and virtual design appears today as an ecosystem project requiring the overcoming of boundaries of theatrical space itself. From Ciro in Babilonia at Rossini Opera Festival (2012) to Don Pasquale at La Scala (2018); from Attila (2018) to Macbeth (2021), again at La Scala; from Aida at Sidney Opera House (2018) to Aida at Teatro dell’ Opera di Roma (2023), the project emerging is one of a progressive experimentation of intermedia expansion of Opera.
Copyright (c) 2024 giulia anastasia carluccio, stefania rimini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Always bound to forms of intermedial dramaturgy, the company Fanny & Alexander (Luigi De Angelis and Chiara Lagani) since 2015 has started a new directorial path in the field of opera. By applying a methodological approach that catches the intermedial dimension of stagings according to the epistemological premises of digital performance and the lines research of Opera Studies, the article explores the question of their scenic and visual innovations through four specific case analyses: Il flauto magico (2015), Orfeo nel metrò (2019), L’isola disabitata (2021), Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria (2022).
Copyright (c) 2024 Laura Pernice https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The article explores the potential of emerging volumetric and capturing technologies in reshaping the documentation, archiving, and accessibility of performance work. It discusses how these technologies can impact the relationship between live and mediated experiences, and their possible effects on dramaturgical strategies in ephemeral, process-driven performance practices. It also acknowledges the challenges in documenting live performances and the intrinsic gap between the source and its document, amplified by the digital medium. The article emphasizes the ephemerality and inevitable obsolescence of the archive.
Copyright (c) 2024 Lee Miller, Bob https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Theatrical Characteristics Behind Immersivity Through the Idea of “Arche-Screen”:
Festen. Il gioco della verità (2021) by Il Mulino di Amleto is the first Italian drama adaptation of the early Dogma 95 movie Festen by Thomas Vinterberg. The original staging puts in dialogue different media in a constant, simultaneous double storyline representation: using a live camera they shoot a part of the pièce constantly, in a non-stop sequence on stage, screened on a transparent canvas which frame the entire proscenium. Festen would be considered a case study to question interesting issues around the idea of immersivity intersecting with Mauro Carbone’s idea of «arche-screen», to suggest an innovative standpoint on heritage.
Copyright (c) 2024 Francesco Melchiorri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The article analyses a multimedia concert practice ‘Raumkonzert’ (‘expanded concert’, 2019-2022), which aims to create a walkable musical space by inviting the musicians to play in separate rooms while being connected to each other and to the conductor via digital equipment. This allows the visitors to experience the spatially expanded musical performance in an open and participatory “pick your own adventure” fashion. As the authors have acted as curators for one such concert, they explore the transformative and aesthetic potential of this format as well as its historical precursors and elaborate on the process of its site-specific execution.
Copyright (c) 2024 Lara Perski, Renate Buschmann https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Tracing the evolution of the term "virtual" in relation to the real, this article aims to valorize VR technology as a tool for enhancing theater in an empathic direction. By providing examples of performative outcomes in mixed VR/live formats, the article highlights experiments that utilize VR as a tool for fostering empathic engagement. A portion of the article focuses on the experimental project "Specimens/Exemplars," an unprecedented mixed performance piece (VR/live) with an original script written by the author, which also serves as a social experiment.
Copyright (c) 2024 Giorgia Coco https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Between the White Box and Ethics: Social Knowledge and Ecological Communication in Three Participative Artworks by Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico
This article proposes a reflection on the role of data-driven artworks in fostering interactive participation and social impact. It considers the production of HER, an independent research center founded by Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico, building on what the authors call datapoiesis and what I will explore with regard to the ethical implications of the white box. More specifically, the concept of the white box will be borrowed from computer science to focus on the code and its processing, where the relationship with the computational artwork encourages the emergence of active communities around the artwork. Esthetic features are employed to enhance the audience's awareness and agency in relation to social insights. Both perspectives emphasize those artworks that rely on computation to represent data and make it understandable, navigable, and perceptible. I will consider three case studies that highlight this open approach: Whether the work is based on data obtained from institutional sources – as in Obiettivo; whether data are provided by the local community – as in IAQOS; and whether data relate to the environment in which the work is exhibited – as in U-DATInos. Each case leads to different participatory perspectives with inherent limitations and potentials, where the artwork can serve as an information object or is explicitly designed to build a relational ecosystem that thrives through human engagement.
Copyright (c) 2024 Luca Befera https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Inês de Castro in Scenic and Performative Visions
The article presents an analysis of the sensitive journey in the Museu do Teatro e da Dança National (MNTD) of Portugal, digital collection content. The visions of Inês de Castro, the costume design creations by various artists in productions by Portuguese theatrical companies between the 1940s and 1970s. The concepts and visuality of the story and characters are transported through the traces of the costumes designed of various Portuguese Companies, photographs and drawings composing a collection of memories able to feed new creations. The intention is to present memories and show how they can be used for new costume designs.
Copyright (c) 2024 Michele Augusto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The museum, and in particular the field of temporary exhibitions, has become a space for experimentation, a laboratory for verifying the digital horizon as a medium of narration of art history. This condition is evident in two exhibitions in Milan: Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918-1943 at the Prada Foundation (2018) and 1923: Past Futures at the Milan Triennale (2022), that highlight the convergence and the difference between analogue writings and digital devices. The article analyses these exhibitions as possible paradigms of the exhibition and museum canon of the present time in relation to digital humanities.
Copyright (c) 2024 Massimo Maiorino https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Digital Curation Lab Director Toni Sant and the artist Enrique Tabone started collaborating on a research project exploring the visualization of specific datasets from Wikidata for artistic practice in 2019. The research was initiated by Tabone through a Wikidata exploration of gender representation in the University of Salford’s Art Collection. Eventually, she developed an inquiring model for application on other art or museum collections. During the period 2021–2023, datasets on which this approach has been applied include about a hundred university art collections across the United Kingdom, as well as Heritage Malta’s collection of prehistoric female figurines, held at two museums in Malta and Gozo. For DRHA 2023, the project brought together the research work conducted over the previous years toward a coherent conclusion. This was demonstrated through a sound art installation accompanied by physical objects, both created by Tabone.
Copyright (c) 2024 Toni Sant, Enrique Tabone https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The article focuses on the role loudspeakers have played in museum sound. It argues that loudspeakers evolved according to a ‘vococentric’ bias: (a focus on the reproduction of the voice, and the assumption of voice as a normative sounding object); and that this vococentrism continues to obscure one of the central affordances of the loudspeaker: its ability to act as a vehicle for a ‘sonic’ augmented reality. A more complete and accurate account of the affordances of the loudspeaker would identify not a ‘proxy voice’ but a proto-augmented reality machine: something uniquely bestowed to blend the mediated and the real.
Copyright (c) 2024 David Prior https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
& I, the Moment of being Dis-Stance Together
The article employs a practice-as-research approach in scenography to re-imagine theatre space as a space that is opened through the process of moving towards the availability of things. It focuses on the creative process of the author’s online theatre piece, & I, the Moment of being Dis-Stance Together (2023), to explore the transition of scenography to online performance design that devises mixed reality performance and also delves into how Chinese philosophical concepts from the Book of Changes offer alternative interpretations of this genre of work.
Copyright (c) 2024 Yi-Chen Wu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Tradition Upgraded, ICH Redefined Through Innovation
The article presents the process behind redesigning a traditional costume of Chinese Kunqu opera, an innovation drawing on an unusual joint effort among digital and traditional manufacturing techniques and meant to revive the interest of a younger audience in traditional cultural heritage. The objective is to spark dialogue and collaboration among traditional crafts and contemporary manufacturing disciplines while generating an innovative esthetic and appealing narrative that younger generations may appreciate and support. The development of a postgraduate module at XJTLU Design School, sharing the same research project objective, supported the redesign process. Collaborating with a costume designer preserving a centuries-old crafting tradition was central to finalizing an initial prototype and planning further project development.
Copyright (c) 2024 Ivan Parati https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0