(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

Virtual reality can be used to not only introduce people to the world’s most beautiful and vital places, it can also save those places. People build civilizations as mediations between themselves and their environments. Their creations always impact land. From the establishment of cities within the wild, to the sequestering of synthetic wilds within the city, to the designation of parks and bases—the formalizing of the built world claims and tames, it draws boundaries and builds walls; it establishes control and manifests power. In this, civilizations become extensions of the civilizers onto the civilized—an immediate extinguishing of “wild,” a creation of a newly formed “virtual” reality with its inherent consequences to be acknowledged and approached carefully. Augmented and virtual visitation to precious and vulnerable lands is the next step in land conservation. It is beginning to unfold at certain parks throughout the world through website panoramas, 3D models, videos, interactive interface tours, and other means. There are virtually inhabitable models and images of certain places made available through various VR resources. A concerted effort to leverage such technologies and specifically, accurately curate such visits would yield not only interesting digital views of parks, monuments, coasts, forests, historic sites, and other scarce natural world treasures; it would also allow intensely immersive visits that educate, conserve, interpret, and expand upon park visitations. Seen as an evolution of past technologies in entertainment and conservation, virtual visitation of “vital land” is simply the next step in the trajectory of Stockholm’s Biologiska museet, but not necessarily as a brick-and-mortar building wrapped in beautifully painted synthetic murals. This next step uses the headsets and digital constructions of contemporary leisure and business to expand public land access and awareness into new mediums and representational means for transporting innumerable “elsewheres” to “right here” for all people.