IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section B

Abstract

“The city is a museum” (EmilianiIl,1985). As a showcase for local culture and history, territorial museums have the function of enhancing local tangible and intangible cultural heritage and local cultural identity. However, with the rise of new types of museums, such as eco-museums and high-tech exhibitions, territorial museums, which only display local culture and history and are limited by their permanent exhibitions, tend to remain simple and outdated, gradually being forgotten, and some even permanently closed. Especially in China, small museums similar to territorial museums symbolize obsolescence and backwardness among all categories of museums. On the other hand, today’s museum’s paradigm is undergoing a profound change, american museum expert Sherman Lee points out that museums are in danger of becoming Disneyland and degenerating into a cultural wasteland. In recent years, many of China’s new territorial museums have been characterized by an excessive focus on the visitor’s experience and extensive use of digital technology, which instead ignores the importance of cultural heritage. Li Degeng also mentioned it in his book “Liquid Museum,” he said: Museum narratives face many event selections and authenticity. This fear is not superfluous as many museums seem to be held hostage to the practical demands of a new model of museum development, bent on experience and entertainment. Thus with the widespread use of digital technologies within the museum context, territorial museums are faced with new problems: the exhibition, as the museum’s most direct window to the public, will inevitably have to face the problem of how to avoid the risk of excessive secularization, commercialization, and entertainment in the exhibition narrative. This paper will explore the relationship between cultural heritage and digital technology in the territorial’s museums and how the territorial’s museums can better utilize digital technologies to present the local cultural heritage.