IN-PERSON ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

Understanding cultural heritage today requires more than just preserving objects. It involves exploring the complex relationships between artworks, artifacts, architecture, communities, and their changing meanings. These relationships connect iconic monuments, local crafts, and intangible values like memory, identity, and a sense of place across time and space. The INT-ACT Horizon project fits into this broader view of heritage, offering a new method for documenting, conserving, and activating interconnected cultural heritage. This paper uses INT-ACT as a case study to rethink how we understand, preserve, and engage with heritage ensembles. By merging semantic data structures (CIDOC CRM) with 3D digitization, mixed-reality (MR) technologies, and co-creation workshops with communities and professionals, the project provides a model for conservation that recognizes the historical, social, and artistic connections of cultural objects. Sites and collections throughout Europe, including physical monuments and historic cities, act as testing grounds for this comprehensive approach, connecting them to their deeper meanings. The paper examines how immersive technologies can restore past narratives, display distant sites, and reconstruct the relationships within which cultural value is created and experienced. It showcases historical monuments with their rich imperial legacies, local traditions, and global cultural exchanges through digitization. INT-ACT’s techniques reveal multiple narratives, support inclusive urban and local identities, and offer new ways to connect with the past to create more participatory urban futures. Ultimately, the project challenges isolated thinking in conservation by showing that cultural heritage consists of a web of meanings, not just a collection of objects.