IN-PERSON: Prague – Section A

Abstract

Immersive technologies present exciting opportunities for cities, cultural institutions, and heritage sites to increase accessibility and establish new dimensions of engagement. There is, however, a prominent gap between the hypothetical potential immersive technologies offer, and their current implementation. This is particularly evident in critical contextualisations of contested heritage which ask who is being represented, who gets to claim heritage, whose agencies are considered, whose voices are centred, and who, in contrast, is excluded from communal productions of space. Immersive technologies allow for these questions to sit in a virtual realm of negotiation: for visitors, questions of whether displaced artworks should be repatriated, and if yes, where to, may become part of their viewing experience; for heritage institutions and cities, digital interactions may preface and shape material change; across positionalities, there is constant potential for exchanges of opinions, adjustments, additions, removals. Simultaneously, virtuality and adaptability have significant downsides: they may foster performative engagements with complicated questions, gamify and trivialise past and present injustices, and, at worst, actively counteract efforts to pursue material change. In this analysis, I use three apps which interact with museum spaces, heritage sites, and public statues, respectively, to demonstrate that the future success of immersive technologies in these spaces is largely reliant on which questions we ask, and less on the affordances of the technologies themselves. Subsequently, I suggest a workflow of questions which can be used at organisational, curatorial, and user engagement level to facilitate critical engagement with contested heritage through immersive technologies.