VIRTUAL Barcelona

Abstract

Sitting in a café in Paris in 1974, French writer George Perec started to record the seemingly mundane minutiae of what could be observed in that place: street signs, a KLM ad, passers-by carrying baguettes, sewer workers (Perec, 2010). This lengthy avant-garde enumeration deliberately excluded things that had been “described, inventoried, photographed, talked about, or registered” (p. 1), including notable buildings, monuments, and other obvious manifestations of tangible heritage. From his vantage point, Perec could not have imagined the disconcerting degree to which the mass adoption of information technologies would produce digital augmentations of our spatial surroundings. Instagram photographs, TripAdvisor reviews, TikTok travel videos, Strava routes, and even Google searches provide examples of banal content that is increasingly enmeshed and involved with places and their fleeting identities—a sprawling, uneven, and intangible genius loci. Sitting in a café in Barcelona in 2023, one is led to wonder what tangible and intangible facets of place have not been recorded, photographed, or talked about. To paraphrase Perec, can a place’s heritage be digitally exhausted, or do these augmentations tend to result in noise of little value and consequence? Might these traces be worth of heritage status in themselves, or only as digital records of other intangible heritage? Embracing an interdisciplinary approach that I dub cultural geo-analytics, I will seek to unravel the intricate dynamics of digital augmentations and their contribution to intangible heritage. As case studies, I will reflect on the urban geographies of social media and Google searches. References: Perec, G. (2010 [1975]). An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris (M. Lowenthal, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press.