VIRTUAL ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

This paper explores how immersive media can reframe the experience of intangible cultural heritage within architecturally and historically contested sites. The case study is a 360° cinematic virtual reality (CVR) work featuring bian lian (face‑changing opera) performed inside Shanghai 1933, a four‑storey concrete structure built in 1933 as an industrial slaughterhouse and remodelled between 2008 and 2010 into a cultural and commercial venue. Scholarship on the building has described its adaptive reuse as an instance of “uncomfortable heritage,” managed through processes of strategic forgetting and selective remembrance. Rather than treating immersive video as documentation, the paper argues that the 360° CVR format functions as a method in its own right. Within the immersive environment, a single performer appears simultaneously in multiple spatial positions, compelling viewers to turn, orient, and choose where to look. This spatial simultaneity echoes the performative logic of bian lian, in which identity is continuously transformed through concealment and revelation, while also resonating with the architectural choreography of Shanghai 1933’s ramps, bridges, and voids—spaces historically designed to regulate movement and visibility. The paper proposes that the impossibility of seeing all performances at once becomes a productive condition: heritage is encountered as partial, embodied, and navigational rather than singular or complete. By aligning intangible performance, adaptive reuse architecture, and immersive media, the study demonstrates how digital practices can create experiential bridges between cultural pasts and urban futures, transforming heritage from a stable narrative into a spatial and perceptual negotiation.