Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

Michel Foucault famously described a heterotopia as, “The coexistence in an impossible space of a large number of fragmentary possible worlds” (M. Foucault 1967). Mobile phone apps that interpret the heritage landscape of a city bring historical and contemporary worlds together arguably creating a heterotopia on demand. While Foucault envisioned specific sites, such as a cinema or cemetery, as heterotopias, the mobile screen arguably has the potential to transform any space into one. The screen, like the city, is palimpsestuous, but not created by the passage of time but through aim and intention. This paper examines the authors’ project Digital Possesso and its use through the notions of heterotopia and the palimpsest. Digital Possesso is a website (mobile and desktop) in the interactive storymap genre, which aims to reveal a richly textured and interactive account of the papal processional route of the Possesso in sixteenth-century Rome. Locative media technology, the linking of digital multimedia content to GPS coordinates, is used to present spatialized scholarly narratives and reconstructions informed by textual accounts, artwork, photographs, and sounds that are accessible directly from a smartphone either onsite or far away. The paper considers key questions around the structuring of experience, specifically that of movement through processional spaces when multiple periods of history intensely and simultaneously converge on the screen-based device. The result is a dance between what is on the screen and the physical environment that may or may not be directly in view forcing the participant to create their own cognitive palimpsest, compelling as it is paradoxical.