Extending the notion of virtuality: New heritage and emergent cultural objects

“Every thing that exists is a potential museum object”
(Hugues de Varine-Bohan, 1976)

All museums are virtual, independent of information technologies. Museums extract each piece from an environment that, as the site of origin, is deemed to hold some significance. The piece is then transferred to a new site, the museum, in which the relationships with its original environment and time are recreated.

Cultural objects—that is, the pieces placed and arranged within a museum—should also be conceived as virtual. They present the ambiguity of being physically tangible as a museum piece, but also being subject to change according to the different perspectives in which they can be interpreted and displayed.

Information and communication technologies empower the creative interaction among the tangibility of a museum piece, its current interpretation, and its future meaning. They allow us attribute to these components different functions and degrees of importance according to the characteristics of what needs to be (re)presented.

Information and communication technologies allow us to imagine and share a new heritage made of emergent and "iridescent" cultural objects. This new form of virtuality keeps the structure of the museum open and dynamic. Rather than focusing on duplicating pieces of reality, recombining digital contents, or interconnecting different museums, it entails new forms of social creativity and museum construction.

In Silence of the Lands, the perception of natural quiet (as a cultural object) is the by-product of the continuous process of interaction and interpretation occurring within the local community. Sounds are retrieved and interpretations produced as a result of the interplay among experience (as a cultural resource), computational representation (as actual interpretation) and collaboration (as a resource of further potential interpretations).