Cultural heritage - its digital preservations, and collateral damage

Abstract

The fundamental goal of this thesis is to examine the relationship between cultural heritage and 3D visualizations of them, stretching and challenging the definition of simulacra in order to better understand what role the concept of digital preservation plays in contemporary cultural heritage preservation practices. At the basis of my argument is the allegation that digitalization of cultural heritage preservation shares with virtual reality a new mode of production, a rhetorical position employed to specific, cultural, and symbolical ends. The purpose of this connection is two-fold: first, I examine 3D visualization in cultural heritage preservation apart from CGI or CAD, which only mimics the computational creation; this position investigates and questions how capturing reality in 3D within all dimensions (only appearances) brings a new dissolution of heritage that we can put any material object or site in any scale into Virtual Reality or reproduce it up to 3mm accurate representation. Second, I make a conceptual analogy of the Baudrillardian perspective of digital imagery to criticize the virtual solutions to preserve cultural heritages. I also describe that those solutions might open more expansive windows to a new visual culture, a new production pipeline within the Deleuzian perspective. Situating the digital blueprints of cultural heritage under the banners of their most repeated utilities and functions (immersion, dissemination of knowledge, human-computer interaction), the thesis uses case studies to illuminate and illustrate the digitalization of preservation in which digital reproduction technologies have virtually constitute the shape of the cultural heritage in the last couple of years. It also creates a creative visual study to provide the necessary demonstration of theoretical argument and the digitalization process itself in order to express the new territorial practices of cultural heritage under the transmission to the digital infrastructures.