Marshall McLuhan claimed that “Media is the extensions of man”, which forms and structures how we perceive and understand the world. Indeed, as the techno-determinism espoused that the key challenge of communication and media in the 21st century is the disappearance of media [3]. And Mark Deuze emphasized that we live in, rather than with media. We have got accustomed to the technology around us which shapes our life and gives us reality, even taken it to granted. At the same time, media becomes pervasive and ubiquitous. It is not easy for us to realize that we actually live in a parallax reality, as Slavoj Žižek’s theroy[10], where people engage with reality on the basis of a constant moving in between idealism and materialism [3]. In other words, on one hand we have to face the reality of our daily life, on the other hand, we immerse in the world we perceive via media.
When it comes to culture heritage, the instances of properties and sites with archaeological, aesthetic and historical value, how can digital media impact on it, especially on the “aura” that Walter Benjamin accentuated [2]? If we consider it in the theory of Deuze, digital media itself becomes part of cultural heritage and that is one of the reasons we utilize it more and more. “We become what we behold that we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”[8] McLuhan argued that we should perceive the world in a brand new way, embedded in knowledge structure and societal transformations. We human beings invented new media technologies and utilized them as our extensions, but it’s not the end. In the field of culture, these tools facilitate our research, preservation and exhibition of cultural heritage, which change the way we interpret it and bring more possibilities beyond their original purposes.
The future of cultural heritage appears less indistinct with the development of technology and should go in the way of digital, immersion and interaction.
Digital
Manovish argued in his book that new media can be divided into two layers: cultural layer and computer layer [7]. What we are doing on cultural heritage is to transcode it so that the two layers combine. But that is just the beginning.
The digitalization has the apparent application in the preservation of culture heritage. For example, in the archaeology project, 3D Digging in Catalhoyuk, Turkey conducted by Maurizio Forte, 3D technology and virtual simulation system promoted the virtual restoration of the site. [1]
Digging is a destructive process, and some of the sites were too fragile to preserve. There are four key issues in archaeological fieldwork and research: the reversibility of the excavation process, the accessibility and elaboration of data during the interpretation process, and the final representation and communication of the data-knowledge [1].
The project is aimed to reconstruct virtually the entire archaeological process of excavation using 3D technology, such as laser scanners, 3D photogrammetry and 3D Virtual Reality collaborative systems during the interpretation process in the lab [1].
The same with archaeological work in Catalhoyuk, some other cultural heritage that exposed to the natural environment and massive visitors, for example, the pyramids in Egypt, the wall paintings in Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, China, marble statues in Italy and so forth, are all under threat and suffering from inevitable destroy from outside. However, scholars can only implement extremely limited protection to them. We can imagine that these places of interest would disappear one day. The only way we can preserve it permanently is to transcode them to digital data so that they can be stored in the computer. Even more, it would be possible that we can reconstruct them physically one day in the future with the based line we recorded in our database.
Immersion
Maurizio Forte argued that the revolution of digital technology we focused on in the past years was mainly the technical power, instead of the power in the semantic level, the way of communication and the connotation of information.
Before Information Age, we learned and obtained information from teachers, books, radios and televisions, following a linear process. We learned about cultural heritage from history books, museums, films, photographs etc. With the coming of new media, this mode of learning was broken by a reticular system, where we can acquire knowledge from multi-sense. According to Forte, two categories of relations happen when people learn about cultural heritage via digital media, the visual immersion and interaction in virtual world [4].
As Sarah Kenderdine showed in her TED talk about her project Pure Land, a multiple-projector spatially-interactive browser that displayed different sets of archival data allowing users to re-discover personal cultural histories. With pioneering virtual reality technology, visitors are immersed in a large 360-degree panoramic projection theatre that gives a true-to-life experience of being inside a cave temple and seeing its magnificent Buddhist wall paintings at one-to-one scale. 3D animations and digital effects revealed the beauty of the Heritage Site [10].
Compared to traditional museum and exhibition, Pure Land attracted more attention, but not that from the press and websites, but the concentration of visitors’ brains and cognition. In this “cave”, visitors are immersed in the knowledge of Buddhist culture and art. To some extent, the cave of Pure Land is a virtual ecosystem, an auto-poietic biological digital world where data are stored and generated. According to this sense, digital media is no more than a tool or an approach but the constitute of the virtual ecosystem.
The Virtual is another world which is not opposed with the Real, and the former one is the result of the transcoding of cultural heritage. Its relationship with cultural information on the cultural layer is just like that of the body and mind. One “exists” in the digital world in the form of binary code, one and zero; the other is the intangible knowledge in museums, books, the brains of human beings, in history, in time and, the “aura”. In Pure Land, the multi-projector technology opened the door of the two ecosystems.
Interaction
New media brought new social phenomenon that people are deeply individualized, they are absolutely liberal but still live in communities. Due to this kind of individualization and the uncanny capacity of contemporary media, people can connect and isolate at the same time [3]. The mass has a lack of certainty and settlement, and they are not content to accept the world presented in front of them, which leads to intense desire for self-exposure. It seems that everyone wants to be the protagonist of media world.
The symptom indicates the future of digital cultural heritage, which would be exhibited in the form of interaction where visitors explore their own experience in the virtual reality. Different from visual immersion, interaction in virtual world underlines the physical behavior and activities.
Again in the project 3D Digging in Catalhoyuk, virtual reality system rebuilt and represented the site for visitors. All the models made by laser scanners and computer vision have been optimized and implemented for the DiVE ( the Duke Immersive Visualization Environment ). In the virtual Catalhoyuk, visitors literally walk into the world and surrounded by the reconstructed objects even interact with them. Technologies such as stereo glasses offer depth perception and navigation; handled “wand” make people manipulate the stuff. [5]
Figure-3 the DiVE system of Duke University
The interaction and immersion experience provides by DiVE enforces the sense of presence of reality, which is shaped by technology, as Deuze argued. As the boundary of the Real and the Virtual has been broken, digital media becomes invisible because we can get into the Virtual just as we use our mind to control the body.
Discussion
How we interpret digital media determines how we use it, and in return that determines how we comprehend our cultural heritage.
As Christiane Paul states in her book Digital Art, ‘‘Technologies often tend to develop faster than the rhetoric evaluating them, and we are still in the process of developing descriptions for art using digital technologies as a medium— in social, economic, and aesthetic respects’’ [9]. In today’s convergence culture [6], multiple forms of media convergence are leading us towards a digital renaissance. The future of culture heritage would thrive with the assistance of digital media; meanwhile, the “aura” of art work would never evanish due to the value of exhibition; it would exist in the digital form, inn an auto-poeitic ecosystem, and provide immersion and interaction for more possibilities of re-creation of our culture.
Bibliography
[1] “3D Digging at Çatalhöyük.”[Online]. Available: http://www.catalhoyuk.com/uc_merced.html. [Accessed: 4 Dec 2015] [2] Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in London, United Kingdom: Fontana Press. 1968 [3] Deuze, Mark. “Media Life,” in Media, Culture and Society. 33.1 (2011): 137-48 [4] Forte, Maurizio. “Ecological Cybernetics, Virtual Reality, and Virtual Heritage,” In Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007. pp.389-408 [5] Forte, Maurizio. “3D Archaeology at Çatalhöyük”. 2013[Online]. Available: https://mediterraneanworld.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/3d-archaeology-at-catalhoyuk/. [Accessed: 4 Dec 2015] [6] Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Web. [7] Manovich, Lev. “Principles of New Media,” in The Language of New Media. 1st MIT Press pbk. ed. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002;2000. pp.27-48 [8] McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. First MIT Pressition. ed. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1994 [9] Paul, Christiane. Digital Art. London, United Kingdom: Thames and Hudson. 2003 [10] “Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang”. 2012. [Online]. Available: http://alive.scm.cityu.edu.hk/projects/alive/pure-land-inside-the-mogao-grottoes-at-dunhuang-2012/. [Accessed: 18 Nov 2015] [11] Žižek Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2006