Limits of Interpretation in Visual Urban Heritage: The role of embodiment in lived experience of `virtual' and `real' historical urban centers.
Ref.: 207
Área temática:
03 Integridad visual de los paisajes urbanos históricos
Fecha de recepción:
12/11/2008
AUTORES (* Autor principal)
COPPOCK, Patrick J.
* (Italia)
-
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
ABSTRACT
The Limits of Interpretation in Visual Urban Heritage: The role of embodiment in lived experience of `virtual' and `real' historical urban
centers.
What, if any, role does physical embodiment play as we move in the `zone of proximal development' (c.f. Vygotsky) between
`virtuality' and `reality', or better between possibility and actuality as advanced digital interactive media technologies are used as tools to
simulate, envision, plan and manage the visual integrity of historical urban centers? How does such intermedial migration affect our "sense
of place"?
In this paper I will discuss a number of philosophical and pragmatic issues that arise, and that need to be taken into account
in this connection, if we wish to develop further in-depth studies to investigate the role of embodiment as a (re)mediator of
actor/observer/participant experience in the overlapping between actual and possible world environments.
To illustrate how some of the
philosophical/theoretical issues raised in the course of the discussion are brought into play in typical transmedia/transworld migration
situations, empirical materials from two ethnographic case studies carried out over the last few years will be presented and discussed:
Case Study1: visits to `Virtual Torino', in Second Life, and the historical city center of Torino, Italy.
Case Study 2: visits to `Virtual
Berlin', in Twinity, and the historical center of Berlin, Germany.
The more general theoretical framing of this presentation builds on
preparatory studies of conceptual common ground that links process philosophical (A.N. Whitehead), historical (C.S. Peirce) and
contemporary (Eco) semiotic conceptualisations of notions of the Real, where (inter)subjective forms of cultural meaning are conceived of
as emergent phenomena brought to life in a dynamic field of cultural interactions - a zone of proximal development - with continual
intersection and overlapping of material, immaterial and technologically mediated cultural artefacts all envisioned in terms of process
and our individual and shared experiences of these processual artefacts in interaction.
BIBLIOGRAFÍA
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Websites:
Twinity: http://www.twinity.com
Second Life: http://www.secondlife.com