מורשת מוחשית בעולם דיגיטלי
הרצאת אורחת:
Digital Virtual Architecture in Preserving Cultural Religious Heritage
and Collective Memory
Professor Anat Geva
Seeking to maintain our cultural religious heritage and the collective memories associated with these traditions drive the preservation of historic religious structures all over the world. However, these attempts are not always feasible, and more of such historic architectural sites dissipate from reality. In a world continuously shattered by wars and displacement of people, often meaningful religious buildings are destroyed or damaged and people are left with no place and no specific time to continue their spiritual rituals. Thus, preservation efforts shift to keep alive people’s collective memories of those sacred monuments. Saving these memories calls for new ways of preservation to provide a spiritual relief without a specific physical place. Current digital technologies provide a way to address the broken link between our spiritual heritage and its physical representations. Digital virtual reality can create the “vanished” physical sacred space and bridge across time and distance that stem from the destruction of peoples’ major roots. This project examines whether people can experience spirituality while being engulfed in a virtual realm away from the real physical one. Four interwoven major concepts that influence directly the preservation of cultural heritage and collective memory are presented. The first two address the epistemology underlying the search for representation of the destroyed sacred places; and the role of architecture as a crucible for memory. The other two concepts focus on the potential capacities of recreating virtual visits in sacred spaces; and demonstrate that virtual spaces carry over spirituality and can serve as the symbol of cultural religious heritage that was lost in reality. The latter proposition was tested utilizing a digital experiment on 1600 participants who "walked through" virtual sacred spaces. The findings of the experiments demonstrate that virtual environments offer an alternative for spiritual/religious practice when various conditions prohibit the physical presence in the real sacred site.