The virtual museum as the activation and rewriting of the urban landscape

Artigo baseado na comunicação proferida no International Conference Lost and Transformed Cities: A Digital Perspective, realizado na Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas /Universidade Nova de Lisboa, em Lisboa, Portugal, 17-18 novembro 2016The city as a virtual museum addresses a diffuse conception of patrimony and an experience of a digital “hybrid space” (Kluitenberg, 2010). Such a museum is marked by a conflation of presence and distance and a nexus of blurred boundaries between intimacy and publicness, thus contributing to re - imagine our experience in the contemporary networked spatiality. The city’s material culture enhanced by people’s perceptions and memories is now empowered by digital networks giving rise to a “locational humanism” (Holmes, 2003) and a collective activation of urban landscapes. Bearing in mind the importance of place and locality within the context of a digital age, this paper focuses on the city as a virtual museum, a relational space which creates an urban allegori zation and an immersion effect on the digital networks.