Publication Details
Abstract
The research is conducted to test the transformation of cultural heritage preservation in the digital age, with a focus on the roles of museums, virtual reality (VR), and artificial intelligence (AI). Based on Walter Benjamin’s theories of aura and informed by post-aura debates on authenticity, the present study explores how heritage is mediated, reconstructed and re-experienced when physical artefacts are destroyed and lost for visitors. The research employs case studies and is centred on the examples of Palmyra in Syria, the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan and the Notre-Dame Cathedral fire in Paris. Various methodologies were employed, including a comparative case analysis of institutions, such as the British Museum, and emerging VR platforms, such as CyArk, and AI applications for reconstruction and predictive archaeology. The study concludes that, currently, on the one hand, museums continue their uninterrupted role as custodians in the realms of the physical and, on the other hand, VR offers immersive access in a democratized manner, and AI and other data-centric computational solutions open new spaces for reconstitution and prediction that have been unprecedented to this date. At the same time, in all those cases post-aura categories, such as questions of authenticity, ownership, and ethics, are intensified. In the end, the present study shows that the future of heritage is about not a choice between the physical and the digital, but about acknowledging their co-existence and building a resilient ecosystem that combines them in the most successful ways with the right combination of aura, access and accuracy. In the end, digital mediation does not replace heritage, it rewrites its future and present and the very possibilities of its survival and meaning.