Abstract: As emergent immersive media technologies become increasingly implicated in the field of digital cultural heritage, their use and circulation in these contexts require a growing critical focus. Emerging across discourses of nationalism, colonialism, and armchair travel, immersive media have supported imperial fields of view through heightened and unrestricted vision while valuing spatial and temporal coherence to capture and apprehend authentic representations of historical material. This chapter asks how immersive heritage might challenge and de-centre domineering cultural worldviews and conventions operationalized through immersive media formats while also embracing the radical potentials to change and to make meaningful alternative understandings and experiences for learning. What might it mean to embrace immersive complexity in immersive heritage design practices?

Keywords: embodied museography, polyphony, immersive complexity, ecological thinking, cultural institutions, museum studies

Introduction

Advances in immersive technologies, including the rapid expansion of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and extended reality (XR) platforms, have transformed the ways that cultural knowledge and memory can be transmitted, shared, and accessed. The adoption of these technologies by museums, archives, and other memory institutions have increasingly shown the impact of these media technologies in the research, preservation, interpretation, and representation of cultural heritage knowledge. The 2009 UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage articulated this turn, signalling a new generation of technologies that are challenging current archival presentation and historical visioning practices to produce new resources for digital information, historical storytelling, and knowledge creation. From Beyond 2022 (Trinity College Dublin, 2022), an open-access virtual reality 3D reconstruction of the Irish Record Treasury destroyed by a fire in 1922, The Library at Night (Alberto Manguel, Robert Lepage, and Ex Machina, 2016), a 360-degree video experience that transports viewers to libraries across the world, to Modern Games (The Mill and The New York Times, 2016), a virtual reality experience activating the New York Times photo archives of the 2016 Rio Olympics, technologies are beginning to open up affordances for the preservation, interpretation, and access of heritage materials through immersive and interactive techniques. With that said, the use of such formats in these contexts also poses new sets of challenges and risks around their ethical, political, social, and epistemological implications.