International Conference on Digital Heritage EuroMed 2018

The presentation focused on the preparation for the implementation of the PALIMPSEST (Post-Alphabetic, Interactive Museum using Participatory, Space-Embedded Story-Telling) project, funded by the GRIT Interreg EU program.

The presentation started with the description of the research group SindeFin, an open-structured research group, interested in how contemporary technologies affect the subject’s relation to its surroundings. Its members are primarily academics from different disciplines and countries and also postdoctoral researchers and PhD candidates and it is linked to the Laboratory of Fine Arts, Audiovisual and Electronic Applications at the Democritus University of Thrace.

This introductory note was followed by an overview of PALIMPSEST and the theoretical background on which the project was based, making special reference to the post-alphabetic approach.

The project focuses on how cultural heritage assets can be reinserted in the city through digital technologies, storytelling and artistic interpretation, in Epirus-Greece and Puglia-Italy regions. PALIMPSEST addresses the common challenge of promoting tourism in less-developed areas, by animating the urban public space and recuperating cultural heritage assets through bottom-up, participatory procedures and artistic interventions that as a result create new cultural assets. It does so by developing an in-situ, localized archive of story-telling assets, which leads to an interactive, immaterial, open-air Museum experience in the urban space of the city, with the involvement of artists selected through an art competition.

The partnership involved and the multidisciplinary team were also presented as important assets of the project. Open challenges as well as specific issues and considerations regarding mainly the first phases of the project were also explained.