heritage
As the past exists for us only as its symbolic representation, and 'heritage' may be said to designate a form of representation of the past that embodies an eclectic mix of artifacts, text, images and performance, there is a natural affinity between design practices in heritage and those in the new media.
The application of new media in heritage has both a practical and theoretical face: the practical face may be seen at an increasing number of museums and galleries; the theoretical face emerges when design problems demand reflection on the nature of our representational relationship with the past.
At this point the work of Walter Benjamin, and its Fruhromantik origins, become active agents in new media design.
The statues are now only stones from which the living soul has flown ... They have become what they are for us now - beautiful fruit already picked from the tree, which a kindly Fate has offered us, as a girl might set fruit before us. It cannot give us the actual life in which they existed, not the tree that bore them ... So Fate does not restore their world to us along with the works of antique Art, it gives not the spring and summer of the ethical life in which they blossomed and ripened, but only the veiled recollection of that actual world. Our active enjoyment of them is therefore not an act of divine worship through which our consciousness might come to its perfect truth and fulfilment; it is an external activity - the wiping-off of some specks of dust from these fruits, so to speak - one which erects an intricate scaffolding of the dead elements of their outward existence - the language, the historical circumstances, etc. in place of the inner elements of the ethical life which environed, created and inspired them. All this we do, not in order to enter into their very life but only to possess an idea of them in our imagination. ... the Spirit of the Fate that presents us with those works of art is more than the ethical life and the actual world of that nation, for it is the inwardizing in us of the Spirit which in them was still only outwardly manifested; it is the Spirit of the tragic fate which gathers all those individual gods and attributes of the divine substance into one pantheon ... (G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind)