Special Issue: Digital matter and intangible heritage.

This special issue analyses the intangible factor in the era of virtual communication, where everything seems to potentially exist. This intangibility passes through several fields and applications: culture, cyber culture, economy, tourism, virtual communities, enaction, and virtual reality. The issue consists of nine articles. The first three articles deal with the topic of embodied knowledge and the technology-mediated experience. The first article deals with the performative aspects of interpretation; the second focuses on the role of learning as a process based on the embodied experience of heritage. The third presents examples of the complex networks of meanings and interaction engendered through the experience of a novel advanced information technology system. The experience of journey and actual visit afforded through the digital virtual dimension is the topic of the next two articles. A guided tour through an avatar of the cultural heritage institutions in Second Life is the subject of the fourth article. The fifth article presents the use of an onsite interactive installation as a way to supplement and extend the visit in the museum by revealing intangible aspects of heritage that are not readily apparent from material artifacts. The sixth and seventh articles bring to the forefront notions of audience and spectacle central to the experience of heritage. Whereas the sixth focuses on the organization and realization of a project intended to further develop intangible heritage experience to visitors of the eternal city of Rome, the seventh pays attention to the problematic of capturing the attention and imagination of audiences to cultural heritage exhibitions through the use of immersive virtual reality environments. The perspective of the real landscape is not lost but rather enhanced in the eighth essay that describes an imaginative visit to a diversity of artists sites throughout southeastern Florida. As new practices and artifacts emerge from the digital dimension, new definitions of what constitutes intangible heritage will emerge. The final ninth essay describes work of translation into digital format of the physical replica of the Gismondi model of Rome and proposes that intangible heritage is that which is embedded into a shape and revealed by a digital technique.