Open cabinet

Book section : Chapter

Emerging technologies present exciting opportunities for cultural institutions to increase accessibility of their collections and establish new routes to engagement. This allows an unprecedented variety of perspectives to be included in the critical knowledge reproduction facilitated by heritage sites and institutions, and fosters experimental ways of approaching long-standing issues within these spaces. New mobile immersive technologies have the capacity to fundamentally change how audiences interact with heritage. There is, however, a prominent gap between the hypothetical potential these technologies offer and their current implementation in cultural institutions. This is particularly evident in one of the most challenging fields which seeks to harness these technologies, the critical contextualisation of contested heritage: while immersive technologies afford new depths of interaction and education, they also risk reaffirming colonial narratives within museums or trivialising colonial violence, and, at worst, may actively counteract decolonial repatriation and reparation efforts. This chapter considers Open Cabinet, an AR web tool developed for the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in this context and examines the advantages and potential risks of using AR to critically engage with contested heritage. We hope to contribute to an emerging interdisciplinary discussion which uses decolonial theory, critical museology, and HCI approaches in a practice-oriented way to centralise the impact, rather than merely the intention, of critically engaging with contested heritage through AR applications.

Authors: Rivera-Carlisle, J; Eccles, K

• Publication status: Published
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Host title: Mobile Heritage
• Pages: 79-97
• Chapter number: 4
• Publication date: 2025-04-22
• DOI: 10.4324/9781003400288-5
• EISBN: 9781003400288
• ISBN: 9781032509204
• Language: English
• Subtype: Chapter