Preserving immersive experiences as transformative museum experiences

Immersive experiences generated via the use of eXtended Reality (XR), encompassing augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), form a crucial part of today’s creative and digital landscape whose cultural value should be recognized as an emerging heritage to be safeguarded for current and future generations. Museums, especially, have provided a salient context for XR to evolve from an emerging technology into a medium of creative expression within the design of meaningful and transformative museum experiences. Preserving immersive experiences poses challenges for contemporary conservation due to issues of technological obsolescence, forms of collective and distributed ownership, and the interactive, participatory, and performative nature of creative technologies. This chapter addresses two London-based immersive experiences as case studies – Virtual Veronese (23 July – 5 August 2019) at The National Gallery and Alice: The VR Experience (22 May – 31 December 2021) at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). The chapter fulfils a three-fold function: first, it explores the transformative potential and socio-cultural dimensions of immersive experiences that call for their cultural preservation; second, it discusses the transformative nature of immersive media content and its technological preservation; and third, it reflects on how both preservation aspects have brought transformations in museum practices, policies, and structures.<p></p>