The city culture memory’s digital media: Past images visualization

The article examines city past images visualization processes, which in the modern society mostly occur in the digital environment. Digital transformation made a revolution in culture experience generation and translation, which had an impact on memory preservation processes in digital space. The relevance of the work is confirmed by the necessity of a timely scientific analysis of not only the global digital memory and media memory research but also issues of the digital transformation influence on the processes of culture memory functioning in a local context, particularly, in city context, which is less highlighted by research so far. The author introduces into scientific discourse and justifies the city culture memory digital media term and offers to consider the processes of remembering in city through a prism of its features, focusing attention on a digital visualization of city past images. The article uses the experience of Veliky Novgorod, which is characterized by a rich past and a variety of the city cultural memory visual mediums. The analysis of city culture memory digital media features that visualize city past images in digital environment is conducted by the author in three directions: (a) impact of digital technologies on the city culture memory preservation and actualization processes (neural network, 3D-modeling, VR and AR), opening up new opportunities for past images visualization and restoration of the memory media’s lost fragments; (b) city past visual representation features in digital media as a global carrier of city culture memory, forming the relevant repertoire of visual patterns and fixing certain past fragments in media content; (c) development trends of institutional practices of digital memory media’s creation and sharing including cultural artifacts digitalization, institutions’ activities virtualization, digital heritage work standards creation. Besides visualization, city culture memory digital media, identified by the example of Veliky Novgorod, are characterized by efficiency and content access openness for diverse audiences, rapid shift of relevant past fragments, presence of different versions of the past. The total spread of city memory digital media on the Internet makes them a part of a resident’s daily life, a window into the past reduced by a digital code and a way of a visual perception of this past. The widespread usage of such media leaves an imprint on the entire city remembering culture, which is now characterized by “rhizomacy”, fragmentation, mixing of the real and the virtual, which blurs city culture memory and also increases the risks of meanings substitution in collective memories, leading to a decrease of citizens’ consolidation level. Such knowledge opens up the possibility of not only further empirical research in this direction but also development of strategies for preserving the city culture memory in a digital environment.