Paper long abstract:

This poster presentation explores the activity of virtual travel around a simulated Mediterranean.Created in the course of an EU Euromed Heritage project, the 'Mediterranean Voices' website forms a multi-media database of the 'intangible heritage' of Mediterranean cities. However, the navigation of the website has been designed to function less as an information retrieval system, and more as an invitation to travel, to make unexpected connections and serendipitous discoveries. Drawing on some of the material from www.med-voices.org, the poster presentation reflects on the use of hypermedia as a technology for imagining and representing the Mediterranean, and the nature of the spatialitity emerging from it. Following de Certeau, the presentation suggests that a visit to the Mediterranean Voices site becomes an act of authorship, in which static notions of 'cultural heritage' and the touristic imagery of the Mediterranean are destabilized by the focus on the everyday and intimate, the interactions of 'visible' and 'invisible' mobile populations as they create 'belonging' and 'meaning' in changing and unstable urban environments, and the absences left by the death or departures of individual 'personalities' or whole communities.