The present paper reports about a recent urban acupuncture project, Augmenting Angri, started with its first edition in 2020 and carried on in the small city of Angri (SA). The project has adopted the city of Angri to test appropriate techniques for the enhancement of local cultural heritage, ex-perimenting the attractiveness and easy access to digital content offered by recent augmented reality apps, with the aim of engaging the local population in. The project therefore falls in the field of digital humanities for the enhancement of cultural heritage through ICT but, at the same time, it is also in the field of urban art, especially street art, very popu-lar in the last two decades in Italian cities. According to a Urban acupunture approach, we combined some advanced digital representation techniques to the traditional painted street art, designing the interaction of physical murals with digital content overlapped through augmented reality.
Augmenting Angri: Murals in AR for Urban Regeneration and Historical Memory
Augmenting Angri is a project aiming at preserving the memory of about twenty murals located in the historical centre of the small city of Angri (SA) using ICT and in particular Augmented reality. The project has been carried on in 2020 with the students attending the integrated course of Visual Expression (professors A. Pagliano and P. Vitolo) in the Master’s Degree Course in Design for the Built Environment. Augmenting Angri consists of an innovative valorisation path in Augmented reality which expand the narrative message of the old murales thanks to the digital contents (audio, video, animations and 3D models), sometime replacing them back, in case of totally disappeared murales.
Phygitalarcheology for the Phlegraean Fields
The research investigates the theme of the valorization of the huge, but widespread, archaeological heritage of the Phlegraean Fields which, already weakened in its conservation and fruition by the bradyseismic phenomena of the area, is made even more fragile by the absence of narrative strategies, making even local communities unable to perceive its value. The study proposes a systematization of the knowledge of the Phlegraean Fields Park, through surveys and 3D models, integrated by the use of different digital technologies, which together promote effective forms of communication between users and heritage. Each site becomes the node of a network of thematic routes, traced starting from the major attractions of the area and aimed at defining a hybrid landscape, made of in site visits and immersive digital experiences. The goal is to generate a new model of inclusive museum, configuring cultural relationships between physically distant places, between lost spaces and real ruins.