Art and Heritage Education in a Digital Art Center
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The article analyzes how a digital art center can become a critical, participatory, and inclusive space for artistic and heritage education, articulating theory and practice around an immersive exhibition on La Ruta at the Bombas Gens Centre d’Arts Digitals (Valencia, Spain). A qualitative interpretive approach based on hermeneutic phenomenology is adopted. Data were generated through six focus groups, comprising 30 professionals from the fields of visual arts, education, and visual culture, following a visit to a recent cultural heritage installation that incorporates immersive technologies; the data were then analyzed using an inductive thematic analysis. The results show that technological immersion only acquires educational value when it is coherently integrated into the story and accompanied by pedagogical mediation, reveal the role of vicarious nostalgia and heritage literacy in the construction of collective memory, and evidence narrative silences around subaltern voices and social controversies. It is concluded that this digital art center can function as a hybrid learning laboratory for teacher training and heritage education, as long as technological spectacularization is subordinated to processes of participation, epistemic justice and critical reading of heritage.
Source: Heritage
Language: English
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,930
OpenAlex ID: W7172508777