Dreaming the Archive: Immersive Heritage and the Design of Historical Perception

Abstract

Immersive media artworks that transform cultural archives into large-scale, real-time visual environments offer a newly promoted framework for heritage experience. This paper examines this phenomenon through Refik Anadol's Archive Dreaming (2017) and Rumi Dreams (2022), situating his practice at the intersection of design, art, heritage, and media theory. The central inquiry investigates whether these environments engage the inferential processes that traditionally construct historical consciousness or substitute an immediate, pre-inferential affect. Grounded in film theory, embodied phenomenology, and philosophy of memory and affect, this analysis demonstrates that the binary between historical reconstruction and sensory experience is unsustainable, as perception constitutively unites memory and sensation. Dissolving this opposition invalidates the charge that immersive works reduce heritage to pure spectacle. Instead, Anadol's installations function as environments engineered to render a cultural past present. The paper concludes that immersive media art redesigns the conditions under which historical memory is experienced, establishing historical affect as an engineered object that places cultural heritage within design practice.