The Silence of the Land Project: Promoting the Virtual Museum as a Place of Cultural Negotiation

The Silence of the Lands is a virtual museum of natural quiet. The project promotes a model for preservation, experience, and renewal of natural heritage that empowers the active and constructive role of local communities in the collection and interpretation of natural quiet as a cultural object. This is accomplished by using ambient sounds as conversation pieces of a social dialogue aimed at transforming the virtual museum in a place of cultural negotiation; that is, to make the virtual museum a living organism linking the people, visions, interpretations, and values that pertain to a specific environmental setting. The project combines multiple interaction spaces and social practices into a large socio-technical architecture affording: (a) data catching (sound collection and geographic referencing by means of mobile devices); (b) data description (creation and management of individual soundscapes on the Internet); and (c) data interpretation (collaborative production of the ideal soundscape in the public space).