Future Heritages: Digital as New Doc-Humanity and In-Tangible Materiality

In this second issue devoted to memory and its relationship with the digital, we have chosen the image of an object, a Micronesian navigation chart. It originates within a tradition of implicit and empirical knowledge of a territory made experiential and handed down through an actual artefact. Unlike an ancient portulanus (pilot book), the map is physical and tactile and does not realistically reproduce or represent the morphology of the territory but rather a model of it. However, like Western nautical cartographies, this orientation tool embeds different levels of knowledge of a territory, or rather, of a context within which it is necessary to orient oneself in order to interact. Oriented thanks to the stellar compass, they include quantitative and qualitative information on ocean currents, flows, winds and betia or time-varying environment-based seamarks.

From our point of view, it represents a different way of trans- mitting and sharing "data" (intended as information) and knowledge to whom can interpret them. At the same time, it emphasises the path necessary to obtain that knowledge.