Let’s look at the tourist potential of the city of Senones, home ground of our VRisme: mixed realities town initiative. It is clear that this city has no chance as a mass tourism destination. Senones is too tough for mass tourists, who want to run away from their own misery towards sunny pleasures. But we may reflect, if Senones has a future in cultural tourism. Even though what is offered is crude, as the architectural heritage and the societal situation have a heavy post-industrial touch.
Several examples show that it will not suffice to model our architectural heritage in 3D to transform it into a great attraction. Examples without the necessary narrative concept are: Rome https://www.romaexperience.com/rome-tours/rome-virtual-tour/ Versailles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4KjHwzc6oQ These examples show that is not enough to show beautiful spaces filled with animated puppets in historic clothes. We need to tell a story on a specific and unique local quality.
Cultural tourism finds itself in the ecological crisis, the destructiveness of tourism enters the consciousness of cultivated participants. How could we achieve this without the negative effects using mixed realities, with their simulations, virtualizations and augmentations, for a new kind of journey between the worlds, experiences and cultures? This form of high level tourism tries to combine informative content and pleasure. Its participants are active people who do not dream of a dolce far niente at the beach. They want to understand the specific qualities of the ends of the world they visit, and they suffer from a growing conflict of conscience between their intellectual and emotional interests and the consequences of their tourism activities.
Would it be possible to invent exploratory tourism, in which visitors are involved as participants and researchers? Could this goal of reinvention, of redefinition of the tourist act, become a collective goal of cultural tourism? Think of a new-born tourism that dares to ask what we can learn and understand other worlds, beyond a mere projection. Let’s think how this issue could be staged as an impressive and helpful experience to the people involved.
Our young high-tech school is located in the abbey of a lost village will develop media simulators. In their entirety, they act as a spectacular zoo visualized in the abbey’s library, which tourists can visit, learn, interact and make improvements. It will be necessary to create this fantastic story, to tell it in digital perfection and by this way to highlight the heritage. An abbey has always been a place of reflection and research – let’s return to this initial goal.
At present we produce a simulation film, which tells the rebellion of our beautiful abbey. She wakes up after her 200 years of industrial dreams, gets up and sets out for a walk to Paris, where she will liberate all the animals of the Zoo of Vincennes. She will return home with her new friends the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, and they will live in in our valley. The animals will come along from Paris to Senones, travelling in the library of the abbey, where they will install an experimental zoo in the middle of simulations and installations, later to be visited and loved by tourists coming to our abbey. For this kind of alternative Disneyland we will collaborate with the association les nez rouges, who want to help us with their mechanical and pneumatic means to fabricate the simulator facilities of the zoo.
Our school in the abbey of this village wants to become a place, where tourists can spend some days and get involved in our quest, so that we may learn about tourism in post-industrial mixed realities.
