Transvisuality, geopolitics and cultural heritage in global flows : the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the death of the virtual terrorist

Transvisuality is put forward here as an analytical tool working against the generalization of a particularized mode of seeing and as a springboard to consider new ontologies for heritage collections. The Reconceptualising Heritage Collections project contributes to this knowledge by using museum collections, a Palestinian thob abu qutbeh (wedding dress) and a British Mandate coin c.1927 (Powerhouse Museum collections, Sydney) in digital format to critique social, cultural and political reconstructions of space and territory in the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. Drawing on the notion of transvisuality together with actor network theory and new materialisms, we critique both geopolitical and museum narratives aspiring to closure. Cultural heritage in the context of geopolitical conflicts, global, transvisual flows and fluids and the complex fields of relations and material configurations that arise from these interactions, questions current ontologies for the heritage object as markers of national, ethnic and local identities. Instead, cultural heritage is reformulated as a mobile assemblage of things, dynamical processes and interactions characterized by functional flow, conflict, friction, intensities, turbulence and emergence. It is through these multiple dimensions that a new optic for framing transvisual practice and the digital object in the context of collections documentation is proposed.