“Lviv Interactive” and Exploring Artists’ Spaces on a Digital Map

The paper discusses the utilization of digital maps and an encyclopedia platform, hosted by the Center for Urban History in Lviv, to delve into the history of artistic milieus and practices within the spatial context of Lviv during the late 1980s. The digital project’s objective was to present the lives and artistic practices of alternative artists in Lviv through various mediums such as video walks, stories, digitized collections, analytical texts, and a digital map. By combining visual anthropology, art history, urban studies, and oral history through the Lviv Interactive platform and digital storytelling tools like ArcGIS and Storymaps, the project addressed the question: How did the city shape contemporary art in Lviv? The authors argue that integrating digital tools, web interfaces, and established academic concepts in our daily lives represents the emergence of digital history, a convergence that scholars employ to interpret our surroundings. However, the concept of a purely digital history may only materialize when our cognitive abilities are digitized, potentially merging with the domain of artificial intelligence rather than traditional analog historians. The experiences and uncertainties encountered during the City and Art on the Edge project further reinforced the notion of digital hermeneutics as an intermediary state, emphasizing the inherent tensions between the tangible analog world and the digital realm.