When Heritage Becomes Data: The Twin It! Event and the Quiet Revolution of Cultural Memory

The Twin It! Event and the Quiet Revolution of Cultural Memory

Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen hosts the Twin It! II closing event in Brussels today, marking a milestone in Europe's effort to create high-quality 3D digital twins of cultural heritage across all 27 Member States. The initiative moves beyond mere digitisation toward practical reuse of heritage data in education, tourism, and extended reality, while raising deeper questions about what happens when cultural memory enters the algorithmic realm.

The conversation about how Europe preserves and transforms its cultural memory through AI is exactly the kind of thing being discussed at Human x AI Europe on May 19 in Vienna, where the ecosystem gathers to work through what these shifts actually mean.

The Room Where It Happens

Stand in a room full of ministers of culture, each presenting a 3D model of something their nation considers worth preserving, and notice what's actually being negotiated. Not just pixels and polygons. Not just metadata standards. Something more fundamental: the question of what gets remembered, how it gets remembered, and who decides.

Today in Brussels, Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen hosts the closing event of Twin It! II, a campaign that has quietly been reshaping how Europe thinks about cultural heritage in the digital age. The event, organised alongside Cyprus' Deputy Minister of Culture Vasiliki Kassiandou under the Cypriot Presidency of the Council of the EU, brings together the Europeana Foundation and the European Commission to showcase what happens when every Member State contributes high-quality 3D-digitised heritage assets to a common European data space.

The numbers tell one story: 37 high-quality 3D models from the first phase, representing buildings, sites, and objects from every EU Member State. The ambition tells another. By 2030, according to the 2021 Commission Recommendation, Member States are encouraged to digitise in 3D all monuments and sites deemed at risk, plus 50% of the most physically visited cultural landmarks.

But the real shift isn't about preservation. It's about transformation.

From Archive to Infrastructure

Digitisation means preserving, protecting and sharing our cultural heritage. Artificial intelligence and open data innovation can fuel creativity and curiosity across sectors from education, tourism and entertainment.

Henna Virkkunen

Notice the verb: fuel. Not merely support. Not simply enable. The language reveals an understanding that digitised heritage isn't a static archive but a generative resource, something that feeds other systems, other industries, other ways of knowing.

The Time Machine Organisation's coverage of the event emphasises this pivot: A central ambition of Twin it! Part II is to move beyond digitisation towards practical and scalable reuse of cultural heritage data. The ministerial event highlights how Member States are integrating 3D heritage into national strategies, supporting innovation ecosystems, and strengthening collaboration with cultural institutions and technology providers.

This is where the cultural diagnostic becomes interesting. When heritage becomes data, it enters a different economy. It can be remixed, extended, queried, and generated from. A 3D model of a Gothic cathedral isn't just a record; it's a training set, a tourism asset, an educational module, a game environment, a prompt for generative AI.

The Memory Twin Emerges

The conceptual framework catching attention in heritage circles goes beyond the familiar digital twin terminology. The UNESCO Chair on Digital Cultural Heritage at Cyprus University of Technology has been developing what they call the Memory Twin, a holistic framework for integrating both tangible and intangible dimensions of heritage.

The distinction matters. A digital twin captures geometry, texture, spatial relationships. A Memory Twin attempts something more ambitious: capturing historical context, stories, the paradata (documentation of the digitisation process itself) that makes heritage assets not just viewable but understandable.

This builds on foundational work like the London Charter (2006), which emphasised intellectual transparency in 3D visualisations, and the ICOMOS Seville Charter (2017). But the Memory Twin concept pushes further, asking what happens when cultural heritage documentation must serve not just human researchers but AI systems that will process, analyse, and generate from these assets.

The question isn't abstract. When an AI system learns from 3D models of European heritage, what does it learn? What assumptions about significance, beauty, and historical importance get encoded? What gets left out?

The Interface as Ideology

The European Heritage Hub's Call to Action, launched at the 2024 Forum in Bucharest, outlined five key priorities for cultural heritage in digital transformation. The document emerged from conversations between heritage experts, policymakers, and civil society representatives, and it carries a particular urgency given the newly elected EU institutions.

What's striking about the Call is its insistence on responsibility. Not just technical standards, but ethical frameworks. Not just digitisation, but consideration of who benefits, who has access, and what happens when heritage data enters commercial systems.

The Twin It! campaign operates within this tension. On one hand, it's a technical achievement: coordinating 27 Member States to contribute high-quality 3D assets to a common data space requires significant diplomatic and logistical work. On the other hand, it's a cultural intervention, a statement about what Europe considers worth preserving and how it wants that preservation to function.

The European Commission's proposed strategy for a Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage sets out guidelines for improving data sharing, increasing reuse, and empowering specialists in preservation and digitisation. But guidelines are one thing. Implementation is another. And the choices made in implementation, which metadata standards, which access protocols, which reuse licenses, will shape what's possible for decades.

What Extended Reality Reveals

The official press release mentions extended reality experiences as one potential reuse case for digitised heritage. The phrase deserves attention.

Extended reality (XR), encompassing virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, represents a particular kind of cultural encounter. When someone experiences a heritage site through XR, they're not just viewing a representation; they're inhabiting a designed environment. Someone chose the lighting. Someone decided what to include and exclude. Someone determined the narrative arc.

This isn't new. Museums have always been designed environments. But XR makes the design choices more consequential and less visible. The interface naturalises its own ideology. A visitor walking through a physical museum can see the walls, the labels, the curatorial hand. A visitor in an XR heritage experience may not notice where the experience ends and their own perception begins.

For policymakers and governance scholars, this raises questions that go beyond technical standards. What does informed consent mean when heritage experiences are algorithmically personalised? What does authenticity mean when the original is a data file that can be infinitely modified? What does public access mean when the most compelling heritage experiences require expensive hardware?

The Artifact Remembers

Twin It! II closes a campaign that began under the Swedish and Spanish Presidencies of the Council of the EU and culminated during the Belgian Presidency. The continuity across presidencies suggests something important: this isn't a single administration's project but an institutional commitment that transcends political cycles.

The 3D models produced by the campaign will outlast the ministers who presented them. They'll be queried by AI systems not yet built, experienced through interfaces not yet designed, interpreted by researchers asking questions not yet formulated.

This is what makes cultural heritage digitisation different from other data initiatives. The time horizons are longer. The stakes are harder to quantify. The success criteria are unclear. How does one measure whether a 3D model of a medieval church has adequately captured what matters about that church?

The answer, of course, is that one doesn't. Not definitively. The best one can do is create systems that are transparent about their limitations, open to revision, and designed with future users in mind, users who may have very different questions than the ones being asked today.

What Becomes Normal

The Twin It! campaign is normalising something that would have seemed extraordinary a decade ago: the idea that every EU Member State should contribute high-quality 3D heritage assets to a common data space, that these assets should be designed for reuse, and that AI and open data innovation should be understood as tools for cultural preservation.

Pay attention to what's being naturalised. The assumption that digitisation equals preservation. The assumption that reuse is inherently valuable. The assumption that heritage data should flow across borders and into commercial systems.

These assumptions aren't wrong. But they're not neutral either. They encode particular values about openness, innovation, and the relationship between culture and technology. The Twin It! campaign is, in this sense, not just a technical initiative but a cultural one, a statement about what Europe believes heritage is for.

The ministers gathered in Brussels today are presenting 3D models. They're also presenting a vision of the future, one where cultural memory is computational, shareable, and generative. Whether that vision serves the heritage it claims to preserve is a question that will take decades to answer.