"Larger than life" : Urbex content as digital archive of an industrial site under demolition in Lorraine, France

Sammanfattning

Urban exploration (urbex) digital content is a new form of online archive on abandoned, derelict places. For Hayange’s factory, as for many other locations, it is a way of sharing images, sounds, and impressions of a site in demolition. This thesis approaches urbex content through the prism of digital storytelling, multimodal discourse analysis, and social semiotics to understand how urbex narratives are created and shared on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Flickr, and urbex blogs. The analysis proposes a categorisation of the content through aesthetic, documentary, and social media genres. The discussion studies the contextual creation and sharing of the content in relation to heritage discourses. It then turns to how urbex and local narratives relate or differ. The study argues that urbex content is a documentation of the aesthetic experience of the urban explorer, nuanced by interaction with other social media users. Although it may not present a local social context and affective connection to the site, the presentation of Hayange’s factory in the content allows sensitive spectators to connect with its story.