Local cultural symbols often carry profound historical and cultural value, yet they struggle to enter the global discourse due to limited dissemination and cultural or linguistic barriers. This presentation takes the endangered intangible cultural heritage of the Dongba script as a case study to explore how the traditional model of “preservation and reproduction” might be transcended, opening new pathways for the regeneration of cultural symbols. By using poetry as an interactive medium, the project enables AI-driven generation and creative reinterpretation, transforming static preservation into dynamic storytelling. We aim to discuss how to create a sustainable methodology for bringing local cultural symbols into the global visual and artistic landscape.

Can synthetic media, trained on fragmented archives, honor tradition while making it resonate with modern audiences?

In Fusion: Landscape and Beyond, we frame cultural heritage not as a static artifact but as a living dialogue, mediated by digital archives and AI. By training models on digitized shan-shui (mountain-river) paintings, we interrogate how artists today re-code tradition through algorithmic workflows and expand the “archive” beyond preservation into active reinterpretation.

In this talk, we critique the assumption that digital tools disrupt heritage. Instead, we argue AI’s malleability aligns with shan-shui’s historical fluidity. Just as historical painters reinterpreted predecessors’ works to reflect their era’s concerns, we use generative Ai to synthesize landscapes that embed contemporary anxieties of urbanization and ecological change. We argue that, when ethically directed, AI can act as a bridge that continues rather than fractures the lineage of cultural memory.

The recreation and reinterpretation of Mexican cultural heritage themes has been the focus of my digital artwork since my early days as a digital artist. I use 3D computer graphics techniques to recreate symbolic geometries and mythical themes from a variety of pre-Columbian cultures. But I am also interested in exploring new meanings and interpretations of cultural symbols that cut across cultures, such as geometrical ornaments and mythical creatures including snakes and jaguars. I use digital technology not as an old-fashioned archeological tool but as a way to combine, recreate and reinterpret diverse iconic structures and images, representing them in unexpected contexts, urging the public to pause, think and reconsider the meaning of our cultural heritage. My recent digital work is shown at the National Center for the Arts in Mexico City during the months of April-May, 2025. The show is entitled “Digital antiguo” in Spanish, loosely translated as Vintage Digital.

This talk introduces a poetic-design system that transforms the classical Chinese poetic form jueju into a cross-cultural, sensory interface for engaging with intangible heritage in digital space. Centered on student experience, the system invites users to compose English jueju poems through Intent Seeds—subtle emotional, environmental, or biometric prompts.

Using real-time data like location, breath, ambient sound, and affective state, the interface activates a rhythm engine and draws from a bilingual database of metaphors, tonal structures, and symbolic pairings. It does not visualize the past—it enacts tradition through embodied, participatory practice. The English jueju becomes a dynamic poetic interface where literary form, cosmological thought, and real-time interaction converge, offering a new model of digital archive as resonant, generative, and alive.

This talk explores the intersection of AI, art, archives, and animation by transforming the archive of Upper Austrian artist Klemens Brosch (1894–1926) into an AI-animated film. While AI image-generation tools typically rely on online data, museum collections often provide only low-quality reproductions. By using high-resolution images from Brosch’s archive, the project examines AI’s potential in animation while addressing challenges such as artistic integrity, stylistic control, and creative authenticity. The talk highlights that while AI can generate high-quality visuals, preserving the essence of Brosch’s work requires extensive refinement and iteration. The project ultimately raises critical questions about authorship, originality, and the role of technology in artistic creation.

The moon has long stood as a symbol of collective human experience, woven into art, literature, and philosophy as a lens through which we explore time, space, and memory. Its constant presence in the night sky serves as a universal anchor, connecting people across distances, eras, and cultures, a silent witness to our shifting thoughts, emotions, and reflections. Over time, the archive of moons has grown into a vast dataset—a collection of texts, synthesized imagery and photographs captured through various means.

As a reflection on the composition process of moon data and the symbolic connection between human and moon, “Are We Gazing at the Same Moon?” creates a moon-gazing ritual that utilize AI to re-imagine the moon as a concurrent presence across parallel realities, questioning the relationship between personal memory and collective memory. By challenging the process of “Lunar Mosaic”, it questions the notion of a singular, unified human experience of moon-gazing.

This presentation showcases two work-in-progress projects that investigate the potential of novel methods for capturing, processing, and displaying 3D reconstructions of real-life locations / objects. Specifically, leveraging 3DGS, SLAM-enhanced digital twins, and large LED display volumes, I work with cultural heritage sites in Hong Kong (a historical decaying Hakka mansion) and Poland (restored pre WW2 Jewish district in Warsaw). The contribution serves as both a technical ideation and a cultural intervention in emerging tech. It reflects on the conceptual and technical challenges faced when working with rapidly evolving spatial media. Based on the presented works and numerous educational activities undertaken in the discussed domain, I investigate how the space between visual/digital twins and synthetic generations can be explored to create new crossmedia image sensibilities, thereby contributing to the broader discussion of the role of physical and virtual cameras in today’s media.

“Master Dancer” is a VR historical gamified experience that features the dancer, performer, and stagecraft pioneer Loïe Fuller. This virtual reality adventure invites users to explore a reimagined Folies-Bergère theater, interact with Fuller’s 3D avatar, and embody expressive motion through interactive gameplay. Drawing on archival research for historical background and costume design, museum-quality digital replicas, and contemporary tools such as cloth simulation and particle systems in Unreal Engine, the project blends history with speculative design. Through active dance games and embodied performance, “Master Dancer” teaches Laban-derived movement qualities inspired by Fuller’s groundbreaking choreographic style. This talk explores the ongoing academic development process from motion capture sessions to artistic direction leveraging technical capabilities – while proposing a new model for using VR to reanimate cultural heritage through direct experience.