Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Tim Winter, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

PROGRAM

ABSTRACT

In its gaze towards both the past and future, heritage has rapidly become a productive space for digital content production. Pulling together 4 speakers from across Singapore, this roundtable explores digital transformations that are redefining both normative values and frontiers, in ways that will demand researchers, governments, businesses and cultural sector institutions to rethink how they approach and conceptualise heritage in the future.

How does the digital remake, reinvent our ideas, our imaginaries of what might be codified, conserved and demarcated as heritage? There is little doubt, after all, that the transition from analogue to digital is fundamentally altering the way cultural information is both studied and analysed, manipulated and disseminated. Given the new possibilities emerging around the use of generative AI – its capacity to translate ancient texts, produce new representations of past worlds, and amass data sets on an unprecedented scale, what new questions around aesthetics, politics and knowledge should we be asking? What does saving and preserving really mean, given the digital ‘copy’ now seems to supersede material worlds which inevitably succumb to decay? And by what logics is the past now being digitally reassembled for commercial and strategic purposes?

To explore such questions, our speakers will present examples ranging from AI, gaming, digital content aggregators, theatre and the Metaverse. The session will reflect on the degree to which the performance of culture in digital and ‘hybrid’ spaces renders heritage in new ways and simultaneously reinforces long familiar tropes and narratives. How is history, culture and religion to be (re)presented through combinations of embodied and disembodied participation? We will also ask whether digitisation should be seen as preparatory for the rise of generative AI, and what that means for academic researchers at a time when culture increasingly forms part of the geopolitical competition to order the world around digital ecosystems.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Marcus Bingenheimer is Associate Professor of Religion at Temple University (Philadelphia), Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies and Senior Research Fellow in the Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore. Marcus taught Buddhism and digital humanities in Taiwan, and held visiting positions at universities in Korea, Japan, France, and Thailand. Since 2001, he has supervised numerous projects concerning the digitization of Buddhist culture, mainly involving markup, GIS and network analysis. His main research interests are Buddhist history and historiography, early sūtra literature, and how to apply computational approaches to research in the Humanities. He has written and edited a handful of books and some sixty articles. Currently, he works on a survey of Chinese temples in Bangkok, a paper on machine translation, and a 12th century Chinese Pure Land text.

Nien Yuan Cheng is a Singaporean performance scholar and dramaturg. She is presently Faculty Early Career Award Fellow at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. She obtained her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney in 2020. Her work explores the poetics of storytelling and dramaturgy in the digital age, intercultural theatre, and oral histories in/as performance. More information about her is available at http://cheng-nienyuan.com.

Natalia Grincheva is Program Leader in Arts Management at LASALLE College of the Arts, University of the Arts Singapore, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Digital Studio at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on innovative forms and global trends in contemporary museology, digital diplomacy and international cultural relations. In 2020 she was awarded Oxford Fellowship for her visiting research residency at the Digital Diplomacy Research Center at the University of Oxford. She is the author of two monographs: Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age (Routledge: 2020) and Global Trends in Museum Diplomacy (Routledge: 2019). Her new co-authored monograph Geopolitics of Digital Heritage will be released with Cambridge University Press in 2023.

Tim Winter is Cluster Leader and Senior Research Fellow in the Asia Research Institute (ARI) at National University of Singapore. He moved to ARI from University of Western of Australia, where he was Professorial Future Fellow of the Australian Research Council. Tim has led the development of heritage diplomacy as a cross-disciplinary concept and introduced geocultural power to the analysis of international affairs. Recent articles on these topics appear in Geopolitics, International Affairs, International Journal of Cultural Policy, and Environment and Planning D. His most recent books are Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty First Century (University of Chicago Press 2019) and The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford University Press, 2022).

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this hybrid talk has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.