• Qiongpei Kong King's College London,
• Simon Mahony University College London

King’s College London

Chinese paper-cut was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009 [1]. It encompasses living traditions, artistic expressions, and craftsmanship passed down through generations, contributing to cultural diversity and community identity. The black paper-cuttings from Nangou Village in Sanmenxia, China, represent a rare and highly localised variant of this art form. While black commonly symbolises sorrow or misfortune in wider Chinese festive contexts, in Nangou it conveys blessings for good fortune rooted in the local peoples’ belief systems, especially in the decoration of the underground courtyard wedding chambers. These wedding chambers form the case study for this research, as they demonstrate a unique and highly specific application of this traditional art form.

Historically, black paper-cuttings were placed in fixed, specific positions on walls and ceilings. Each motif, whether animal, plant, or symbolic pattern, expressed particular blessings for the newlyweds, such as good luck, happiness, and fertility. The decorated space functioned as a coherent visual environment, in which the paper cuttings were not merely ornamental but served as a narrative medium, linking together architecture, ritual, and communal values. Together, they formed part of Nangou’s community identity and told stories that connected past and present, while pointing towards the future. 

This cultural system has now almost disappeared. With the elder practitioners passing away and younger generations showing little interest in continuing the craft, its living transmission has been severely disrupted. At the same time, most of the traditional underground courtyard dwellings have collapsed or been filled in, and families have moved into modern houses where paper-cutting no longer plays a significant role. What survives today are fragments, individual cuttings removed from their original context, a small number of photographs, and partial memories, insufficient to reconstruct the spatial logic of the wedding chamber. The narrative storylines have become broken.

This presentation proposes a digital approach to reconnect these dispersed elements and revitalise this narrative medium. Through the 3D modelling of surviving underground courtyards, VR reconstructions of wedding chambers, and the integration of object histories and oral accounts, the project explores how virtual environments can restore lost context and offer new ways of understanding and presenting this endangered tradition. The aim is not only to demonstrate the potential of these techniques but also to ensure that this intangible cultural heritage is properly archived and disseminated, so that its existence and cultural significance are acknowledged and preserved within contemporary cultural discourse, by reactivating its spatial and narrative dimensions. More broadly, alongside issues of preservation and sustainability, it raises important questions about ownership and responsible stewardship of indigenous heritage, drawing on the CARE Principles (Collective benefit, Authority, Responsibility, and Ethics) [2] for digitised heritage materials, to ensure that community needs and purpose are central to the research outputs. A significant strength of this project is that the lead researcher is a native of Henan Province and speaks the local dialect (Sanmenxia), enabling direct communication with the people of Nangou and the development of a trusting relationship built over time.  

 

References

[1] UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage (2009): Chinese paper-cut https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/chinese-paper-cut-00219

[2] Carroll, S.R., Garba, I., Figueroa-Rodríguez, O.L., Holbrook, J., Lovett, R., Materechera, S., Parsons, M., Raseroka, K., Rodriguez-Lonebear, D., Rowe, R., Sara, R., Walker, J.D., Anderson, J. and Hudson, M. (2020) “The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.” Data Science Journal 19(1): 43. doi:10.5334/dsj-2020-043

• Cecilia Pardo Grau Universidad del Pacífico

Universidad del Pacífico

The khipu was a recording system introduced by the societies that inhabited the Andean region of South America before the Spanish conquest (AD 1532). Comprising a main cord from which hanging knotted cords of different colors and sizes branch off, the majority of khipus store numerical information used to manage resources and populations. There are approximately 1,400 khipus that are dispersed in collections of museums and private institutions around the world. This complicates access for study and, as they are objects made from cotton and camelid fiber, they are especially delicate and sensitive to changes in temperature and humidity. Consequently, while khipus have been an object of scholarly fascination for over a century, their full semiotic nature remains one of the most significant unresolved enigmas of the pre-Columbian world.

To address these challenges, Proyecto Khipus, an interdisciplinary initiative by the Universidad del Pacífico in collaboration with scholars from Harvard and St. Andrews aims at contributing with the knowledge and dissemination of Andean khipus, integrating Humanities and Engineering to develop high-fidelity 3D digital models, using Blender for design and Python for coding. Utilizing a corpus of 29 khipus from the Art Museum of Lima (MALI), the project has constructed a database featuring over sixty categories of archaeological data, including fibre torsion, colour, and knot morphology, all of them features that contain information within a khipu.  For this purpose, the alternative of training an AI model is being explored to reduce or simplify the code that synthesizes the construction process of the models corresponding to the designs in Blender. This will subsequently allow the complete khipu to be generated according to its cataloging stored in the database.

This presentation outlines the current progress of the project. These models will be hosted on a virtual platform designed to democratise access for researchers and the public, effectively reducing the need for physical handling while allowing researchers to "virtually manipulate" the objects in ways impossible in a museum setting. This work establishes a scalable decolonial framework for Andean digital heritage, providing new insights into ancient information systems while ensuring their long-term preservation. Once this model is tested, the project will move to a second stage, incorporating models of khipus housed in other repositories in Peru and abroad, based on a structured database. 

 

Project outputs

• Virtual platform that will integrate interactive digital models produced based on an updated registration and archaeological documentation of khipus, conceived as a tool available to students, teachers, at both school and university levels, as well as researchers and general audiences.
• Documentation of  29 khipus in order to assess the existence of recurrent patterns that may contribute to studies attempting to elucidate questions about the ancient methods of recording information in a khipu.
• To contribute to the preservation of khipus for future generations by reducing their physical manipulation for study.
• To generate a work model and a platform that can integrate, in a second stage, other khipu collections located in different repositories across the world.

Inca Khipu. Cotton. / The Khipus team working at the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI)  

 

 

Views of work in progress of Khipu digital models in Blender.

 

• Thea Pitman (Professor) University of Leeds,
• Andreas Rauh (Dr) Dublin City University

University of Leeds

AIAI: Artificial Intelligence, Art and Indigeneity is a small-scale, experimental research project. With the collaboration of the Brazil-based NGO Thydêwá, it has brought together a group of Indigenous artists, writers, teachers and community leaders from across Abya Yala (specifically, what is today Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Chile) with non-Indigenous researchers and artist-technologists located in the UK and Ireland in order to critically evaluate the nature of generative AI tools for image generation in relation to Indigenous cultures and values. It started in 2023 with our first experiments with the tool MidJourney. We then moved on to design a bespoke image generation tool based on Stable Diffusion in early 2024. Preliminary results have been exhibited at The Convention House in Leeds, the Galería Gabriela Mistral in Santiago de Chile and the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin, and an open-access book drawing together project materials and findings, including chapters authored by the full range of project team members, is forthcoming with University of London Press (Autumn 2026).

While we knew in advance that GenAI tools would evidence unhelpful biases in their results, the point of the project was to allow those who were curious about the tools to experiment with them to see what could be achieved and to explore how the individual artists involved responded to the results. This has allowed us to think through the design process for a better kind of model, not only in terms of the results it produces but also in terms of questions of data security and environmental concerns relating to the extravagant amounts of energy required to train LLMs in the first place. This paper will report and reflect on the journey travelled thus far, including contexualisation in terms of AI art, Indigenous appropriations of AI and Latin American Indigenous art experimenting with AI, and exploration of key topics such as creativity, censorship and copyright, and appropriation, ancestrality and buen vivir. 

It will be presented by two of the non-Indigenous researchers on the project, with permission from other project members, and supplemented by video recordings of some of the Indigenous artists and writers reflecting on their experiences.