This study investigates the transformative potential of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) in revolutionizing the marketing of artworks by Malaysian visual artists, with a particular focus on promoting cultural heritage. NFTs, as digital assets secured by blockchain technology, offer artists innovative methods to monetize their creations while preserving authenticity and provenance. Despite their growing popularity, Malaysian artists face challenges such as limited knowledge and skepticism regarding the effective use of NFT technology. This research aims to identify strategies and best practices for incorporating NFTs into digital art marketing, particularly in the context of cultural heritage preservation. Through a combination of content analysis and semi-structured interviews with five experts, this study applies the soft laddering technique to explore the perceived benefits and challenges of NFTs. The findings highlight the significant potential of NFTs to enhance Malaysian artists' access to global markets and strengthen the preservation of cultural heritage. The study underscores the need for improved technological literacy and NFT utilization among Malaysian artists to maximize their presence and competitiveness in the evolving digital art marketplace.
The growing outrage over the continued stewardship of artefacts acquired through nefarious means has compelled cultural institutions to explore their role in marginalising cultures through misrepresentation. Indigenous communities around the globe are seeking the repatriation of sacred objects often collected through colonial violence. Though many museums have collaborated with communities to repatriate these artefacts, many have also avoided or refused repatriation requests, leaving communities without recourse. This paper will explore repatriation in the digital world through the lens of Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise's (CATPC) the quest for the return of an important Balot Pende sculpture from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and whether creating a digital iteration, like an Non-Fungible Token (NFT) of a sacred object, offers a potential activist tool to reclaim an alternate form of ownership when physical repatriation is not available.
Heritage is a vital resource for storytelling, defining our identity and history, and adding dignity and uniqueness to our legacies for future generations. Therefore, it should be protected, and awareness needs to be created. Today, in the face of climate change challenges and natural disaster, some of our heritages, linked to natural landscapes, is endangered. This paper describes developing an alternative licensing model for NFTs and a mobile-based NFT marketplace created to promote and protect nature as a heritage in the face of climate change-induced dangers. By incorporating evidence about state-of-the-art, leveraging blockchain and NFTs technologies at the service of heritage, here we highlight two essential and unique aspects: i) ensuring the usage of zero-carbon blockchain solutions and the creation of temporary NFTs, and ii) enabling continuous income sources for the asset owners, in our case organisations devoted to the protection of the designated natural landscapes. In this paper, we describe the design process and the validation of the ideas behind the usage and licensing of zero-carbon temporary NFTs. Thus we propose a financially sustainable solution capable of showing the actual state of the lineage (for example, the changing aspect of a landscape over seasons) and promoting a continuous source of donations used to preserve the assets. We validated the concept with users and obtained good usability and design results, proving the chosen approach’s effectiveness.
Rucitarahma Ristiawan, Edward H. Huijbens, Karin Peters
Research on governance of tourism development predominantly focuses on sustainable management of a tourism destination, pinning hopes on the market and individual entrepreneurs. In Indonesia, this mission has been codified in post-reformation era (1998–2014) policies of land-use change promoting tourism and environmental conservation. One of these is the introduction of the UNESCO Geopark charter as a tool to realize the image of a modern state and “modernizing” regional economies. In this, a particular patrimonial governance arrangement appears to govern land use distribution to accrue the potential value of land from different use. This particular clientelist order will be analyzed in this article, namely by examining how finance, state power, and informal interactions between the national and regional structures of governance mesh in arranging land-use conversions for tourism purposes. Based on 4 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 32 interviews with various stakeholders in the Gunungsewu and Ciletuh UNESCO Geoparks, the paper will show how Indonesian post-reformation decentralization policies induced regional clientelism in the production of tourism destinations. This includes hierarchical relations between the local elite, private business owners, and governments representing asymmetric loyalty relations, negotiated subordination, and dominance. The more recent re-centralization attempts from the national government under Joko Widodo’s regime seem only to encourage this clientelism as a form of resistance to the state. This evidences that the Indonesian patrimonial governance and the production of tourism destinations in geoparks run counter to the ideals in governance as promoted for destination development.
At present, there are many information security issues in the digitization of intangible cultural heritage (ICH). The digital information of ICH is vulnerable to malicious tampering, stealing or attacks. The blockchain technology has the characteristics of distribution, un-tamper and traceability, which enhances security in the process of protecting digital information. Therefore, this paper discusses the integrity protection and the encryption protection from the perspective of blockchain encryption technology and provides a reference for the network security research of the ICH digital resources.
The need to protect our cultural heritage was stressed on revitalization of historical city centers in communities. The main aim of this research is to attract finance and activities to the historical city centers through the citizens and municipalities participation while cities expanded their boundaries toward suburban areas. Today the main problems which facing to the most historical city centers, is loss of their centrality through effect of urbanization on any point of the cities which is the most important issue on neglect and abandonment of the historical central area by decentralizing living, commerce and public areas. This article evaluate the ways in which city center revitalization can be effect on vitality and viability of the central area in case of Naghshe Jahan square which situated at the center of Isfahan city, Iran. Constructed between 1598 and 1629, it is now an important historical site, and one of UNESCO's World Heritage Sites.