Muhammad Hadi Mustafa, Choy Poh Keong, Chua Wen Xuan, Zulkiflee Abdul-Samad · 5 authors
The challenges in heritage building documentation and management in Malaysia highlight the need for a more secure and integrated digital framework. Although Heritage Building Information Modelling (HBIM) has improved digital documentation and lifecycle management, current practices remain constrained by data fragmentation, limited transparency, and inefficient stakeholder collaboration. While blockchain technology offers considerable potential to enhance data security and trust, its integration with HBIM in heritage conservation projects remains underexplored. This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework in exploring the interrelated themes influencing the implementation of blockchain integration with HBIM in Malaysian projects. Using a qualitative approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with industry professionals, and the data were analysed using thematic analysis. The proposed conceptual framework is empirically informed by practitioner interviews, allowing the study to capture both technological possibilities and implementation realities within the Malaysian heritage project context. The findings suggest that blockchain-enabled HBIM has the potential to strengthen data integrity, transparency, traceability, stakeholder accountability, and lifecycle decision-making, although these benefits require further validation through pilot implementation. Future research should further validate the proposed framework through pilot projects, and blockchain governance guidelines tailored to the Malaysia’s heritage conservation sector.
The digital landscape is transforming cultural heritage preservation. Online mapping initiatives, like UNESCO's GIS and Historypin's community-driven maps, are fostering engagement and accessibility. Europeana's digital library and CyArk's 3D preservation empower us to explore and safeguard heritage across time and space. By catering to diverse heritage types (tangible and intangible), these platforms offer valuable tools for education and global exchange. With the integration of Web3 technologies, these initiatives can further enhance their impact. Decentralized networks enable more equitable access to digital heritage, preventing gatekeeping and censorship. Blockchain can ensure transparent and immutable records of heritage artifacts, addressing ethical concerns related to digital representation. Additionally, the tokenization of cultural assets offers allowing communities to retain control over their heritage. However, the adoption of Web3 also necessitates careful consideration of data sovereignty and digital rights to ensure inclusive and responsible cultural preservation.
Lei Xu, Muhamad Fairus Kamaruzaman, Rusmawati Ghazali
This study explores the application and social impact of Non-Fungible Token (NFT) technology in preserving Chinese intangible cultural heritage, specifically Shu brocade patterns. Through a case study of the specific Shu brocade pattern “Falling Flowers and Flowing Water,” the research details the conversion process from physical Shu brocade to digital patterns and then to NFTs, including steps such as image acquisition, processing, vector reconstruction, and NFT minting. The findings indicate that NFT technology offers an innovative approach to preserving Shu brocade patterns, with the potential to reshape the value chain of traditional crafts. Simultaneously, this method has multifaceted impacts on the Shu brocade industry and cultural heritage preservation. This study not only provides a new perspective and practical reference for the preservation and inheritance of cultural heritage in the digital age but also makes a positive contribution to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals regarding cultural heritage preservation.
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.
Tangible cultural heritage has recently been an important target for companies’ mining, minting or forging non-fungible tokens (NFTs). When encountering cultural goods collected in museums, the practice of NFTs needs to comply with national rules aimed at preserving and valorizing cultural heritage. NFTs are assets that could play different roles in museums. They might be considered as a tool for enhancing preservation or access to information on cultural goods, in particular when the latter cannot be displayed in the premises of museums. While no provision on preservation or access would be affected by the use of NFTs for such purposes, this chapter argues that these assets are way too expensive to be considered as an appropriate means for the said goals. On the contrary, NFTs remain one of the most recent tricks that bodies managing tangible cultural heritage, including artworks museums, use to collect funds. Thus, NFTs may be considered as a fund-raising tool, under the condition that the unique goal of the museum is to re-invest the collected money into initiatives fitting with its educational mission. In order to have a complete description of the scenario, it is worth referring to some national cultural heritage rules that favour fund-raising practices in museums; in some countries, these provisions may affect the ability of minting NFTs, even when they concern ancient artworks in the public domain.
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.
Do We need a Turing Test for Activist Art in a Bare Art World? Gregory Sholette (bio) Repetition and doubling—themselves an uncanny pair which double and repeat each other—seem to be at the heart of every "uncanny" phenomena. —Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (2017)1 In its simplest form, the Turing Test involves a human evaluator physically separated by a wall or other barrier from two participants so that all communication between the three of them must take place through a keyboard device. The evaluator knows that one hidden participant is human and one is a machine, though which is which remains unknown. The evaluator is tasked with trying to identify who is the person and which is the imitation person. Simultaneously, both participants try to convince the evaluator they are human. At the moment the evaluator becomes genuinely uncertain which participant is machine and which is human, the machine has successfully passed Turing's Test. You're in an art gallery. Toward the back of the space you spot a weird, ill-fitting emergency door. A question arises silently: is it a work of art or not? Just above your head is a rusted valve jutting out from a faded metal sign encased in white paint. Same question: Art? Not art? What about that awkwardly bent length of drainage pipe running alongside the track lights above the exhibition? Does anyone else see this? Should you refocus your attention exclusively on those objects with wall labels? Moments later, a dozen people enter the space singing, shouting, making boisterous declarations: "I Can't Breathe"; "De-Colonize this Place"; "Not My President"; "Respect Workers Rights in the UAE." Before leaving, the group hands out photocopied flyers and performs an Occupy Wall Street General Assembly in the middle of the gallery, complete with a Human Microphone. [End Page 221] When they do exit, the space returns to its muted, white-cube status. But you do not return to normal. Not completely. A string of questions follows: Was that a genuine, spontaneous activist intervention, or was it a carefully rehearsed performance of an activist intervention, and therefore a work of art? Then again, if something appears exactly the same as what it appears to be—if it stirs the same emotions in us and carries out the same task of raising social awareness—then does it really matter if we are uncertain about what it actually is in some fundamental, ontological way? What if this event was both at the same time: art and life, mimicry and authentic protest, fiction and fact, all doubled up and coexisting on a single continuous surface, sort of like a Möbius strip reality? Marcel Duchamp once proposed what he termed a "Reciprocal Readymade," in which a work of art is converted to an object of everyday use.2 Perhaps what you just witnessed was that thought experiment put into practice?3 The questions do not leave you alone. They return, repeat, becoming obsessional, even addictive. You find yourself wondering how and when things got so disorderly—and you wonder what it might take to tidy them up again. It's not only your unease that seems at stake here. How many times have you overheard an art historian, critic, or even fellow artist demand to know "is it art or activism?"4 Remember how they sought some type of epistemological solace such as providing empirical evidence that demonstrates activist art's effective social outcome? Yet what that proof, should it be made, assures the mainstream art historian is that these practices subordinate aesthetics to utility, allowing for a return to business as usual. It pissed you off. But it also led you to suppress your own need for certitude with a faint-hearted swagger. And contrarily, the same questioning demand arises from community activists troubled by what they perceived to be the enfeebling effects of aestheticized politics. This is when you ask yourself only half-sardonically: does contemporary art, especially art activism, require its own version of Turing's thought experiment? Though even as you consider this, you can't help but suspect that if this test were given today, nothing would change...
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.
Miguel García García-Revillo, Miguel Jesús Agudo Zamora
The recent entry into force of the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage means certainly good news for the protection of this part of the legacy of past generations. A great deal still remains to be done, however. 2001 Convention has a limited personal and material scope of application. In its absence, the international regime applicable to this kind of heritage spreads out among a number of heterogeneous instruments focused on diverse topics. One of the problems that the said diversity and heterogeneity causes is the variety of terms and definitions used by it. On the other hand, the implementation of a series of instruments so different becomes particularly complex when referring to States that have partially transferred their competences “up” to a regional integration organization, like the European Union, and “down” to decentralized territorial units, like the so-called Autonomous Communities. To this respect, the case of Spain provides with a good example of such difficulties.