China News Service, Hangzhou, November 8 (Lin Bo Cao Dan) After putting on a smart interactive device, the Longmen Grottoes that appeared before his eyes was so clear that it surprised 90-year-old Hangzhou citizen Li Zhigang. "It's clearer than watching TV." He said, and the picture brought him back to his visit decades ago.
From November 5th to 9th, the 20th Hangzhou Cultural and Creative Industry Expo (hereinafter referred to as "Hangzhou Cultural Expo") was held in Hangzhou. In the "Cave Hunting XUNKU" exhibition area of the China Academy of Art at the Hangzhou International Cultural Expo, the memory of an old man and the digital life of a cave were overlapped in a few seconds.
Recently, tourists had an on-site experience in the "XUNKU" exhibition area of the Hangzhou Cultural Expo. Photo by Lin Bo
For a long time, the mainstream idea of digitizing grottoes has been high-precision scanning, collection and archiving, and online roaming, so as to turn cultural relics into a secure and clear digital file. But under the wave of AI generation, a key question has emerged: when technology can quickly generate ancient cave scenes, where should the digitization of cultural heritage go?
"The 'Cave Hunting' project goes beyond simple image reproduction and uses cave civilization as the foundation to build a 'generated world' supported by cultural knowledge, digital assets, and narrative rules." Yu Zhen, a professor at the China Academy of Art and executive deputy director of the AI Center, said in an interview that the "generated world" here does not automatically generate ancient scenes with one click.
In his view, caves are never a library of materials that can be used at will. The shape, location, age, construction technology, etc. of a statue are intertwined into a rigorous and verifiable knowledge network.
Therefore, the "Cave Hunting" project is based on verifiable original data, digital restoration is responsible for completing the remains, and artistic deduction is responsible for narrative expression. The content generated by imagination is not equated with the ontology of cultural relics and historical facts. Based on the bottom line of textual research, the scattered cave clues are connected into a coherent civilization narrative.
"We are not just restoring and displaying them, but bringing a piece of history and a world to everyone from the perspective of the statue craftsmen who made the statues thousands of years ago." Yu Zhen said that the artifacts themselves are easily forgotten, but the complete world view and story are more likely to move people's hearts across borders. "The goal of the 'Cave Hunting' project is to rescue and restore those cave statues that are disappearing or even have disappeared, and then through multiple carriers such as immersive movies, interactive exhibitions, and game-based narratives, the cave civilization can be accepted by the public and go overseas in a contemporary experience."
If "AI Design" focuses on using artificial intelligence to expand content production, then "Design AI" focuses on how art and design can in turn participate in the research and construction of artificial intelligence. The two are not antagonistic, but go further from "using tools" to "defining tools, organizing processes and establishing quality judgments".
This means that the digitization of cultural heritage is moving beyond the "collection and display" stage and moving towards knowledge construction and contemporary translation.
This is also an important shift in the cultural and museum field in recent years: the focus of digitalization has shifted from "preserving cultural relics and making them visible" to "making civilization understandable and disseminating."
Recently, a view of the "XUNKU" exhibition area at the Hangzhou Cultural Expo. Photo by Cao Dan
For example, Dunhuang's "Digital Donor" embeds public participation in the restoration narrative, game technology is used to restore the hanging temple according to the mortise and tenon structure, and allows players to enter the construction site of Northern Wei craftsmen... These all follow the same path: instead of using technology to copy a clearer "object", it uses technology to build a framework that can understand "why things are like this."
In the AI era, the digitization of cultural heritage has also faced new challenges: algorithms have lowered the threshold for visual creation, but also amplified the risks of distortion of historical facts and simplification of context. Some digital cultural museum products are satisfied with creating "stunning" visual spectacles, compressing the rich history into national style images for consumption, and dissolving the complex social context and academic logic behind the heritage.
The exploratory value of the "Cave Hunting" project may lie in the fact that it provides a set of constraint paths that can be referenced: delimiting boundaries with academic research, and allowing generative tools to serve the knowledge system rather than replace it.
In the final analysis, digitization is not about creating eternal “digital substitutes” for cultural relics, but about building a dialogue interface for continuous development of civilization. It must not only assume the responsibility of rescuing and preserving, and guard the bottom line of historical evidence; it also needs to open up diverse translation methods to allow people of different ages and cultural backgrounds to find entrances to ancient civilizations.
From archiving to knowledge construction, from one-way display to two-way resonance, this road has no standard answer, but it points in the same direction: to keep the dormant heritage real, fresh and continuously growing in the digital age.
