Digitising the indigenous and indigenising the digital: Using new technologies to create ethically-minded paths for circulation of traditional dances..

The aim of this research project is to contribute to the decolonizing imperative to explore, understand and critique the possibilities that new digital technologies convey for the safeguarding of indigenous intangible cultural heritage (ICH) practices with a special accent on dance. Misappropriation, disrespectful uses, and lack of attribution of their artistic practices are troubles that traditional peoples keep facing, even more intensely within the digital sphere, which is becoming the most prominent arena for circulation of cultural products after the crisis of COVID19. The interdisciplinary methodology is designed to deliver theoretical and critical frameworks to support future development of reliable decentralised applications to enjoy, share, profit or circulate expressions of cultural heritage in informed and ethically-minded ways. Blockchain architectures, motion-capture, and other digitization tools are to be examined within the margins wherein they are embedded: intellectual property laws, interculturalism and accessibility issues. Along with the rigorous analysis of technological affordances and legal constraints, an art-based methodology to engage with indigenous practitioners will produce insight into the imaginaries and expectations that new technologies yield. Fostering and envisioning, through this complementary and participative process, the concrete and abstract layers of indigenous futurism after the digital age.