Reenactment and Intangible Heritage Strategies for Embodiment and Transmission in Museums

This article is focused on the interplay of different forms of intangibility (living heritage and reenactment heritage) and the way technologically enabled practices might reshape the role and transformation of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) in museums. The article introduces three cultural heritage digitisation research projects and their associated museological interventions. The examples chosen for this chapter include the living heritage of South Chinese martial arts in Hong Kong, and the ritual reenactments arising from the canonical Confucian performance manual YiLi from the Book of Etiquette and Rites. Both projects are ongoing and were initiated in 2012. The third project is an interactive reperformance of the poetic oeuvre of Edwin Thumboo, Singapore's leading living poet, dating to 2013/2018 in two distinct environments/interfaces. Through use of multimodal encoding, algorithmic reenactment, recombinatory narrative and kinaesthetic digital interfaces, these three projects signal important new forms of museological experience arising from embodied cognition that have the potential to transmit ICH in museums.