UNESCO Meta-Project: A CHI Initiative for Interdisciplinary Cultural Transformation

Overview

The UNESCO Meta-Project is a transdisciplinary initiative organized by the Center for Holistic Integration (CHI) at the New York City College of Technology (CUNY). It brings together a constellation of research, performance, and digital humanities efforts that engage directly with UNESCO World Heritage Sites and Intangible Cultural Heritage practices.

Each project operates independently yet contributes to the broader mission: to explore how cultural legacies—both tangible and intangible—can be preserved, reinterpreted, and transformed through collaborative research, technological mediation, artistic performance, and educational integration.

Rooted in CHI’s Balanced Blended Space (BBS) framework, the UNESCO Meta-Project emphasizes symbolic continuity, epistemological transparency, and interdisciplinary synthesis, offering new models for how heritage is experienced, taught, and reimagined in the 21st century.

The UNESCO Meta-Project offers a pathway for reimagining the role of cultural heritage in a mediated, collaborative world. Through its constellation of site-specific and practice-specific sub-projects, CHI is building a living tapestry that honors the past, empowers the present, and imagines the future.

This initiative welcomes new collaborators, proposals, and research streams—provided they share a commitment to ethical engagement, creative transformation, and intellectual reciprocity.

Integrative Role of CHI and the BBS Framework

All UNESCO projects are unified through the CHI’s Balanced Blended Space (BBS) framework, which models how intelligences interact and information flows between physical, digital, and symbolic domains. Through BBS:

• Mediation pathways can be documented and analyzed.

• Performances can be mapped as structured signal flows.

• Cultural artifacts can be translated across time, space, and modality.

CHI serves as both coordinator and conceptual engine, ensuring that:

• All projects remain grounded in UNESCO’s preservation mission.

• Each sub-project can scale and evolve without losing symbolic coherence.

• Students and collaborators understand their roles as both creators and interpreters.

Anticipated Outcomes

• Immersive cultural performances linked to specific heritage sites.

• VR/AR reconstructions with historical and mythological layering.

• Curriculum modules co-developed across institutions.

• Joint research papers and open-access digital archives.

• Expanded student mobility and global research participation.

• New frameworks for how technology and tradition co-exist.

Project Philosophy

At the heart of the UNESCO Meta-Project is the belief that:

• Cultural heritage is not static but dynamic—transmissible through narrative, embodiment, and reinterpretation.

• Heritage should be both preserved and transformed, allowing new generations to engage with ancestral knowledge systems through contemporary technologies.

• Artistic, technological, and scholarly disciplines must work in collaborative balance, honoring the past while innovating future modes of storytelling, ritual, and education.

The Meta-Project operates within CHI’s principles of:

• Holism: Engaging all modalities—physical, digital, symbolic, and human.

• Collaboration: Bringing together faculty, students, artists, technologists, and cultural stakeholders.

• Distributed Participation: Creating frameworks for multiple institutions to contribute meaningfully.

Sub-Projects within the UNESCO Meta-Project

1. Agrigento Digital & Performance Project (Italy)

• Site: Valley of the Temples, Agrigento – UNESCO World Heritage Site

• Focus: Digital twin creation, temporal mapping, immersive performance layers

• Partners: CHI, Marco Savatteri Productions, University of Palermo, Urban Vision Group

• Modes: VR, AR, symbolic scenography, workshop/performance integration (e.g., Il Risveglio degli Dei)

2. Modul University Collaboration (Austria)

• Site: UNESCO integration through ethics, data, and systems thinking

• Focus: Interdisciplinary curriculum design for AI, sustainability, and cultural impact

• Partners: Modul University Vienna, CHI, AAECA

• Modes: Ethical frameworks, data narratives, course development (e.g., SEID 2364, Collaborative AI)

3. Gamelan & Wayang Kulit Preservation Project (Indonesia)

• Site: Javanese Gamelan and Wayang Kulit – UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage

• Focus: Reinterpretation of traditional musical and performative forms within the Blended Shadow Puppet Project

• Partners: CHI, student composers, ethnomusicologists, interdisciplinary performers

• Modes: Digital puppetry, virtual orchestration, MIDI-based gamelan synthesis, narrative expansion

4. AAECA Cultural Diplomacy and Research Exchange (Austria/USA)

• Site: Intercultural bridge-building through UNESCO-aligned initiatives

• Focus: Enabling mobility, cross-institutional research, and joint publication

• Partners: Austrian American Educational Cooperation Association (AAECA), CHI, Modul University, CUNY

• Modes: Conference participation, joint proposals, international student and faculty exchange