Cultural Heritage Preservation of Traditional Indian Art through Virtual New-media

Traditional art and craft, practiced by various craft-guilds in the country are the evidence of Indian cultural heritage. Though the narratives depicted in the form of painted façade or scroll-paintings are the genesis of traditional Indian visual language, the scarcity of public awareness and seclusion from the mass is becoming a threat to economic sustainability of those craft-guilds as well as cultural sustainability of our heritage. Virtual heritage propagated through new-media have strong potentiality to turn people culturally aware about our absconding cultural heritage (Cameron, Kenderdine, 2007) and eventually bring traditional Indian art and craft into the domain of public knowledge. The paper explores contemporary research in virtual cultural heritage by arguing for an enhanced user-driven approach through new-media for diffusion of knowledge. Translating the pool of data, worthy to be preserved and diffused among larger mass, into a popular paradigm like new-media is found more accessible by new generation and can act as an educative tool (Kalay, Kvan Affleck, 2008). The young population is most effective to carry forward the cultural heritage in the long run. In this paper new-media, like game-designs and animations are explored as a contemporary paradigm for educating the selected target-user by translating the narrative visual language of Indian vernacular art-forms. The research process involves ethnographic survey to document the socio-cultural heritage. Study is duly meant for the knowledge preservation, such as method, material and the key features of the visual art-form. Possibilities and constrains of the contemporary paradigm are analyzed and extracted visual language from the traditional art-form is translated accordingly. This paper therefore addresses the methodological user-driven design exploration to preserve and propagate the cultural heritage value of Indian traditional art-forms among new generation by documentation and responsible translation of tangible traditional visual paradigm into an easily accessible contemporary virtual paradigm.