Modern Mythos

Across South and Southeast Asia, heritage practices sustain living epistemologies that weave material, memory, and ethics. Traditional craft-based artifacts do not simply preserve form. They think, mediate, and teach, transmitting embodied ways of knowing that bind aesthetics to ethics, gesture to cosmology, and craft to community care. As generative AI reconfigures visibility and authorship, these traditions risk abstraction into datasets that flatten differences and reproduce extractive models of representation. Modern Mythos proposes a paradigm of symbiotic AI: systems built through consent, reciprocity, and return. Grounded in fieldwork with Sri Lankan Ves Muhunu and Balinese Topèng and Barong–Rangda traditions, the project examines how ritual modes of knowing, rooted in embodiment and iteration, can reconfigure digital design practices. Pilot workshops develop prompt grammars that encode materials, gestures, exclusions, and intentional imperfections as digital twins; AI-generated images and animations are logged with lineage notes and circulated under negotiated cultural conditions. These prototypes function as dialogical artifacts, returning to community collaborators for critique before rematerialization. This approach is formalized as a dual-framework model: a Symbiotic AI–Craft Toolkit that embeds consent, attribution, and refusal protocols into the workflow, and a Digital Twin–to–Craft Pipeline that governs the progression from generation to critique and, where authorized, rematerialization in carved form. Together, these frameworks articulate a governance-led methodology for AI–heritage collaboration in which digital artifacts remain accountable to lineage, context, and return. Modern Mythos evolves an emergent commons where AI supports heritage regeneration rather than displacement. By framing language, pedagogy, and ritual as co-governance infrastructures, it reimagines AI as a cultural interlocutor that amplifies difference and returns creative value to the craft-maker.