It is not Dance, is Data: Gearing Ethical Circulation of Intangible Cultural Heritage practices in the Digital Space

Overview & Synopsis

The documentation, protection and dissemination of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) in the digital age pose significant theoretical, technological and legal challenges. Through a multidisciplinary lens, this paper presents new approaches for collecting, documenting, encrypting and protecting ICH-related data for more ethical circulation. Human-movement recognition technologies such as motion capture, allows for the recording, extraction and reproduction of human movement with unprecedented precision. The once indistinguishable or hard-to-trace reproduction of dance steps between their creators and unauthorized third parties becomes patent through the transmission of embodied knowledge, but in the form of data. This new battlefield prompted by digital technologies only adds to the disputes within the creative industries, in terms of authorship, ownership and commodification of body language. For the sake of this paper, we are aiming to disentangle the various layers present in the process of digitisation of the dancing body, to identify its by-products as well as the possible arising ownership rights that might entail. "Who owns what?", the basic premise of intellectual property law, is transposed, in this case, onto the various types of data generated when intangible cultural heritage, in the form of dance, is digitised through motion capture and encrypted with blockchain technologies.