The UNESCO Meta-Project is a transdisciplinary initiative led by the Center for Holistic Integration (CHI) at the New York City College of Technology (CUNY). It brings together a growing constellation of research, performance, cultural preservation, and technological sub-projects that engage directly with UNESCO World Heritage Sites and Intangible Cultural Heritage practices across the globe.
Encompassing fields as diverse as engineering, performance, design, history, architecture, cultural studies, computational systems, philosophy, and speculative storytelling, the initiative provides an open framework for all people and all disciplines to participate in the critical reimagination of cultural legacies. The immense diversity of UNESCO-recognized artifacts and practices enables virtually unlimited research and creative pathways, grounded in rigorous scholarship and mutual respect.
Rooted in CHI’s Balanced Blended Space (BBS) framework, the Meta-Project promotes symbolic continuity, epistemological transparency, and interdisciplinary synthesis—modeling how heritage can be experienced, preserved, taught, and transformed through mediated collaboration. The UNESCO Meta-Project also serves as a living model for studying Mediation Pathways within BBS, allowing researchers to trace and formalize how meaning, identity, and information move across physical, digital, and symbolic spaces.
A key sub-component of the initiative is the Fictive Universe Project, developed within CHI’s Blended Shadow Puppet (BSP) framework. This speculative storytelling platform invites students and researchers to map real-world cultural phenomena into a consistent fictional world, transforming heritage into narrative, metaphor, and symbolic logic. This narrative mediation creates a recursive feedback loop between imagination and documentation, in which invented cultural expressions are always anchored in verifiable source material.
The UNESCO Meta-Project thus offers both a practical and visionary foundation for interdisciplinary cultural transformation. It is an evolving tapestry—part archive, part laboratory, part stage—welcoming new collaborators who share a commitment to ethical engagement, creative transformation, and intellectual reciprocity.
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.
- 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)
- 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)
- 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
- 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
All sub-projects are unified through the CHI’s Balanced Blended Space (BBS) framework, which models how experiences and information flow 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.
- 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.