El Retablo Digital (the Digital Altarpiece): Restoration of Mortuary Rituals With Deep Learning

Abstract

The Digital Altarpiece is an immersive virtual temple that seeks to communicate a traditional funeral ritual from Ayacucho, Peru, and revive it in a contemporary environment. Due to the confinements in times of pandemic, these Peruvian Andean rituals of social integration were in danger of disappearing. The ancestral knowledge in humanity has a cultural and spiritual value. Through this project, the theory of dehumanization due to the excess of new technologies and the preservation of cultural memory using digital tools and machine learning are questioned. For this, digital memories were collected, photographs of physical spaces openly uploaded to the web by their authors. This data was extracted to learn features using GANs or Generative Adversarial Networks. The intention of using photographs from social networks was to reinterpret and discover a new local and collective perspective. Although artificial intelligences have the power to excite us with new figure proposals, we humans are experiencing the sensations of these pieces, and we can direct our technical explorations with new technologies that change so quickly, to cultural integration.