Community Pathways, AI and Cultural Memory

TCAF contributes to the AI4CHIEF symposium

A research paper developed by contributors from The Cornelius Arts Foundation, RIZOM, the Center for Applied Cognitive Science (CACS) at the University of Texas at Austin, and ArtCentrica has been accepted for presentation and publication at the AI4CHIEF symposium.

AI4CHIEF stands for Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage in the Information Era Forum, an interdisciplinary symposium exploring how artificial intelligence can support culturally situated heritage narratives.

The research paper, “The Meta-Body of Artworks: Sequence-Based AI Storytelling for Culturally Situated Heritage Narratives”, explores how AI can support storytelling around artworks without stripping away cultural context, introducing the concept of the meta-body of artworks as a way to understand the wider network of relationships, narratives and interpretations through which meaning emerges.

One chapter extends this reflection through a community-based case, showing how participatory artistic protocols can inform culturally situated narrative systems. The example draws on the 2017 Lagamas residency conducted by The Cornelius Arts Foundation in southern France.

From Artistic Protocol to Community Cartography

In 2017, photographer Gideon Mendel, working with tintype specialist Jonathan Pierredon and assisted by Alice Mann, was embedded in the village of Lagamas, a rural community in the Hérault valley.

The residency, titled The Strings that Connect a Village, explored how interpersonal relationships shape collective identity in a small community.

The project unfolded through a structured artistic protocol.

• Participating villagers were photographed individually using the nineteenth-century wet-plate collodion technique, which produces images on glass plates and requires the subject to remain still during exposure. This analogue process foregrounds presence, materiality and the passage of time.

• Each participant was invited to bring an object representing a meaningful dimension of their identity.

• These objects were assembled into a collective composition. Short handwritten texts on A5 cards accompanied each object, allowing participants to frame their own narrative.

• A series of filmed conversations was conducted by cinematographer Venkat Damara and facilitated by Marianne Magnin, whose familiarity with the village helped create a climate of trust. These interviews added an oral dimension to the evolving narrative of the project.

Mapping the Social Fabric

In a second phase, forty-five portraits were assembled into a single large composite image.

During a facilitated session led by ethnographer Dr Anne Varichon, a specialist in the semiotics of colour, participants mapped their relationships with one another using coloured threads stretched across the photographic composition.

Six types of ties were identified:

• conjugal

• familial

• professional

• associative

• friendship

• neighbourhood relations

The resulting installation produced a living cartography of the village’s social fabric, revealing patterns of affiliation, absence, solidarity and latent tension.

Three public moments marked the completion of the residency:

• a private viewing for participants

• a public presentation during the village festival

• the production of a short documentary capturing the process.

Through these stages, the project combined portraiture, storytelling and relational mapping into a shared narrative structure.

The Emergence of a Meta-Body

Within the framework of the research paper, the Lagamas residency illustrates how a meta-body can emerge through collective participation.

Portraits, objects, stories and relational threads formed a network through which meaning was constructed locally. Narratives were articulated by participants themselves and situated within the relationships that structure community life.

This relational configuration resonates with the broader concept of the meta-body of artworks developed in the AI4CHIEF paper.

Artworks rarely exist as isolated objects. Their meaning evolves through exhibitions, curatorial sequences, personal memories, critical interpretations and community encounters. Together, these layers form a dynamic field through which cultural meaning circulates and accumulates.

Understanding this wider relational field becomes particularly important when designing digital systems that aim to support heritage storytelling.

From Local Narratives to Living Cultural Archives

The Lagamas project also revealed how village life evolves through history, trauma (wars, deportation, exodus...), and successive waves of demographic change.

Like many rural communities close to Montpellier, Lagamas has experienced several phases of migration. Historical arrivals during the twentieth century included Spanish and Belgian families. More recent decades have seen newcomers from Central and Eastern Europe, alongside urban residents relocating from nearby cities.

Such transformations reshape the social landscape of a village over time.

A digitally sustained narrative archive could help document these evolving relationships, creating a living civic memory through which residents situate their stories within a shared historical timeline.

Extending the Protocol Digitally

The research paper explores how contemporary storytelling environments could extend the Lagamas protocol through digital tools.

In collaboration with ArtCentrica, whose platform enables sequence-based storytelling around artworks and cultural artefacts, community workshops could follow a process such as:

1. Memory and Object Session: Residents contribute a digital image or object linked to personal or family history.

2. Narrative Framing: Participants write or record short narratives explaining the significance of the object.

3. Sequence Construction: Using ArtCentrica Stories, participants assemble narrative sequences that combine personal contributions with historical archives.

4. Relational Mapping: Digital equivalents of coloured threads allow participants to visualise affiliations, generational links and patterns of migration.

5. Governed Sharing: The community collectively determines what may be shared publicly and what remains internal, defining narrative permissions and cultural protocols.

Such an environment would preserve the participatory logic of the original artistic protocol while allowing the narrative archive to evolve across generations.

Cultural Infrastructure for Narrative AI

Within this framework, AI becomes part of a broader cultural infrastructure.

AI systems can assist with sequencing narratives, connecting archival material and supporting discovery across complex cultural datasets. At the same time, provenance, authorship and community permissions remain essential elements of narrative governance.

The AI4CHIEF symposium brings together researchers, artists and technologists working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, heritage and cultural memory.

The Lagamas chapter illustrates how artistic practice can contribute methodological insights to this emerging field.

When communities actively participate in shaping the stories that describe them, heritage narratives remain anchored in lived experience.

In this sense, narrative AI has the potential to support long-term cultural continuity by helping communities articulate their histories across time without flatening heritage meaning, through relational intelligence.