Preservation of Kandyan traditional clothing (dress forms, draping methods and their usage in context) in the UNESCO world cultural heritage site Kandy and its vicinities in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Historical notions of cultural value in the heritage sector have been determined by holders of curatorial expertise based at institutions with large collections of artifacts. However, the rise of new digital technologies has facilitated not only active two-way engagement with heritage, but also a broadening of what we mean by heritage and how it can be accessed, through the co-production of exhibitions, oral histories, and other forms of display and archive based on personal remembrance, recollection and interactivity. Since the late 1990s the potential of the digital world for generating new ways of engaging with heritage, broadly defined, has been a key focus of both academic work and cultural practice. At times, the emphasis has been on how the Internet can provide a 'shop window’ for the sector, and how this might be translated into physical visits to sites. Elsewhere, the literature explores how the digital sphere can be exploited to provide a dynam1c space for two-way engagement with heritage culture, aimed at providing a complementary experience to the physical visit through a range of phenomena (online communities,). The aim was to establish the potentiality of virtual new-media to digitally preserve the tangible traditional dress form after transferring in to new paradigm and create an avenue to preserve the vernacular with their socio-cultural context the intangible cultural heritage of Sri Lanka. How traditional dress form change to a contemporary form of dress is examine in the video production ..