The touchscreen as glass case: technological gatekeeping and the reproduction of Authorized Heritage Discourse in AR-Mediated Jin Opera preservation

Digital heritage technologies are widely promoted as democratising tools that overcome the exclusionary logic historically critiqued in Laurajane Smith’s Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD). This paper challenges that assumption through a critical examination of a Multi-Channel Augmented Reality (AR) system developed to preserve Jin Opera – an Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) form from Northern China. Drawing on a mixed-method study with 42 participants comprising expert custodians and younger audiences, this research exposes a structural paradox at the heart of digital preservation: the very interface designed to widen access reproduces exclusion in a new register. While the AR system achieved high acoustic fidelity – technically mitigating R. Murray Schafer’s ‘schisophonia’ – its touchscreen-centric modality created a ‘somatic barrier’ for elderly custodians, whose embodied knowledge constitutes the tradition’s living archive. We argue that this dynamic constitutes a ‘Technological AHD’: a new form of authorising discourse wherein the digital interface, rather than the museum curator, becomes the mechanism that determines whose relationship with heritage is legible and valorised. The paper concludes by proposing a framework of ‘Inclusive Constructive Authenticity’ that repositions interface design as a political act requiring pluralistic, multi-modal architectures to ensure that technological preservation does not silence the very custodians it purports to serve.