Introduction

The digital age represents a developmental stage propelled by the internet and digital technologies as core driving forces, encompassing domains such as digital education, digital technology, and digital life, which have profoundly transformed people's modes of production, lifestyle, and thinking. This "digital existence" has led to the continuous application of technological products like computer technology, digital technology, and advanced photography in the creation of visual works. Since its inception, documentary film has been renowned for its "authenticity"—a presumed authenticity constrained by both external and internal factors that prevents complete, unadulterated truthfulness. The rise of digital technology has, to some extent, opened up alternative pathways for the creative treatment of reality in documentary production. As the times have progressed, documentary genres have continuously diversified, with cultural heritage documentaries focusing on artifacts of historical, cultural, artistic, or scientific value. Following the founding of the People's Republic of China, cultural construction unfolded vigorously, and during this period, cultural heritage documentaries gradually emerged. Early works primarily featured static displays of artifacts, emphasizing their historical value and archaeological significance. Entering the new era, under the influence of "digital existence," cultural heritage documentaries have integrated the static and dynamic aspects of objects, the reproduction and generation of images, and the resonance and interaction of emotions, constructing profound cultural landscapes from multiple dimensions. These changes manifest not only in form but also in content. The evolution of technological means and aesthetic innovation is reshaping the expressive modalities of cultural memory, as audiences in the digitally constructed image world engage in both aesthetic reception and bidirectional interaction.

1. The Evolutionary Impact of Digital Age Technological Innovation on Cultural Heritage Documentaries

Given that a historical perspective better illuminates how the digital age has influenced cultural heritage documentaries, we briefly divide their development into three stages—early, developmental, and innovative—for holistic examination. The early stage spans from the early to mid-20th century, from the birth of documentary film in China to the flourishing period of news documentaries. The 1905 filming of Dingjun Mountain inaugurated Chinese documentary cinema. Influenced by turbulent times, these works primarily served propaganda functions. In 1918, the Commercial Press established its Motion Picture Department, producing five categories of films: scenic, current affairs, educational, classical drama, and modern drama. Scenic films such as Putuo Scenery and Beijing's Famous Sites introduced the nation's landmarks, constituting an early phase of cultural heritage documentary development. However, these works adopted a predominantly "spectatorial" approach, failing to comprehensively explain the origins and development of these sites. Productions from this period used film as their medium, relying on traditional equipment and techniques that offered limited visual flexibility, favored group shots, and employed linear narrative structures with monotonous visual effects. During this early period, scenic, current affairs, and educational films all fell under the umbrella of news documentaries, bearing strong propagandistic and historical value, thus incorporating cultural heritage subjects into the news documentary category.

On December 24, 1953, the Central People's Government Administrative Council's decision on strengthening film production stated: "News documentaries should report more timely and truthfully on the achievements of our people in socialist industrialization and transformation, as well as their contributions to world peace, while systematically filming our beautiful rivers and mountains, scenic spots, historical sites, important products, and cultural relics." This policy ushered cultural heritage documentaries into their developmental stage. Works such as the 1958 Underground Palace by the Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio used mobile dolly shots to authentically record the initial excavation of the Dingling Tomb, prompting public reflection on archaeological discoveries. The 1979 documentary The Silk Road incorporated natural, ethnic, and cultural artifact elements along the route, presenting the prosperity of the Silk Road through combined macro and micro perspectives and introducing open production consciousness to the documentary field. Notably, this work broke from the conventional formula of narration over images, employing host interviews to investigate the Great Wall ruins and local residents' living conditions. This experiment in documentary style exerted far-reaching influence on subsequent documentary creation.

Examining the trajectory of digital age development, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology divides China's digitalization process into three stages based on information technology advancement: informatization (1956–2003), business digitalization (2003–2016), and digital transformation (2016–present). It is evident that the early stage of cultural heritage documentaries had not yet entered the digital era. During the developmental stage, however, with state policy support and the rise of digital technology, documentary production underwent increasing transformation. Under these combined influences, the aforementioned works of significant cultural and historical value gradually emerged. During this period, documentary concepts began to update, with the quantity of cultural heritage documentary works rising rapidly and production quality steadily improving. Since the 21st century, digital technology has permeated all industries. Propelled by technological advancement, the application of high-definition imaging, 3D reconstruction, and CG technology has significantly enhanced visual expressiveness and immersive experiences. Cultural heritage documentaries have thus entered an innovative stage, undergoing substantive transformation. Works such as Masters in the Forbidden City (2016), Every Treasure Tells a Story (2018), and Paintings Within Paintings (2022) employ flexible perspectives, vivid scenarios, and diverse stylistic fusion to create remarkable cultural heritage documentaries.

In the past two years, generative artificial intelligence technology has also influenced various industries. Through innovative applications in content generation, visual effects, and data analysis, it has significantly improved the efficiency and quality of image creation, broadened dissemination channels, and promoted the inheritance and reconstruction of cultural memory, though exploration and practice remain necessary. As an audio-visual art form, documentary film has been deeply influenced by science and technology throughout its creation, production, and screening processes. The continuous advancement of the digital wave has fundamentally transformed documentary form and content—unconstrained by time and space, diversified in form, and profound in content. These dimensional extensions continuously influence audience viewing patterns and the generation of cultural memory, impacting how audiences access cultural memory.

2. The Transformation Path of Memory Construction in Digital Age Cultural Heritage Documentaries

Human memory construction is a dynamic process involving encoding, consolidation, and reconsolidation, with each stage being crucial for memory maintenance. As science and technology advance daily, documentary expression methods continue to explore innovation, while collective memory undergoes continuous mediation and reshaping. Just as museums serve as "sites of memory" that preserve national memory, cultural artifacts, as mediums bearing historical culture, can trigger the deepest memory switches in audiences' hearts. Cultural heritage documentaries, as unique storage media for memory, transcend spatiotemporal limitations to reshape and vividly present historical memory.

2.1 From Representation to Reconstruction: The Reconfiguration of Memory Situations

As an essential characteristic of cultural heritage documentaries, historicity means that audiences inevitably experience a sense of unfamiliarity when encountering cultural memory content. To break this estrangement, documentary creators have transitioned from flat to three-dimensional generation, moving beyond the singular appearance of artifacts toward multidimensional reconstruction and dynamic derivation, creating diverse memory situations that enhance memory's penetrating power. The documentary Paintings Within Paintings, when presenting Zhang Xuan's Tang Dynasty painting Spring Outing of the Lady of Guoguo, employs digital restoration and 3D modeling to transform static artifacts into dynamic forms, unveiling millennia-old mysteries. The work meticulously examines each figure in the painting, determining the specific location of the Lady of Guoguo. Historical existence memory is flexibly interpreted through the dynamic trajectories of figures and scenery, full of rhythm and cadence, while concretely and perceptibly restoring the occurrence of historical and cultural situations, presenting the spirited spring outing of the Lady of Guoguo's entourage in 752 CE.

Cultural memory functions through reconstruction—that is, it always connects its knowledge to an actual or contemporary situation. As carriers of cultural memory, cultural heritage documentaries transcend previous recordings of artifact integrity, employing technological means to insert new perspectives. While digitally reconstructing memory situations, they also imbue them with new connotations. In the second episode of The Forbidden City in 100 Objects, when extending from the center of the Forbidden City—the Taihe Hall Square and Taihe Gate Square—to traditional Chinese courtyards, 3D animation generates courtyard layouts with changing seasons, sequentially presenting the entire Forbidden City's mimetic field. Documentary creators fully utilize digital technology to digitally model China's largest and most complete ancient architectural complex, then analogize it to familiar everyday courtyards, stimulating audience imagination to understand the ethical depth of mutual care and watchfulness behind the palace courtyard design, thereby activating the spatial domain of cultural memory.

Furthermore, new documentary forms have gradually emerged with technological iteration—VR interactive documentaries have transformed viewing methods, allowing audiences to continuously explore various cultural memory generations within the image world. Ancient Books Journey (2023), China's first VR interactive documentary recreating the four major early 20th-century ancient manuscript discoveries, enables users to experience the history recorded in ancient books more immersively, achieving unprecedented "zero-distance" contact with artifacts. The currently in-production large-scale 8K historical artifact documentary Millennium Artifacts will incorporate cutting-edge technologies like 8K+VR to endow artifact display with new vitality, enabling precious cultural heritage to be "unlocked" by modern audiences in more authentic and vivid ways. VR interactive documentaries not only enhance the sense of immersion in cultural memory but also provide audiences with opportunities to understand history from different perspectives, making cultural heritage more vivid and multidimensional and allowing memory situations to be modernistically reconstructed. This form not only revives artifacts and memory but also continues cultural veins and resonance through the fusion of technology and emotion.

2.3 From Macro to Micro: The Extension of Memory Paths

As media continuously change, the forms of memory inevitably transform accordingly. With the rise of the digital age, cultural heritage documentaries, while narrating historical memory, also integrate contemporary communicative memory content through fusion interpretation, creating a unique contemporary context that connects past and present, China and the world. The documentary interpretation methods are innovating with digital advancement, enabling emotional identification and achieving a cultural memory community. In China's first "living painting" documentary How to Read This Painting, fourteen representative figure paintings were selected, such as Emperor Taizong Receiving the Tibetan Envoy and Portrait of Prince Guo. The work breaks traditional painting narration modes by having actors portray the figures, constructing a mimetic field within the paintings and vividly interpreting the characters' various states and emotions, naturally and relaxedly narrowing the psychological distance with audiences.

Cultural memory is simultaneously experiencing and continuing in the process of narration and interpretation. Some documentary works, while interpreting plots, both restore historical situations and continuously rewrite audience memory according to the principles of recollection and reconstruction. These rewriting principles involve not only combination and processing from the creator's perspective but also real-time interaction with audiences through bullet comments, indirectly allowing viewers to become weavers of past and present memory with a sense of virtual co-presence. In the documentary Stories from the River, the narrative about the "King of Painted Pottery"—the water ripple painted pottery basin—incorporates numerous modern colloquialisms such as "Taobao Network," "mix-and-match style," and "traffic password." The work contains both the timeless charm of classical culture and witty interpretations of modern culture.

"Media, as material support, plays a fundamental role in sustaining cultural memory and interacts with human memory." Under the impetus of digital technology, new media forms—interactivity—have entered narrative, giving images a certain extensibility. Audiences both construct memory and intervene in memory generation, expanding the temporal and spatial scope of memory. When How to Read This Painting presents the Tang Dynasty masterpiece Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk, bullet comment interactions mostly consist of praise and reflection. However, these cultural memory media rarely generate controversy; their memory-making effect lies not in the unity, consistency, or ideological unambiguity of the images they convey, but in the fact that they serve as clues to stimulate discussion about those images, placing memory culture at the center of certain media representations and the series of issues connected to them. Bullet comment content real-time reflects some audiences' sincere feelings and emotions, including not only praise and reflection but also suggestions for the work and expanded knowledge. In real-time interactive behavior, audiences can exercise full autonomy in selecting the scope of holistic memory sources, understanding existing memory preservation while continuously generating various interactive memory content combined with images, forming diversified memory and producing identity and group belonging.

In the digital cultural context, the fluidity, mobility, and interactivity of dissemination platforms have generated user-participatory content production models, strengthening immersive, fragmented, and interesting user experiences while gradually forming a trend toward decentralized and personalized aesthetic evaluation that creates a new aesthetic form of both confrontation and symbiosis with traditional authoritative interpretation and criticism mechanisms. To align with contemporary communication ecology, cultural heritage documentaries have transformed in form and content, attempting to present works through "micro-production" formats—entirely different from the serialized works of the developmental stage. Thematic expression has also shifted from grand, majestic artifact documentation to delicate, exquisite artifact narration, gradually expanding the range of artifacts and extending the paths of cultural memory construction. The CCTV documentary series Every Treasure Tells a Story carefully selected one hundred national treasures, narrating them through story-based episodes of five minutes each. To reveal artifact details, it employed technologies like 3D acquisition and micro-trace extraction, increasing the application of new multimedia technologies. Professor Zhang Tongdao, Director of the Documentary Center at Beijing Normal University, stated at the premiere: "Every Treasure Tells a Story conveys the weight of artifacts through the most modern and popular artistic methods, making documentaries, especially short films, become light cavalry in civilization dissemination."

Currently, an increasing number of cultural heritage documentaries adopt "micro-documentary" expression methods to broaden artifact narration pathways. The documentary Art in China launched by China Media Group uses 3D technology to vividly display classic works from major national art museums. Similarly adopting short-episode formats, it focuses on specific artworks and artifacts, narrating their historical, artistic, and cultural value while evoking audience resonance with national identity and history, enhancing multi-layered understanding of cultural memory. Other works like Artifacts Online and Stories of China in National Treasures follow this narration method. While maintaining educational and artistic qualities, cultural heritage documentary production tends toward microcosmic content and form. Through concise narration and high-quality visual effects, audiences can not only clearly understand each artifact's uniqueness but also find more personalized cultural experiences within fragmented information, forming new cultural identities and memory paths.

Cultural heritage documentaries in the digital age are not merely representations of history and culture but dynamic carriers of memory construction. While artifacts primarily rely on exhibition spaces for memory restoration, restrictions of daily time and location create a certain "fluid gap" across regions. The accelerated pace of the digital age allows audio-visual-based cinematic art to stitch audiences' memory gaps anytime and anywhere, deepening communicative memory while expressing the unique charm of cultural memory. Given their encompassing of social, historical, and artistic value, documentaries have effectively combined with artifacts from their inception and will continue to play a crucial role in artifact documentation and dissemination. Evidently, the transformation path of memory construction methods in digital age cultural heritage documentaries will remain a dynamically developing process.

3. Digital Memory Exploration in AI-Driven Cultural Heritage Documentaries

Digital memory is a digital form of cultural memory that carries various genes and characteristics of cultural memory and digital information—simply put, it is a memory form that collects, organizes, stores, and displays specific objects' historical and cultural information digitally, bearing, reproducing, and disseminating it in cyberspace. Against the backdrop of the digital age, the rise and development of artificial intelligence technology continuously empower film and television creation and dissemination while entirely reshaping the generation of cultural memory. Documentary film, as an art of "reality," faces adaptation obstacles when encountering content generated by generative artificial intelligence—a branch of AI based on "real situations." How to transform challenges into opportunities has become a question requiring time to answer. Whether documentary types focusing on artifacts can employ emerging technological means for cultural recollection and situational reproduction of past events, or for imaginative construction around related materials, warrants in-depth analysis.

Generative artificial intelligence technology primarily involves four domains: text generation, image generation, audio generation, and video generation. In text writing, such technology can help creators provide rich inspiration sources and creative materials based on "authentic materials." The May 2024 documentary Crossing Modaoshan, which combines AI and archaeology, successfully reconstructed prehistoric human images through advanced digital human technology and large AI models, enabling audiences to transcend spatiotemporal boundaries and directly observe and understand the physical characteristics of early Guangdong residents, stimulating interest and exploration while obtaining immersive experiences. It is evident that AIGC empowers cultural heritage documentaries to simulate historical figures' reactions and states while restoring historical scenes, acquiring digital memory forms and allowing cultural memory to simultaneously experience and continue in narration and interpretation.

In August 2024, the AIGC documentary Classic of Mountains and Seas, an original creation by Feng Bin, followed the original text's sequence and used digital technology to reproduce the mythical creatures and scenes mentioned in the book. During production, Feng Bin mentioned utilizing various AI tools such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, Jimeng, and Keling for script conception and animation generation. Simultaneously, he delved into ancient texts to find relevant materials, using AI to analyze obscure vocabulary and optimize expressions. With digital technology support, the production of Classic of Mountains and Seas was completed vividly. The work showcases both the unique charm of ancient culture and the innovative application of AI in creative fields. The October 2024 seasonal archaeological documentary Jinling Memory: The Ancient City of Changgan similarly introduced AIGC technology, presenting a new historical face of Nanjing and endowing traditional archaeological documentaries with new life. With AI assistance, documentary teams can achieve rapid data analysis and image generation, displaying more intuitive and vivid historical scenes.

We can observe that AI technology is increasingly applied in image production. Although generative AI demonstrates enormous potential in cultural heritage documentary creation, it still faces numerous challenges, such as the authenticity and accuracy of generated content, how to effectively balance the relationship between AI and human creators, and intellectual property protection issues that require consideration. However, we need not be overly concerned about the future development of generative AI technology; instead, we can adopt a positive attitude. Just as previous technological revolutions have propelled human civilization forward, "the subject of future content creation will still be humans; AI's tool attribute will not change, it will only become increasingly powerful. It cannot replace the creative subject, whether professional or amateur creators." AI should be regarded as an auxiliary tool that helps creators more efficiently realize their conceptions and creations, thereby expanding the boundaries of artistic expression and enriching audience cultural experiences.

"If books disappeared, history would vanish, and humanity would perish. ... Books are not merely arbitrary summaries of our dreams and memories; they also provide models for self-transcendence." Although Susan Sontag's subject was books, documentaries, as memory carriers, are similarly cultural compilations under different technological developments that provide audiences with diverse memory nourishment, achieving national identity and the continuation of image culture. The new era's directive on strengthening cultural heritage protection and inheritance, and promoting excellent traditional Chinese culture, states that we must "let artifacts speak, let history speak, let culture speak." Cultural heritage documentaries are precisely exploring along this developmental strategy. They not only bear the responsibility of explaining and interpreting historical artifacts but also play a crucial role in promoting traditional culture.

The rapid development of digital technology has driven innovation and transformation in cultural heritage documentaries, endowing traditional culture dissemination with diversified expression. Through digital means, artifacts are no longer confined to museums and history books; they integrate into people's daily lives in more vivid and immersive ways, allowing them to experience the weight of history and the charm of culture in relaxed and enjoyable atmospheres. By connecting historical memory with contemporary memory through images, not only is cultural memory digitally preserved, but new possibilities are also created for traditional culture dissemination. However, in the wave of AI technology, while cultural heritage documentaries have encountered unprecedented opportunities, they have also entered a realm filled with unknown challenges.