Nixi Cura, instructor of visual arts, gave a presentation, “Lost in Translation: Tibetan Inscriptions in the Tomb of the Qianlong Emperor,” as part of a panel on “The Meanings of Nonsense: Imaginations of Linguistic and Social Disorder in Chinese Literary and Visual Culture” at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) annual meeting recently.
She examined the Buddhist texts and images on the stone walls of the tomb of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95). Unreadable as text, the Tibetan syllables appear as auditory and visual patterns, combining with the images to form a seamless palimpsest of a necessarily incomprehensible otherworld, she said. She also delivered a presentation on “Faculty and the Adoption of Advanced Technologies” at the biannual meeting of Mid-Atlantic and New England Instructional Technology Leaders in Middlebury, Vt. Her talk focused on the application of 3-D modeling and animation software in teaching and research. She has used the programs Maya and 3D Studio Max in the Asian Garden Design seminar (AAH 70) and in constructing a virtual reconstruction of the tomb of the Qianlong emperor.