Perpetuating the Phad: From Performative Scroll Painting to Interactive 3D Game

Our research revolves around Pabuji ki Phad, a large visual narrative scroll painting from Rajasthan, India, activated through performative orality and music. The narrator (Bhopa) guides the audience through the intricate scenes, mediating the embedded story. Their recitation epistemically bridges the visual and verbal, transforming the scroll into a participatory, intersubjective experience. Phad functions as both a cultural artefact and visual ethnography, preserving collective memory, moral frameworks, and aesthetic practices. It acts as evidence in storytelling and reinforces social cohesion by reflecting shared values and identity. Using visual anthropology and cultural semiotics, we explore the visual-textual tradition as an archive of embodied knowledge, where meaning is co-constructed through performative seeing and multi-sensory engagement. The team consists of researchers specialised in ethnography, visual arts, and vernacular knowledge systems, who actively collaborate with the Bhopa narrators. Through Action Research, we analyse and reinterpret the socio-cultural practice into an interactive 3D game as an alternative form of research expression. Our work introduces innovative co-creative methodologies through a transdisciplinary approach that intersects sociology and creative practice. This approach underscores the potential of a new paradigm of interactive digital platforms to function as a tool of cultural continuity, educational engagement and social research.