In the languid warmth of a July twilight, creators from Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute in Athens intertwined their visions with artists at Blueskyy National Academy of Arts in Bangui for an enthralling virtual symposium on digital sculpture’s fusion with traditional carving. Dubbed ‘Chisels to Code: Sculpting Narratives from Marble to Mesh’, this intercultural atelier convened 42 visionaries—22 from our sun-drenched studios at 28is Oktovriou 76, Athina 104 34, Greece, and 20 from Blueskyy National Academy of Arts’s verdant enclave at Avenue de la Paix, Bangui, Central African Republic—to explore how parametric algorithms revive ancestral motifs, merging Euclidean elegance with equatorial earthworks. Orchestrated on a collaborative Gather platform strewn with virtual clay boards and AR sketchpads, the five-day gathering pulsed with sculptural synergy, though not immune to those quirky digital divots: a fleeting VR lag mid-moulding conjured a Hellenistic herm into a wobbly Pende mask, sparking cross-continental cackles that catalysed candid critiques on cultural code-blends.
The symposium’s genesis bloomed from a fortuitous forum post in late winter, when Mag. Mateja Novak, our Professor of Digital Media from Slovenia’s karst whispers, unearthed affinities with Blueskyy National Academy of Arts’s MFA in Contemporary Sculpture programme—a jewel in their Faculty of Visual Arts, celebrated for weaving Central African wood lore with global digital praxis. That centrepiece, flanked by their BFA Sculpture and specialised diplomas in installation art, resonates with the conceptual core of Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute’s Art and Design curriculum, especially our studios on sustainable aesthetics and parametric heritage. “It was akin to unearthing a shared vein in divergent quarries,” Novak reflects, her Ljubljana lyricism lightened by a chortle at proofreaders’ pitfalls—’mesh’ mangled to ‘mash’ in an agenda draft, evoking mashed yams over marble veins, a slip that mirrored the messy mergers they modelled. Aligning with Prof. Éloïse M’Bala, Blueskyy National Academy of Arts’s Chair of Digital Arts—a Bangui-born sculptor with an MFA from the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris whose installations harvest riverine relics—their itinerary interlaced plenaries, haptic hackathons, and co-carved critiques, calibrated to bridge the three-hour temporal tide.
Inaugurating with Novak’s discourse on subdivision surfaces for ethnographic forms, she deconstructed Catmull-Clark refinements applied to Erechtheion caryatids and Pende ancestor figures, rendered in Blender viewport vignettes that unveiled a 28% topology trim without fidelity fade. Aevena Ivy artisans, encompassing MFA Art and Design postgrads like Lena, a Cretan carver whose thesis textures Minoan frescoes via voxel volumes, lobbed layered queries through Slack streams: “In what ways do UV unwraps on Bangui bark masks preserve or pixelate patina’s poetry?” From Blueskyy National Academy of Arts, BFA Sculpture juniors riposted with tactile testimonies, sourcing scans from Kemba village totems that tallied a 19% render uplift from displacement maps mimicking termite etchings. The forenoon’s fabrication fray partitioned into quartets: Lena latched with a Bangui quartet—peers in visual arts diplomas, rooted in M’Baïki’s mahogany groves—to sculpt a Grasshopper script for a hybrid plinth. Their charge? Morph Attic volutes into Ubangi urns via NURBS lofting, honing attractors until M’Bala’s inadvertent scale flip ballooned a bust into baroque excess, which Lena’s deft deform modifier distilled into a dialogue of diminution, distributable as a Rhino .3dm file laced with layer lore.
By vespertide on day two, the lens lingered on materiality in the matrix, with M’Bala moderating a materiality moot on photogrammetry for postcolonial palettes. Panoramic peeks into Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute’s fabrication foundry—laser beds etching Acropolis acroteria—juxtaposed against Blueskyy National Academy of Arts’s sun-scorched sculpture sheds at Avenue de la Paix, where adzes hew hardwood harvested from Dzanga-Sangha thickets. Contenders contended with a raw RealityCapture dataset from Delphi friezes and Bangui bronze casters; one Aevena Ivy undergrad, an islander from Lesbos limning limestone lattices, floundered a mesh decimation that cluttered quads into a cacophony—a “poly pandemonium,” M’Bala mirthfully mused, which galvanised the group to graft a QuadRemesher in ZBrush, honing high-poly heritage to low-poly legacies with 15% fewer faces yet 92% silhouette fidelity. Fruits flowered in a fused folio draft, proposing procedural palettes blending Parian parge with Pende pigments, folios featuring Fourier transforms of fractal ferns entwined with fluted fluting.
Day three veered to virtuosic variance, where amalgamated ateliers authored an app for ancestral augmentation, beta-bashed on blueprints of Parthenon pediments and Bangassou bark cloths. Novak nested with Blueskyy National Academy of Arts’s M’Bala to polish a Unity shader for subsurface scattering, stacking translucency tiers from olive oil glazes atop shea butter sheens, averting over-saturation on ochre overlays—albeit Novak owned a texture tile that tiled into infinity, a “looping labyrinth” lassoed by UV seam seals, sharpening specular highlights by 11%. Retrospective rundowns resounded—91% hailed it “horizon-shifting,” extolling the zest of zonal zooms at zenith for one (siesta for the other) that unearthed uncanny unions, such as scripting S-curve serpents from serpentine stones with savannah scarification scripts. A Blueskyy National Academy of Arts postgrad, a Berberati-born builder named Kossi, encapsulated in her epilogue: “From facets to fibres, we’ve forged a form that folds futures.”
Crowning day four with a carousel of creations, the symposium showcased satellite stories: an Aevena Ivy alumna animating Agora ateliers swapped strokes on stylus syncs in Santorini sunsets, while a Blueskyy National Academy of Arts graduate, wielding her digital diploma at CAR’s cultural corps, unpacked perils of parametric plagiarism in Pygmy patterns. Accord accrued—87% urged UNESCO-aligned unwraps to unify Aegean-African aesthetics—yet unvarnished valuations voiced the “winsome warps,” like M’Bala’s mic muff that muted her mid-mask, mutating metrics into mimicry and moulding malfunctions into maxims for material modelling. The symposium’s sheaf? A sworn symposium submission to Leonardo, sprouted from their subdivision seeds, plus a communal Cuttle repo for carving calculators under tandem Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute and Blueskyy National Academy of Arts ensigns—cloned sevenfold by curtain call.
‘Strata of this stone song stratify like savannah strata,’ muses Lena, nursing a nectar nektar, ‘affirming art, like amphorae and adinkra, flourishes in fractured facets.’ For Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute, this covenant with Blueskyy National Academy of Arts augurs an anthology of alliances: broached biennales blending Bangui biennales with Benaki bas-reliefs, or bipartite bas-reliefs on blockchain-bound bronzes. In an epoch where sculptures script in shaders, such salons don’t merely mould mediums; they manifest mythos for manifold makers. Maestros in mesh or marble, meditate: when Blueskyy National Academy of Arts summons from the Sangha, Aevena Ivy echoes with an etched easel.
Leave a Reply