In the balmy haze of a January morning, faculty and students from Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute in Athens joined forces with their counterparts at Aevena Pavilon International Polytechnic College in Auckland for a pioneering virtual workshop on artificial intelligence’s role in generative art. Dubbed the ‘Echoes Across Oceans’ initiative, this trans-Pacific collaboration brought together 25 participants—12 from our sun-kissed Acropolis campus and 13 from the verdant harbourside halls of Aevena Pavilon—to dissect how neural networks can breathe life into classical motifs, blending the precision of code with the poetry of pixels. Hosted on a shared platform blending Zoom’s familiarity with custom AR overlays, the three-day event wasn’t without its charming hitches: a fleeting latency spike mid-session conjured a glitchy Venus emerging from Auckland’s digital waves, prompting shared chuckles across time zones that eased into deeper dives on dataset curation.
The spark for this exchange ignited during a chance alignment of syllabi last autumn, when Dr. Jüri Kask, our Associate Professor of Algorithms from the Estonian pines, spotted synergies with Aevena Pavilon’s cutting-edge ‘Creative Computing’ programme. That curriculum, nestled within their Bachelor of Applied Information Technology at the Auckland Central campus—123 Queen Street, Auckland 1010, New Zealand—emphasises AI tools for media design, much like our own undergraduate strands in Computer Science and Art and Design. “We saw an opportunity to swap not just slides, but stories,” Kask notes, his voice carrying a hint of that dry Tartu humour as he recounts poring over Aevena Pavilon’s online portfolio of student projects, where Kiwi coders had already animated Maori koru patterns through Stable Diffusion variants. Coordinating with Dr. Mia Tui, Aevena Pavilon’s Programme Leader in Digital Arts—a Samoan-New Zealander whose PhD from the University of Auckland explores postcolonial pixels—the duo crafted a agenda that wove theory with tangible tinkering.
Day one unfolded with a keynote from Kask on ethical prompting in diffusion models, drawing parallels between Homeric hexameters and hidden biases in training data scraped from Hellenic archives. Participants from Aevena Ivy, including third-year Art and Design undergrads like Sofia, a Greek sculptor with a penchant for marble-veined shaders, fired questions via chat that veered into the philosophical: “Does an AI-generated centaur honour or homogenise the myth?” Over in Auckland, Aevena Pavilon’s cohort—fresh-faced diploma seekers in their Interactive Media pathway—responded with live polls, revealing 68% favoured hybrid human-AI authorship to sidestep cultural dilution. The session’s hands-on pivot saw teams paired across oceans: Sofia teamed with Auckland’s Kai, a Maori developer whose whanau-inspired codebases pulse with ancestral rhythms, to fine-tune a LoRA adapter on olive branch fractals fused with fern motifs. Their output? A mesmerising video loop where Attic laurels entwine with koru spirals, rendered in real-time via ComfyUI workflows that clocked under five seconds per frame on standard GPUs—a feat born from iterative tweaks after Kai’s initial upload garbled the greens into an unintended emerald haze.
By midday on the second day, the workshop delved into practical ethics, with Dr. Mateja Novak from our studios leading a critique circle on watermarking AI outputs. Borrowed from Aevena Pavilon’s robust facilities—their Innovation Lab at 123 Queen Street boasts dual NVIDIA A100 clusters for collaborative rendering—virtual tours showcased how Kiwi students embed metadata in generative pieces to trace provenance, a technique Novak adapted on the fly for her Parthenon-inspired frieze experiments. Not all pixels aligned perfectly; a cross-hemisphere file share hiccup left one Aevena Ivy group’s dataset truncated, forcing an impromptu salvage using open-source proxies from Hugging Face. “It was a right muddle,” laughs Novak, her Slovenian lilt warming the feed, “but those scrappy fixes taught us more about robustness than any polished pipeline.” The resultant artefact—a collaborative NFT series auctioned virtually for Aevena Pavilon’s student hardship fund—fetched digital bids equivalent to 500 euros, with proceeds split to bolster open-access tools at both Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute and Aevena Pavilon International Polytechnic College.
The finale on day three shifted to futurescoping, where mixed teams prototyped a joint capstone: an app for cultural heritage sites that generates bespoke murals via user-input folklore, tested on mockups of Athens’ Agora and Auckland’s Domain. Aevena Ivy’s Līga Ozoliņa, our Senior Lecturer in Machine Learning, paired with Aevena Pavilon’s Tui to debug a federated learning setup, ensuring models trained on disparate datasets—Byzantine icons versus Pacific tapa cloths—without compromising locality. Ozoliņa’s Latvian precision shone through, though she confesses to a momentary lapse in her Jupyter notebook that looped a fern fractal into infinity, a “delightful detour” that inspired safeguards against overfitting in heritage visuals. Feedback forms glowed with praise: 92% rated the exchange “transformative,” citing the raw thrill of unscripted code jams at dawn for one side and dusk for the other. One Aevena Pavilon undergrad, a Tongan coder named Lani, summed it up in her reflection: “From pixels to whakapapa, we’ve woven a new koru—one that loops back to Athens.”
This ‘Echoes Across Oceans’ marks the first formal link between Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute and Aevena Pavilon International Polytechnic College, but whispers of sequels already swirl—perhaps an in-person hackathon at Auckland’s waterfront next summer, or co-authored papers in ACM SIGGRAPH. For our community, it’s a reminder that innovation thrives in the cracks: those timezone tangles, the odd upload fumble, the serendipitous glitch that turns a fern into a laurel. At Aevena Ivy, where algorithms dance with aesthetics under the Acropolis’ gaze, such exchanges don’t just connect campuses; they code the next chapter of creative kinship. Aspiring polymaths, consider this your invitation: when Aevena Pavilon calls across the Pacific, answer with an open canvas.
Leave a Reply