While working in Athens I got the opportunity to explore the ancient city, taking digital capsules of what I saw in the form of 3D scans. I was really fascinated by the idea of preserving real life objects as digital artefacts, elevating this idea where I thought to compile my scans into a personality that represents Athens. This thought is the genesis of what came to be Athenaman.
Athenaman was constructed by editing together 3D scans of the statues in the Acropolis museum and surrounding area. Removing arms, isolating wings and curating them into a toy-like figurine. I wanted to echo a home-made DIY model, stripping apart an old figurine’s robotic armeture, zip-tying and soldering electrical elements, blue tack, duct tape. Presenting Athenaman physically in the same way that it was compiled digitally, through curating and combining found artefacts.
Athenaman is able to be posed in any way that the armeture allows. I imagine the electrical unit would contain preconfigured poses that the figurine could assume such as Myron’s The Diskobolos or Michelangelo’s David - paying homage to the very artefacts it derives from. Athenaman dreams to be a layered comment on the intersection of art and technology - conceptually a product of its heritage while technically a product of its environment.
Mobile photogrammetry in its current state is a relatively low-fidelity method of 3D scanning. The use of duct tape and blue tack tries to add a sense of playfulness and DIY to the model, highlighting and referencing the low-poly nature of the scans.
