Reconstructing
Athena
A Practice-Based Project · 2026
What does it mean to hold a goddess in the palm of your hand — printed in white plastic, layer by fragile layer?
Reconstructing Athena traces the translation of a classical mythical figure across three states: from sculptural archetype, to digital character built in 3ds Max, to a small monochrome artefact printed in PLA on an FDM machine. What you see beside this screen is not a copy of a digital file — it is its re-materialisation, marked everywhere by the trace of its own making.
The layer lines are not flaws. They are a stratigraphy of time — the visible evidence that this object was made.
The work proposes that 3D printing is not a tool of reproduction but a critical medium: a process that reconfigures how cultural forms are materialised, encountered, and remembered in a post-digital condition.
3D Modelling
FDM Print
PLA
Remediation
Procedural Aura
Medium
Digital model · FDM 3D-printed PLA · Real-time render
Software
Autodesk 3ds Max · Slicer · model-viewer
The Aura of Process
Form · Material · Digital Presence
Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction strips the artwork of its aura. But 3D printing does not reproduce an image — it produces a new material thing, whose presence is constituted by the visible record of its own fabrication.
This project names that condition procedural aura: a presence grounded not in historical uniqueness but in the legibility of process. The thin arms, the hollow drape, the support seams, the layer lines — these are not failures of fidelity. They are the work itself.
The digital and the printed are not two versions of the same object. They are two different objects, bound by translation.
Athena returns here as she has always returned — never fixed, never original. From Phidias' lost ivory and gold, to Roman copies, to Renaissance allegory, to anime character design, she has always been a site of remediation. This project simply continues that lineage by another technical means.
Framework
Benjamin · Manovich · Hayles · Bolter & Grusin
Method
Practice-based research · Iterative prototyping
Tianyi Yao
Artist · Researcher
Tianyi Yao is a practice-based researcher and digital maker working across 3D modelling, character design, and physical fabrication. Her work investigates how classical and mythological forms survive — and mutate — when they pass through the conventions of contemporary digital media.
Drawing on training in 3ds Max and an interest in the visual languages of games and anime, she treats software not as a neutral tool but as a cultural site, one that carries its own assumptions about form, body, and beauty. Her recent work uses FDM printing to bring those digital decisions back into physical space, where they can be touched, weighed, and questioned.
Practice
3D modelling · Digital fabrication · Installation
Contact
your.email@example.com