Yiannis Papadopoulos

TIMAEUS is a digital art studio environment that enables creation of personalised 3-dimensional sculptures built with expanding spherical volumes or interconnected tetrahedra and possibly other atomic blocks in the future. These sculptures can be customised with media, e.g, pictures, videos and music which are overlaid or seeded in the sculpture. Media can represent memories or more generally facts, including live internet feeds, that can be used to create artistic narratives in space. Such facts are embedded in the sculpture and can be experienced in different ways with the capability of zooming in and out, rotating, viewing from different angles, and  applying sounds and soundtracks. Sculptures are hollow and translucent. They can be illuminated, and the space that they enclose can be viewed internally.  

 

TIMAEUS incorporates generative components. Features of images, videos or music can be  algorithmically extracted and used to modify the shape or movement of a perpetually mutating or dancing sculpture where these media have been applied.

 

We are currently designing a study in art therapy of dementia patients where TIMAEUS will be applied. One hypothesis is that artistic memory sculptures can both aid reminiscence and create a much needed sense of well-being. Reviewing one's life in an artistic manner may help to place fragments in perspective as well as work out gaps and conflicts. This could nurture feelings of relaxation through artistic creation and of stronger more coherent self.

 

TIMAEUS was inspired by the homonymous Platonic dialogue and its geometric, atomic cosmogony and cosmology. The above image is of a relief created in TIMAEUS in a style which is reminiscent of sumptuous Byzantine silk fabrics and which, we hope, connects this paper to the Byzantine art for which Ravenna is renowned.