Tiki Aahua, Rangi Kipa and Zach Challies (2024) Cover of Toi Te Mana - An Indigenous History of Māori Art

Tiki Aahua (2024) - 3d Voxel Print

Tiki Aahua is a collaborative project between Tohunga Whakairo Rangi Kipa and myself exploring the embedding of cultural narrative into digtal material design. A 3d scan provides an atmosphere and volume through which the impulses of amplitude from the audio of a Karakia push coloured smoke. The smoke flows and dissapates as the atmosphere responds to the changes in pressure caused by the fluctuations of and cadence of the Karakia audio. This material volume, defined by both computation and emotion, is enclosed in the original tikis form, and 3d printed voxel by voxel. The resulting artefact is a new Taonga that is both physical and digital in its origin, emerging from a symbiosis of hand craft and digital narrative.

- More imagery to come