The Spark
Student researcher Leah Solomon, mentored by art historian Alex Nagel, asked whether a four-thousand-year-old object could be remade as a working thing: an ancient Near Eastern cylinder seal, reinterpreted through AI and digital fabrication, that still rolls a legible impression into clay.
In Process
Historical research led the design: Chogha Zanbil seals — three registers, shallow bas-relief, the goddess Inanna — studied as the source grammar before any generation began.
The Craft
AI image generation iterated the relief imagery; a height-map conversion and a custom Blender wrap script carried it onto the cylinder, and Bambu Studio produced the two-tone 3D print.
Outcome
The negative-to-positive logic is the hard part — what reads on the cylinder must invert correctly when rolled, so clay-impression tests drove every iteration. Research-led experimentation connecting art history, generative AI, fabrication and hands-on material testing in one loop.
Process — 37 frames
