Engineering Mythology: A Digital-Physical Framework for Culturally-Inspired Public Art
Jnaneshwar Das, Christopher Filkins, Rajesh Moharana, Ekadashi Barik, Bishweshwar Das, David Ayers, Christopher Skiba, Rodney Staggers Jr, Mark Dill, Swig Miller, Daniel Tulberg, Patrick Smith, Seth Brink, Kyle Breen, Harish Anand, Ramon Arrowsmith

TL;DR
This paper presents a digital-physical workflow for creating culturally-inspired public art, exemplified by Navagunjara Reborn at Burning Man, integrating myth, craft, and computation across multiple disciplines.
Contribution
It introduces a novel interdisciplinary pipeline linking digital sculpting, distributed fabrication, structural optimization, and digital feedback for large-scale cultural art projects.
Findings
Successful integration of digital and physical fabrication processes.
Effective collaboration between artisans and engineers across continents.
Framework for future culturally-inspired public art projects.
Abstract
Navagunjara Reborn: The Phoenix of Odisha was built for Burning Man 2025 as both a sculpture and an experiment-a fusion of myth, craft, and computation. This paper describes the digital-physical workflow developed for the project: a pipeline that linked digital sculpting, distributed fabrication by artisans in Odisha (India), modular structural optimization in the U.S., iterative feedback through photogrammetry and digital twins, and finally, one-shot full assembly at the art site in Black Rock Desert, Nevada. The desert installation tested not just materials, but also systems of collaboration: between artisans and engineers, between myth and technology, between cultural specificity and global experimentation. We share the lessons learned in design, fabrication, and deployment and offer a framework for future interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of cultural heritage, STEAM…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
