ARIADNA by Dario Lanza.
For centuries, Greek vases have been containers for goods, transporting wine, oil, water, spices and other foodstuffs across the length and breadth of the Mediterranean. But on their surface they also carried legends, stories, myths, religion and art. This project pays homage to the subtle and elegant beauty of these vases.
This project represents, in a generative way, the 8 main types of Greek vases, randomly generating a great variety of amphorae, panathenaic, wine amphorae, kraters, hydrias, lekythos, loutrophoros and kantharos, all of them different from each other. In them we can see a red thread that advances from its base, winds its way across the three-dimensional surface of the vase up to the top, turns around and finds its way out to the same point where it entered. In this way, the algorithm is a metaphor for the “myth of Ariadna”.
According to the Greek myth, Ariadna offered a thread to Theseus so that he could tie it at the entrance to the labyrinth and thus be able to find the exit after killing the Minotaur. Thanks to this thread we can witness Theseus' journey into the unknown and his search for the exit of the labyrinth.
In turn, and in a second reading, the interweaving of white threads that defines the surface of the vase alludes to another myth, that of Penelope, who sewed a loom every day and unpicked it every night to give her husband, Odysseus, time to return home.
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