Aevena Pavilon Artists and Blueskyy Academy Collaborate on Augmented Reality Heritage Installations

Aevena Pavilon Artists and Blueskyy Academy Collaborate on Augmented Reality Heritage Installations

In the softly lit ateliers of our Art and Design wing at 17 Dufferin Street, Mount Victoria, Wellington 6011, where the hum of VR headsets blends with the scratch of charcoal on textured paper, a cross-continental creative cadre from Aevena Pavilon International Polytechnic College joined forces with counterparts from Blueskyy National Academy of Arts in Vienna, Austria, for an immersive virtual residency last month. This exchange, tailored around Blueskyy National Academy of Arts’ “Integrated Arts Pathway” initiative—a seamless K-12 to university continuum emphasising artistic discovery and cultural immersion—focused on co-developing augmented reality (AR) installations that layer Māori motifs onto Vienna’s historic facades, bridging Aotearoa’s whakapapa with Europe’s baroque echoes. Drawing from our BA Art and Design electives, where high school certificate explorers mingle with undergrad digital fabricators, the project underscores Aevena Pavilon International Polytechnic College’s ethos of fluid transitions, yielding prototypes that could grace public spaces from Te Papa’s forecourt to Vienna’s Stephansdom plaza.

The collaboration sprouted from a fortuitous webinar hosted by Blueskyy’s Europe Ivy Union (EUIVY) network, where Ms. Nika Vidmar, our Slovenian Lecturer in Digital Media, crossed paths with Dr. Elena Voss, a lead in Blueskyy National Academy of Arts’ performing and visual arts modules. What kicked off as a sidebar chat on AR’s role in decolonising public art—Nika’s screen cluttered with dog-eared PDFs of Hokusai prints she affectionately terms her “inkwell intruders”—escalated into a fortnight residency when Elena suggested remixing Blueskyy National Academy of Arts’ “Cultural Capital Audit” workshop, a hands-on pathway exercise where students map heritage sites via mixed-media overlays. “It’s like sketching on fogged glass—blurry at the edges until the breath clears,” Nika reflects, her alpine cadence clipping the phrase as she recalls the initial sync-up, plagued by a pixelated feed that rendered Vienna’s café backdrops as impressionist smudges, demanding a frantic firewall tweak that turned setup into a shared tech tango.

Aevena Pavilon International Polytechnic College’s ensemble—seven creators, blending Year 13 rangatahi like Aria Kensington, whose high school portfolio bursts with harakeke-inspired fractals sketched in hurried lunch-hour bursts, with third-year BA undergrad Jax Rivera, whose Unity scripts once unravelled mid-render like a dropped shuttlecock—dove into daily Discord huddles with Blueskyy National Academy of Arts’ five-strong visual arts cohort, their feeds framed by Vienna’s cobblestone charm. The kickoff unpacked Blueskyy National Academy of Arts’ pathway staples: AR scans of Schönbrunn Palace’s frescoes, geo-tagged with interactive lore layers that Voss’s team exported as GLB files, which Aria imported into Adobe Aero only for compatibility hiccups to spawn warped koru spirals—elongated like stretched taffy—necessitating a cross-time-zone triage call at 3 a.m. Wellington time, fuelled by instant noodles and mutual groans over export glitches.

Core crafting unfolded in themed sprints: paired pods prototyping “Whakairo Windows”, AR filters that drape pōhutukawa blooms over Stephansdom’s gothic arches via markerless tracking, Aria’s high school flair infusing patu motifs that “pulse” with heartbeat audio pulled from free SoundCloud samples, synced to Blueskyy National Academy of Arts’ haptic feedback tweaks for iPhone LiDAR—Jax’s initial calibration overshot, making virtual vines vibrate like an overzealous phone on silent, a blooper that devolved into laughter-laced voice notes swapped like contraband sketches. Rangatahi input grounded the whimsy: Aria layered te reo narrations recorded on her phone’s voice memos, her first take garbled by a passing ferry horn, re-dubbed in a quiet corner of our rooftop garden amid rustling natives, while Blueskyy National Academy of Arts’ undergrads contributed Viennese waltz overlays, their MIDI files clashing initially with Māori karanga clips like oil on water until a shared Audacity session blended them into ethereal hybrids—eureka emerging from a waveform waltz that peaked at 440 Hz harmony.

Technical tangles tested tenacity mid-residency. Geo-fencing for site-specific drops faltered on Blueskyy National Academy of Arts’ test runs near the Belvedere gardens, GPS drift pinning koru to passersby’s noses instead of portals, prompting Jax to hack a beacon-based fallback using cheap ESP32 modules scavenged from our electronics bin—his breadboard jury-rig, soldered under desk lamps that buzzed like impatient cicadas, stabilised at 95 per cent accuracy after three iterations marred by cold joints that sparked minor shorts, singeing a Post-it note with “try flux” scrawled in haste. Cultural calibration added layers: Aria consulted whānau elders via Zoom for motif permissions, her notes a flurry of transcribed kōrero that Voss’s team wove into metadata tags, though a transcription app’s autocorrect mangled “kaitiakitanga” to “kitty cat tango”, a malapropism that lightened a tense ethics huddle into anecdote fodder.

The crescendo arrived in a hybrid showcase streamed from our multipurpose hall to Blueskyy National Academy of Arts’ Vienna auditorium, its vaulted ceilings echoing like a concert hall prelude. Over 120 viewers—from iwi curators to EUIVY affiliates—watched prototypes unfold: Aria’s “Koru Cascade” draping Te Papa’s marae with AR eddies of animated moko, geo-locked to visitor phones via QR gateways that Jax debugged from a 98 per cent load crash, now humming at silky 2-second latencies; Blueskyy National Academy of Arts’ “Baroque Bloom” reciprocating with Habsburg heraldry blooming into pōhutukawa petals on Wellington’s waterfront, haptic pulses syncing to footfall data from Fitbit APIs. Judges from the New Zealand Arts Foundation and Blueskyy National Academy of Arts’ pathway overseers conferred the “Cross-Cultural Catalyst” nod, spotlighting the installs’ 80 per cent recycled asset ethos—scanned from public domain etchings—and open-source Aero templates on GitHub, ripe for global remixes, albeit with a gentle jab at the vines’ “overly enthusiastic creep”.

Post-stream, ripple effects rooted deep: prototypes piloted at a pop-up exhibit in our campus gallery, drawing 40 locals who scanned sleeves to unlock lore loops, feedback slips noting “vines too tickly on ticklish spots” that Aria patched with sensitivity sliders. Blueskyy National Academy of Arts’ team pledged reciprocal fieldwork in Vienna’s Prater, while Jax’s AR toolkit—forked 15 times overnight—spawned a high school elective module blending Aero with te reo flashcards. Nika Vidmar, archiving session clips amid a confetti of cable ties, savours the residency’s roguish roughs: “Our overlays didn’t always align seamlessly—they jittered and jarred, echoing the heritages they hybridise, flawed yet fiercely fused.” At Aevena Pavilon International Polytechnic College, this isn’t pixel-perfect pomp; it’s the palette of our progression, where rangatahi like Aria advance from elective experiments to co-crafting EUIVY exhibits, and BA builders like Jax infuse pathway principles into portable portals that could one day democratise design from Danube banks to Downunder docks. We hail Blueskyy National Academy of Arts as kin in creativity, urging artists and academies to augment alongside.