Born-Digital Genesis – From Concept to Code

Exploring the transformation of Vermeer’s The Milkmaid into a born-digital sculpture, this project bridges classical art with contemporary digital expression. The pitcher, drawn from a quiet historical scene, becomes the centre of a multimodal exploration of memory, form, and digital presence. Inspired by Vermeer’s stillness, Milkmaid’s pitcher reimagines the familiar vessel as a symbolic and sculptural digital object. Its journey begins in code, where layers of association and reinterpretation unfold in an interactive, performative space.

The Dystopia of Imitation – Failure as Form

Through 3D scanning and digital sculpting, the project embraces the imperfect. Real-world objects are scanned and transformed, often deformed in unexpected ways. These glitches are not corrected—they are celebrated as creative material. In Milkmaid’s pitcher, failure becomes a method. It subverts traditional expectations of representation, offering a new kind of abstraction. The digital artefact mutates, melts, and slips away from mimesis, creating room for affect, concept, and poetic dislocation.

The Virtual Gallery – A Multimodal Performance

The sculpture is not displayed—it is performed. Within a custom-built 3D gallery, the pitcher rotates, responds, and reflects. The gallery itself draws from Vermeer’s interiors, blending historic ambience with digital fluidity. Viewers navigate through space, encountering the work as part of a layered, immersive experience. The digital exhibition challenges the notion of a fixed object, instead offering interaction, play, and transformation. Art becomes an ongoing event—accessible, decentralised, and participatory.
Visit original Dystopia of Imitation website

Reframing the Milkmaid – Augmented Reality as Remediation

By extending the sculpture into physical space through AR, Milkmaid’s pitcher bridges digital creation and embodied experience. The object can be rotated, scaled, and viewed in real-time settings, dissolving the boundary between virtual and real. In this remediated form, Vermeer’s pitcher leaves the canvas and enters the present moment. The work invites the viewer not just to see, but to engage—to become part of a distributed, democratic encounter with art that is no longer locked inside a frame.

The "Milkmaid's Pitcher" animated sculpture

In the background, you can see the original WebGL/WebXR application. On mobile devices, it allows seamless switching between a 3D environment and Augmented Reality (AR). The object on screen is a rotating digital sculpture — Milkmaid’s Pitcher — dynamically divided by another invisible, rotating 3D form representing a splash of milk. This intersection creates a dual experience: part of the sculpture remains in the 3D space, while the other emerges through AR. Originally, the app could access the visitor's geo-location and capture snapshots of the sculptural state in real time. Each result — a unique Boolean blend of two forms — was structured with metadata for minting 205 NFTs, each representing a distinct sculptural moment. The current version of the app (now with limited functionality due to NFT.storage deprecation) can still be explored on android mobile devices by clicking here , or scan the QR code below with your mobile.

NFT Integration – Establishing Digital Provenance, Ownership and Aura

Tokenised as an NFT, the digital sculpture gains a new kind of presence: verified, traceable, and uniquely owned. The metadata embedded in the NFT contains creation history, edits, and curatorial context. This not only ensures provenance but redefines what it means for art to have value in digital space. The aura of the artwork is no longer tied to location but to the transparency and permanence of its blockchain identity. Ownership becomes decentralised, and the artwork, immortalised in code, lives on as both object and data.

Interactive NFT Viewer for "Milkmaid’s Pitcher" Collection

This web-based viewer presents a collection of 205 NFTs, each minted from a unique digital sculpture derived from Milkmaid’s Pitcher. Every entry includes structured metadata, along with IPFS-hosted assets: a preview image and a fully interactive 3D model. Visitors can explore the entire collection, examine each NFT’s data structure, and engage with the artworks through intuitive WebGL-based manipulation—zoom, pan, and rotate in real-time. Designed to bridge visual art, metadata, and decentralized storage, the viewer offers an immersive look into a generative, blockchain-based sculptural archive.