TOTEM — FLORA Museum Challenge submission The Challenge: take one real, public-domain object from...

TOTEM — FLORA Museum Challenge submission The Challenge: take one real, public-domain object from...TOTEM — FLORA Museum Challenge submission The Challenge: take one real, public-domain object from...

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Natalia Trusova

• 1d

TOTEM — FLORA Museum Challenge submission

The Challenge: take one real, public-domain object from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection and reimagine it into a new world, using FLORA.

My key artifact: a 19th-century rattle by the Xaadas (Haida) people, from Masset, Haida Gwaii. The Met describes it directly: "This raven rattle depicts a perched bird with wings outstretched toward its front — an unusual representation of the raven on a rattle, more typical of the way it would be depicted on a memorial (or totem) pole."

For the Haida, Raven isn't just a myth character — it's one of the two clan divisions their entire society was built on (Raven and Eagle, inherited through the mother's line), and a rattle like this was carried by a chief during ceremonial dances as a mark of rank. Beyond Haida Gwaii, Raven keeps reappearing in the same role across the Pacific Northwest as a creator and trickster figure, and even in Norse mythology as Huginn and Muninn — Odin's ravens, Thought and Memory. Almost everywhere it shows up, it carries the same charge: intelligence, transformation, the thing that adapts and endures.

All six artifacts used in TOTEM:

Primary artifact: Rattle (Raven) — Xaadas (Haida), 19th century — wood, pigment https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/501263

Supporting artifacts, used as visual texture to enrich the world:

Totem Pole Model — Tlingit, 1820–40 — wood https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/319073

Totem Pole Model — Haida, 1875–85 — wood, pigment https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/319081

Totem Pole Model — Charles Edenshaw, ca. 1890 — argillite (carved stone) https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/319092

Ceremonial Board (Malu) — Sawos people, 19th century — wood https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/311159

Grere'o (Shield) — Solomon Islands, 19th century — fiber, shell, nut paste https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/310073

Four different original materials — wood, stone, shell, and fiber — all reforged into one material in TOTEM: metal, the last thing standing once everything organic is gone.

Silhouette preserved. Material is not.

FLORA project: https://app.flora.ai/join-project/dd0f3ef8-da87-4ca9-aa23-1ebe54a56d65

#floramuseumchallenge #flora #metmuseum #generativedesign

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Kate Maricheva

• 1h

Nice job!

Brandin Gudmundson

• Sep 3

I WAS HERE

The source: a clay tablet the size of a bar of soap, made in Mesopotamia around 3100 BCE. It's an administrative account of barley distribution - a receipt. The writing is proto-cuneiform, from the period when writing was still becoming writing, and much of it remains only partly deciphered. Along the bottom edge someone rolled a cylinder seal across the wet clay, leaving a man, hunting dogs and boars. A personal mark pressed into a grain tally.

Every mark humans have ever made says the same thing. We only changed the medium. Norse guards carved their names into the marble of Hagia Sophia. Roman tourists scratched graffiti into Egyptian monuments that were already ancient to them. Pompeii is covered in it. And five thousand years before any of that, someone rolled their seal across a receipt for barley.

So I didn't deface the tablet. The tag is on the wall beneath it, where the museum label goes. "TESLA WAS HERE" isn't Tesla's hand - he was obsessively orderly and would never have sprayed a wall. It's ours. It's what we scratch underneath something to say: this mattered, and someone was here.

A caption, not vandalism. Testimony.

Original: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/329081 Met accession 1988.433.1, public domain.

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Lolo Liu

• Sep 3

THE WOMEN LEAVE. THE SEALS STAY. 只是朱顏改

After Zhou Wenju, In the Palace. Song dynasty copy, before 1140. The Met, Open Access. Original: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/40004 Canvas: https://app.flora.ai/projects/ns72hzhvj0sysrbq51ew51cgy18dnpjh

Zhou Wenju was court painter to Li Yu, the last emperor of Southern Tang. These are the women of his palace. When the Song armies took his kingdom, Li Yu was carried into captivity, and there he wrote the ci poem 虞美人 for the palace he would never see again: 雕欄玉砌應猶在，只是朱顏改. The carved railings and jade steps must still be there. Only the faces have changed.

That line is the whole film. I let the women come to life in their own ink lines and walk out of the painting, one by one, until only the empty silk remains. Everything he named as lasting stays: the weave, the stains, and the red seals of the men who owned the scroll for a thousand years. Only the people are gone. His grief as a fallen emperor was that the walls outlive the people inside them, and the painting now does exactly that. One guqin note falls for each woman who leaves.

The closing couplet is not a font. Every character is 集字, collected one by one from brush originals, the way the Tang monk Huairen built the 聖教序 from Wang Xizhi's own hand. Nine of the twelve come from stone-stele collections of Wang Xizhi (集王聖教序, 興福寺半截碑, 普覺國師碑). The three he never wrote, 雕欄砌, are borrowed from Zhao Mengfu and Wen Zhengming, who both spent their lives learning his line.

Made in FLORA. #floramuseumchallenge — Lois Liao / Oni On

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Angelo Capitulo

• 2d

wow how can i learn that!!

Bella Brillantes

pro

• Sep 2

The Lover’s Eye was never just a portrait. It was a portrait of a gaze. The art of looking back.

For the #FLORAMuseumChallenge, I chose the 19th-century Lover’s Eye Bracelet, an intimate object featuring a miniature of a loved one’s eye. Pieces like these were worn close to the body so the wearer could imagine their beloved’s gaze resting upon them 👁️

That idea became my creative starting point: what if the gaze that we see in art could be returned?

So I imagined a woman walking through present-day New York wearing the bracelet. As we get closer to the miniature, we find "Ivy" actually looking out from her own time. The person preserved inside the object is suddenly looking back at us, creating a fleeting exchange between past and present.

The engraved name “Ivy” on the back of the actual bracelet became a small but meaningful detail that helped me imagine the story behind the object.

And so I wanted to create something that felt like a visual poem 💛 A gaze captured centuries ago, finding its way back to another pair of eyes.

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