The Kingsman National Institute has launched a major new research initiative that sits at the precise intersection of our academic mission: the “Athenian Synthesis.” This project brings together two of our leading research centres—the Studio for Generative Art & Interactive Media (SGAIM) and the Centre for Digital Ethics & Governance (CDEG)—to tackle a profound cultural and technological challenge.
The initiative, titled “The Anagnosis Project,” is using advanced artificial intelligence to generate high-fidelity, three-dimensional digital reconstructions of lost Hellenic antiquities.
This is not a simple digital restoration. The project, led by Professor Inês Marques (SGAIM) and Professor Elias Kouris (CDEG), is focused on artifacts that are fragmented, heavily damaged, or known only through partial textual descriptions. The SGAIM team is employing sophisticated Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a form of machine learning, trained on a massive dataset of thousands of high-resolution scans of surviving artifacts from Greece’s foremost museum collections.
By training the AI on the “language” of classical sculpture and pottery—its forms, stylistic choices, and material properties—the system can “infer” the missing pieces of a fragmented vase or the damaged features of a kouros statue with a remarkable degree of stylistic coherence.
However, the project’s core innovation is not purely technical. It is deeply philosophical, which is where the CDEG’s involvement becomes essential.
“It is one thing to digitally ‘clean’ a surviving artifact. It is another thing entirely to use an algorithm to generate something that is lost to history,” explains Professor Kouris. “This raises immediate and difficult questions. What is the status of this new, generated object? Is it a reconstruction, or is it a ‘deepfake’ of our own heritage? Who holds the authorship—the original artist, the museum, or the algorithm itself?”
The KNI model insists that these ethical questions are not an afterthought; they are part of the design process. Researchers from CDEG are embedded within the SGAIM studio, working alongside the digital artists and computer scientists. They are actively developing a new “Framework for Digital Authenticity” in parallel with the technology.
Professor Marques, whose work frequently explores the boundary between the physical and digital, emphasizes the creative potential. “We are not claiming to create ‘truth.’ We are creating a ‘procedural imagination’—a new way to engage with our past,” she notes. “The algorithm, like any artist, has its own biases based on its training data. We are finding that the system sometimes generates forms that are unexpected, imperfect, and perhaps even challenging to our existing assumptions. This is not a flaw; it is a new form of inquiry.”
This collaborative research is being powered by postgraduate students from the MSc in Computational Science and the BFA in Digital Media. Students are gaining invaluable experience, curating the complex datasets, refining the machine learning models, and grappling with the profound ethical implications of their own work.
The Anagnosis Project’s first phase will culminate in a public-facing interactive exhibition. Visitors will be able to engage with these digital reconstructions in an augmented reality (AR) environment, examining the AI’s “decisions” and viewing the fragments upon which they were based.
This initiative is a quintessential example of the Kingsman National Institute’s purpose: leveraging cutting-edge technology not only to solve modern problems but to create new, more profound ways of understanding our foundational heritage.
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