Mythical Mediations: Material Transcriptions of Votive Offerings Dedicated to the Nymphs Dimitris Moutafidis 1 , Spiros Papadimitriou 2 1 Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, School of Architecture, Department of Architectural Design and Visual Arts, University Campus, Thessaloniki, Greece 2 Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, School of Architecture, Department of Architectural Design and Visual Arts, University Campus, Thessaloniki, Greece Abstract The present study is a theoretical and practice-based research about votive offerings dedicated to the Nymphs through which the normative terms and reductive assumptions of traditional archaeological analysis, proposing them as artefacts with representational and symbolic function, are reviewed and re-examined. Votive offerings dedicated to the Nymphs are artefacts that were offered to deities in a religious and/ or ritualistic context either for gratitude or for supplication inside cave shrines. These artefacts are analyzed and a new possible ontology is proposed for them: From representational artefacts to archaeological media artefacts that co-construct transcendent communication and material networks between suppliants and Nymphs. Finally, votive offerings are examined as mythical forms of mediation that self-narrate these entanglements in larger-than-human temporal frames. This speculative narrative permutes the identity of votive offerings from archaeological generic eidos to singular sacred artefacts that actively re-distributes, re-directs and self-narrate the past transcendent fluxes; thus be mythical. The second half of the research is practice-based. New votive offering assemblages are designed that have unique material and aesthetical qualities by which is given prominence to artefacts' agential character as well as the creational value of the mediation itself, i.e. the transcription gestures processes. In each such process there are traces of the previous one, engraved as ontologically equal complementary re-presentations of beings. Keywords 1 votive offering, Nymphs, mediation, mythical, collagen bio-material, 3d-printing 1. Introduction The present study is a theoretical and practice-based research about votive offerings dedicated to the Nymphs, mythical deities, through which the normative terms and reductive assumptions of traditional archaeological analysis proposing them as artefacts with representational and symbolic function are reviewed and re-examined. This gesture is a proposition for a different epistemological model of thinking and viewing the material world; a world in which representation/ reality, natural/ artificial, signifier/ signified and subject/ object dualities are approached as metaphysical constructs. Based on this argument, it is promoted votive offerings' mediating function by proposing them as mythical forms of mediation that actively co-construct transcendent communication networks between suppliants and Nymphs inside cave shrines. This speculative narrative permutes the identity of votive offering from an Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology (DCAC-2021), May 28–29, 2021, Corfu, Greece EMAIL: dimmout96@gmail.com (D. Moutafidis); sip@arch.auth.gr (S. Papadimitriou) ORCID: 0000-0003-3334-8866 (D. Moutafidis) © 2020 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)