Y3 - Techincal Talk 1

Details: 

Date: Monday, 15th June 2026
Time: 7.30 pm

Topic: How to Decode the Process Behind a Sculpture? A Case Study of Badami Chalukyan and Hoysala Sculptural Art through a Computational Approach

  

Guest Speaker: Poorva Salvi 
Recent PhD Graduate,
Archaeological Sciences Centre,
Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, India

Abstract

The study of sculptures from the Indian subcontinent presents a multi-modal perspective into the artistic, religious, social, and political frameworks of the periods in question. Traditional approaches to Indian art relied on stylistic analysis of sculptures, foregrounding subjectivity while studying iconology and iconography to decode the thoughts the sculptures offered, which emerged only after careful scrutiny. The sub-domain of iconometry was limited to deciphering the talamana system (a measurement system from ancient Indian corpora) from the available textual sources, with some exceptions of sporadic studies that applied this system to actual sculptural art using computational methods.

In this backdrop, the present talk combines digital and statistical methods to decode the process behind the sculptural art of the Badami Chalukyan and Hoysala sculptural art through the comparison of theory (talamana system) and practice (in-situ sculptures). Digital documentation methods such as LiDAR, Photogrammetry, and AutoCAD were implemented, and for the analysis of measurements extracted from these methods, RStudio was employed to compute a variety of appropriate descriptive and inferential statistical tests. By focusing on objectivity in analysing the sculptures, this study offers a new direction for answering the oft-asked question: how were these sculptures created, and whether the underlying principle remains unchanged despite stylistic variations.