Studio Ini by Nassia Inglessis

PROBLEM

As designers are driven by the alluring prospect of designing with life's materials actively participating in the fields of Biotech & Synthetic Biology, they are faced with many unanswered dilemmas, such as:

• What are the rules in our relationship with nature?
• How will this relationship be redefined as a result of the nature of our interventions?
• How can we breath life back into processed natural materials through natural processes and create new interfaces in 'living' materials? 

INTERVENTION

InCased is an investigation of our intervention on nature's designs. It seeks to explore the crossover between encasement and entrapment in our design of material and form. Working with glass and living plants as primary materials, I conducted a study in form, colour and opaqueness; glass-blowing vessels by hand,  to explore the subtle boundary between nourishing & protective encasement vs. suffocating entrapment. An entrapment that is however deceiving in the illusion that it creates of momentary permanence and aesthetic.

FURTHER ON-GOING EXPERIMENTATION

http://www.inflating-curiosity.com/workshop/pictures

·       In our first foray into pneumatics we were interested in the life giving quality that air could offer. Giving the inanimate organic forms and movements, we were interested in using materials to create and emulate life. All elements of the earth require air, so how can we breath life into materials that are no longer alive?  Breathing air into wood we imagined giving life to a material we consider long dead in it’s biological life cycle and in this 'living' material discovering new interfaces and platforms for interaction. An exploration of pneumatics in the Inflated Curiosity workshop curated by MIT Tangible Media Labs.