In the last few months there have been a lot of debates about the hand-made Vs machine-made dichotomy that culminated in the "Manus X Machina" event at the Met Museum.
Yet a few interesting examples of this dichotomy were on display last week at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London during May's Friday Late event (the museum's monthly late night happening), entitled "Neo Nipponica".
Suspended between traditions and futurism, the event celebrated the recently-opened Toshiba Gallery of Japanese Art, introducing audiences to leading and emerging artists and designers through live performance, film, installation, debates and DJ sets.
Among the most memorable pieces (not just for fashion fans…) there was also "Tranceflora – Amy's Glowing Silk" by Japanese artist and designer Hiromi Ozaki, better known as Sputniko!.
Placed in the Tapestry Gallery, this Nishijin-Kimono dress and matching footwear was created last year in collaboration with fashion designer Masaya Kushino with fabric woven by master weavers at Hosoo textiles in Kyoto.
The most interesting thing about this piece isn't the fact that it was commissioned by Gucci, but that the ensemble glows in the dark.
The glowing silk was created by injecting the genes of glowing coral and jellyfish into silkworm eggs, a process developed by scientists at the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences in Tsukuba.
Last year the piece was exhibited in a large-scale installation at Gucci Ginza in Tokyo with 3,000 transgenic silkworm cocoons; at the time the exhibition attracted 10,000 visitors in 3 weeks.
This is a great example combining traditional craftsmanship with advanced technology and biological experiments, but there were further intriguing pieces at the Friday Late event (that may be filed under the "art" and "architecture" categories…) of these new trends that could be labelled as neo crafts or neo bio designs.
Artist Keita Miyazaki mainly makes sculptures for example using scraps of Japan's industrial past, such as car parts and speakers, to symbolise a sort of rebirth of life from the wreckage of capitalism. The V&A displayed Miyazaki's "Germination" (2015), a piece made with aluminum bronze, paper, exhaust pipe and speaker system that looks a bit like a strange alien creature.
Another remarkable example of the neo craft/neo bio trend is the Elytra Filament Pavilion, a garden pavilion woven by a robot. Created by experimental German architect Achim Menges with Moritz Dörstelmann, structural engineer Jan Knippers and climate engineer Thomas Auer, this installation is the result of their ongoing research projects (Menges and Knippers lead research institutes at the University of Stuttgart that are pioneering the integration of biomimicry, robotic fabrication and new materials research in architecture) and is their first-ever major commission in the UK.
The glass and carbon fibre pavilion is inspired by by lightweight construction principles found in nature and in particular by the filament structures of the forewing shells of flying beetles known as elytra. Each component of the undulating canopy is produced using an innovative robotic winding technique developed by the designers and producing a strong yet light structure (spanning over 200 square metres and weighting less than 2,5 tonnes).
The structure was visible in the John Madejski Garden during the "Neo Nipponica" event, but the shelter will grow over the course of the V&A Engineering Season as new components are fabricated on-site by a Kuka robot (the structure will be at the V&A until 6th November 2016): sensors in the canopy fibres will collect data on how visitors inhabit the pavilion and monitor the structure's behaviour, ultimately informing how and where the canopy grows.
to know more about this piece and these trends, join the "Biomimicry and Design" interdisciplinary symposium at the V&A (17th June 2016) where biomimicry will be explored as an important field for the future of engineering, architecture and design. The event will bring together leading researchers and design practitioners, among them also the design team behind the Elytra Filament Pavilion.
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