These objects seem to come from a world yet to be invented, with organic surfaces, irregular volumes and an appearance halfway between a natural creature and a digital artifact. It is precisely in this alien territory that Wang & Söderström operate, a art and design duo that explores the relationship between technology, ecology and human perception.
Their work often starts from a digital image, a form imagined on the computer, to turn it into something concrete. Sculptures, installations and objects take shape through a process in which technological tools and material craftsmanship are not in opposition, but work together. The result is presences that are hard to classify: they look like finds from an unknown ecosystem, artificial organisms or fragments of a possible future.
What stands out, however, is not only their unusual appearance, but the way these forms challenge the boundary between the natural and the artificial. In Making Kin, for example, Anny Wang and Tim Söderström drew inspiration from extremophiles, microorganisms capable of surviving in extreme environmental conditions. Starting from the genetic data of these creatures, they used generative algorithms to imagine new forms of life, later turned into sculptures through 3D printing and casting. The result invites us to look at the world from a different perspective, even to imagine which organisms might exist on other planets. Wang & Söderström
This curiosity about what we do not yet know also runs through The Liminal Eatery, an interactive installation that imagines how our sensory experiences might change in an increasingly digital world. Tables, seats, lamps and cutlery are made with 3D printing techniques, while the environment invites the public to engage with a digital form of life. Wang & Söderström therefore do not try to make technology invisible, but to give it a physical presence, capable of prompting questions about how we inhabit and perceive spaces. Wang & Söderström
Their relationship with nature is one of the starting points of their research. Wang & Söderström observe its structures, organisms and processes in order to rework them through digital tools and material experimentation. They do not try to reproduce what exists, but to imagine new forms of life, suspended between the natural and the artificial.
Anny Wang and Tim Söderström, both Swedish and now based in Copenhagen, work precisely on this possibility: using design to imagine new relationships between humans, technology and the environment. Their works do not seem to belong entirely to the present, but not to a distant future either. They sit in an in-between zone, where digital experimentation meets matter and where even an object can become an occasion to rethink our relationship with what surrounds us.
