ARCHIVE OF POSTNATURAL EYEWEAR
The Archive of Postnatural Eyewear is a hybrid digital–physical collection of speculative eyewear artefacts generated through artificial intelligence. Each piece inhabits a space between product design and natural formation: eyewear that appears grown rather than manufactured, shaped as much by mineral logic, biological patterning, and erosion as by human intent.
The archive functions as a taxonomy of implausible objects that oscillate between familiar ergonomics and emergent, natural morphology.
The works are created using diffusion-based generative models trained to synthesise material textures and structural patterns from multiple natural domains, such as biological microstructures, mineral accretions, organic fibrous aggregates, weathered morphologies.
Through iterative prompting and selection, these forms are steered toward the typology of eyewear—frames, visors, masks—but allowed to remain unruly, partially autonomous, never fully compliant with traditional product design expectations.
By pushing eyewear toward the threshold of unrecognizability, the archive asks viewers to consider: where does an object stop being a product and become a natural specimen? Where does design give way to emergence?
The pieces appear both cultivated and grown, engineered and mineral, anatomical and geological. This ambiguity invites viewers to reconsider the categories by which we understand objects: is this an industrial prototype, a biological specimen, or a remnant from an unfamiliar ecology?
By blurring these distinctions, the archive aligns with contemporary artistic explorations of postnatural aesthetics — a realm where synthetic intelligence, organic formation, and technological processes are not in opposition but co-evolutionary.
The archive’s objects function as postnatural artefacts, shifting the focus from what nature is to what nature might become under hybrid conditions of computation and materiality. Each piece hovers between states: natural / artificial, wearable / unwearable, body / environment, product / artifact, specimen / sculpture. This in-between condition becomes the conceptual engine of the work. It foregrounds ambiguity as an aesthetic strategy—refusing closure, use, and fixed meaning.
The project expands Filippo Nassetti’s ongoing research on body architecture, focusing on headwear and facial interfaces as zones where identity, function, and ornament intersect. AI becomes both a prosthetic imagination and a disruptive material intelligence, producing forms that a traditional design workflow could not anticipate.
The archive functions as a taxonomy of implausible objects that oscillate between familiar ergonomics and emergent, natural morphology.
The works are created using diffusion-based generative models trained to synthesise material textures and structural patterns from multiple natural domains, such as biological microstructures, mineral accretions, organic fibrous aggregates, weathered morphologies.
Through iterative prompting and selection, these forms are steered toward the typology of eyewear—frames, visors, masks—but allowed to remain unruly, partially autonomous, never fully compliant with traditional product design expectations.
By pushing eyewear toward the threshold of unrecognizability, the archive asks viewers to consider: where does an object stop being a product and become a natural specimen? Where does design give way to emergence?
The pieces appear both cultivated and grown, engineered and mineral, anatomical and geological. This ambiguity invites viewers to reconsider the categories by which we understand objects: is this an industrial prototype, a biological specimen, or a remnant from an unfamiliar ecology?
By blurring these distinctions, the archive aligns with contemporary artistic explorations of postnatural aesthetics — a realm where synthetic intelligence, organic formation, and technological processes are not in opposition but co-evolutionary.
The archive’s objects function as postnatural artefacts, shifting the focus from what nature is to what nature might become under hybrid conditions of computation and materiality. Each piece hovers between states: natural / artificial, wearable / unwearable, body / environment, product / artifact, specimen / sculpture. This in-between condition becomes the conceptual engine of the work. It foregrounds ambiguity as an aesthetic strategy—refusing closure, use, and fixed meaning.
The project expands Filippo Nassetti’s ongoing research on body architecture, focusing on headwear and facial interfaces as zones where identity, function, and ornament intersect. AI becomes both a prosthetic imagination and a disruptive material intelligence, producing forms that a traditional design workflow could not anticipate.