Bastiaan de Nennie at Roehrs & Boetsch

“By conserving the shape of dying products from nature – like vegetables and fruits – in a digital form and giving them a soul by some small digital cosmetic surgery, an aubergine or a banana become immortal,” says Bastiaan de Nennie, a Design Academy Eindhoven graduate who has rapidly become renowned for his sculptural work at the frontier between physical and digital.

De Nennie 3D-scans familiar objects from our pre-digital reality, objects that epitomise banality, and uses their forms, colours and textures as components to build a new digital reality. The computer-remixed objects manifest again as 3D-printed sculptures. The bright colours and humorous forms appear whimsical at first, but De Nennie also raises unsettling questions about the nature of being and the relationship between human and machine, not unlike the existential questions raised in the newly remade film Ghost In The Shell.

For De Nennie, the 3D-printed sculptures are mortal bodies with immortal digital souls, as in his new work Corpo-real Identities series : “Corpo-real Identities are characters, with each their own soul. The scanned bodies of their ancestors are the guideline for their appearance – the saddle of a bicycle, a pair of sneakers, a fire hydrant, the radiator grill of a car. Their spiritual state changes while going through an objectifying virtual computer-based process, before being born by the 3D-printer.”

It is the ghosts in the design shell that De Nennie’s first solo exhibition, Blending Presences, surfaces at Gallery Roehrs & Boetsch in Zurich until July 22.