Filippo Nassetti, a multimedia artist with a background in structure, has for years been keen on exploring the intersection and relationship between the digital and bodily and the pure and synthetic. This investigation is sustained in his newest work, Respiratory Structure II (2025), during which he has created a bodily sculpture representing airflow in lungs utilizing scientific information and 3D printing.
The spectacular piece, measuring 45 x 26 x 31 cm, relies on a scientific dataset from the Barcelona Supercomputing Heart that visualizes the passage of air by alveolar tissue within the lungs. This venture really builds on Respiratory Structure (2024), the place the artist labored with the Barcelona Supercomputing Heart by the S+T+ARTS AIR Residencies program to create a digital mannequin of airflow within the lungs. In response to the artist, this “led to a brand new, procedural methodology to precisely simulate airflow and particle deposition in alveolar tissue.”
In Respiratory Structure II, the intricate fashions are made right into a bodily actuality utilizing SLS 3D printing and Nylon materials. Every effective department of the advanced construction (measuring as skinny as 1.6 mm) follows the trail of an air particle within the lungs, leading to a charming and exquisite piece of sculpture. In the end although, the venture was about greater than creating one thing lovely.
As Nassetti writes on his web site: “Respiratory Structure started with the concept that an artist’s perspective may help clear up challenges in simulating advanced organic techniques. Whereas scientists use equations and mechanical physics, an artist may even see the physique as a spatial structure—buildings to navigate by excessive decision simulations, revealing their magnificence and complexity. This fusion of analytical pondering and visible creativeness provides a brand new method to simulate anatomical techniques.”
Certainly, the digital fashions created by the framework of the Respiratory Structure and Respiratory Structure II tasks might play a job in simulating how ailments progress within the lungs. In truth, the simulation modeling analysis concerned within the venture is reportedly getting used within the modeling of tuberculosis in an ongoing analysis venture that was offered on the thirty fifth Parallel CFD Worldwide Convention in 2024.
This isn’t the primary venture during which Nassetti has turned to 3D printing to create a bodily art work. In 2018, MHOX, a design analysis group based by Nassetti and Alessandro Zomparelli, created the Superabundance Masks utilizing AM and generative design. This masks is evocative of a fibrous tissue that covers the wearer’s face virtually solely, making a “a imaginative and prescient of the human physique as substratum for the formation of a fibrous biodigital entity.” In 2021, Nassetti deepened the exploration of the human face with the Postnatural Head, a 3D printed sculpture that explores the human head as a “geological entity of onerous materials that’s eroded by forces over eons”.
