The creepy and majestic Kafka: A 3D printed wearable
It’s like one of our worst childhood nightmares have come to life – one of those terrifying creatures from Kafka’s Metamorphosis has come to take over the world. Calm down! The image you are looking at isn’t a physical manifestation of your fears; rather, it is the skilled handiwork of Neri Oxman, founder of MIT’s Material Ecology Design Lab. Drawing inspiration from Franz Kafka’s novel Metamorphosis, he has created a flexible corset which is supposed to represent an insect’s soft torso shell combined with its “armor’ (a human spine). This “wearable mythology” was made using Israeli company Objet’s multimaterial 3D-printing technology. It is made of malleable rubber-like material, and decorated with a pattern that resembles leopard’s spots. The designer himself describes it as “a material counterpart for Kafka’s chimerical writing. Here, Kafka himself is transformed into a chimerical being composed of multiple animal parts”.
Neil Oxman’s Kafka is part of a collection of 18 “wearable mythologies”. He created these creepy designs of mythical creatures for a series of garments and exhibited them in Paris. His exhibition, Imaginary Beings: Mythologies of the Not Yet, opened in May this year.
