Studio NAWA turns digital experiments into physical forms
Exploring the hybrid practice of Alina Nazmeeva & John Wagner, whose work explores labor, memory, and form.
I often think about what it means to bring a digital idea into the physical world—not just through fabrication, but through feeling. That’s exactly what Studio NAWA does. Founded by Alina Nazmeeva & John Wagner, the studio makes work that sits at the intersection of speculation and substance, code and craft.
Their ‘Surface’ series looks like liquid flash-frozen into furniture. Their silkmoth installation unfurls into a meditation on labor, gender, and systems. But what I find most compelling is how everything they do—no matter how conceptual—starts with a question and ends with something you can touch.
I spoke with them about their studio and work. Be sure to catch them at this year’s WantedDesign Launchpad running May 18-20th.
What led to the creation of Studio NAWA?
Alina: We are life partners, and we have been working together for many years - advising and supporting each other projects. We both had education in architecture. I went on to work with digital media and gaming engines that evolved into an art practice. John has been practicing architecture, and we both were teaching. Our first months long collaboration was a design studio we co-taught at RISD.
Studio NAWA (the acronym coming from the first 2 letters of our surnames) came naturally as a practice.
How would you describe your practice?
John: Our practice is a conversation between two people with different interests, experiences and practices. I am rooted in material assembly, aesthetics that derives its inherent quality from materiality, tolerances, qualities and attributes of objects and materials. Alina is working with and within the digital realm, philosophy, conceptual frameworks. Our practice aims to merge these two sometimes opposite yet in continuum practices and passions in new and creative ways.
There’s this elegant tension in your work between the digital and the tactile—what draws you to that in-between space?
Alina: Thank you, tension is a very intriguing term for us. We aim to develop works that have this sense of tension. between different concepts, spaces or people. We think that this in-between space is very ambiguous and also all-consuming, all-overlapping. Yet it is very hard to describe, give shape to. Technology—whether established and emerging—shapes ways we think, know and exist. Simulations and models become the “ideal” worlds that the physical world is measured against or made after. Our pieces in the Surface series were made exactly this way: first digitally sculpted and bright to life with hand-held tools.
Do you start a project more often from a feeling or from a material? And how much do you let the tools shape the outcome?
John: We start with the concept, or a thought. With the Surface series, we asked “How can we bring digital objects into physical space?” The way we wanted to answer this question was conceptual, not formal or production based. So, we looked into the logic of digital simulation, and in mesh-based simulation everything is made of sets of points, connecting lines that outline the polygons. The surfaces that are made up of these polygons are infinitely thin. They envelop the 3-dimensional simulated shapes. The “default” mesh is isotropic, has no gravity, resistance or other distinct physical properties. How do we translate that into physical space where everything has resistance? That was the starting point of the project.
How do you know when something’s “done”? Especially when working with iterative or generative processes that could technically go on forever.
John: Great question. I think this is where the intuitive aspects of our practice are most visible. Generative works are fascinating because their “accidentality” is a quality akin to the material qualities of physical objects and physical workflows. This is where intuition comes in, the vision of the object and how it needs to be, which among thousands of possible iterations is the one?
Alina: Our workflow combines generative, “accidental” forms with the digital sculpting. For instance, our Surface table was made through the application of different simulated forces and attributes (cloth simulation, displacement and noise) across time. The resulting form was in motion, and our piece is a single frame, a split second of that motion. That “split-second” was further adjusted and honed through digital sculpting to make sure that the piece can work as a table.
We love errors.
For ‘bug in my software,’ the silk moth as a stand-in for labor, gender, and coded intelligence is such a potent metaphor. How did that connection first emerge for you? Was it research-driven or more instinctual?
Alina: For bug in my software, the connection between the silkmoth, labor, gender, and coded intelligence actually emerged from a combination of both deep research and a more visceral, intuitive process. It started quite instinctively: we were drawn to the silkmoth because it’s a creature that has been genetically engineered by humans for thousands of years—completely domesticated, unable to survive without human intervention—and that resonated for me as a symbol of labor that’s both invisible and necessary. Especially feminized labor: repetitive, delicate, sustaining entire systems but often erased from narratives of innovation or progress.
From there, we dove into research—into the history of silk production, the gendered economies around it, and even into early computing, where the term "bug" famously arose in part from physical moths interfering with machines. The way the silkmoth's body has been coded through selective breeding paralleled how women's labor (and by extension, bodies and intelligence) has been "engineered" or "optimized" by systems of power, including technology itself.
What’s your relationship with error—do mistakes ever become collaborators in the process?
Alina: We love errors. In “bug in my software”, we consider the caution of “bug” - both as an insect and as a notion of error in a technological system. The protagonist of “bug in my software” is Bombyx Mori, a silkmoth, bred over millennia by humans to produce silk. While some “bugs” are harvested for economic activity, others become nuisances, pests, malfunctions in the systems. We are inspired by Legacy Russel’s notion of “glitch.” In the society occupied by machinic anxiety that fears errors and malfunctions, glitch feminism suggests that glitches in the already problematic system—marked by economic, racial, social, and globalized injustices—may be corrections rather than errors. A glitch, therefore, becomes a refusal to perform, a rupture in the system that manufactures and commodifies human and non-human bodies. On the other hand, there seems to be a difference between the terms “bug” and “glitch.” Glitch seems to be aestheticized and can be exploited to “game” the system, where bugs just need to be removed.
“Glitch seems to be aestheticized and can be exploited to ‘game’ the system, where bugs just need to be removed.”
How do you balance speculative design with something tactile, rooted, real?
John: For us, balancing speculative design with something tactile and grounded starts with treating speculation not as pure fantasy, but rather as a method of world-attunement. We try to approach speculative futures as things that already exist in the present — through materials, labor systems, ecologies, overlooked technologies. The future(s) are not "elsewhere;” they are diffused and unevenly distributed.
Tactility comes in through material practices — textiles and objects. I think a lot about how bodies (human, non-human, machinic) feel these shifts. In bug in my software, for instance, even though the ecosystem is simulated, and the logic is speculative, it’s overlaid with the silkmoth’s DNA pattern — a tangible biological text — and rendered into a landscape you can physically walk into.
The pieces in ‘Surface’ feel like they’re caught mid-movement, like liquid flash-frozen into furniture. What was the first sketch—or glitch or simulation—that kicked off this collection? Did the concept arrive fully formed or evolve through experimentation?
Alina: It evolved through both the conceptual research process and the material experimentation. We arrived at the final production method through more academic research. Reading the history of science and computer simulation we looked to identify if any of the fabrication techniques have conceptual connection with the simulated objects.
Simultaneously we worked to develop prototypes, starting with a plywood core coated with chrome paint to achieve mirror finish. But it felt like an entrance to the “Is it a cake?” show. While conceptually connected to the simulated objects, with their infinitely “swappable” textures, using a composite structure did not feel true to our initial question. We wanted to find a method to create “an infinitely thin shell” that surrounds the shapes.
Through our research we became fascinated by the concept of “ideal” surface that was utilized in baroque calculus. It was understood as something infinitely divisible and continuously curving, homogeneous and isotropic. It’s a surface that could always be broken down into smaller and smaller parts (infinitesimals)—a tapestry of endless micro-movements—yet still holds together in a grand, expressive form. During the baroque times, the physical material that would have all these attributes did not exist. Today, it does not either, but the closest you can get to it is stainless steel.
“Speculation is not pure fantasy, but rather a method of world-attunement.”
Those mirror-polished surfaces are so immersive they almost erase the object itself, or they seem to respond to their surroundings like chameleons. Was that part of the intention? To make the piece disappear into or respond to the environment? How does context/place play a role?
John: Yes, exactly, your reading is spot on. We wanted to keep them ambivalent, both heavy and of the real world, but also invisible, blending, digital. These objects are so real, monumental, made of steel. Yet they are also “non-objects” that completely blend into their environments. This ambivalence exists in the way digital world interfaces with the physical world. There is a metaphor of the “cloud,” yet that very cloud is powered by massive global infrastructure of data centers, submarine fiber optic cables, rare earth metal mining operations…
There’s a delicate choreography in this piece between analog labor (like weaving) and machine processes (like neural rendering). Do you see those as opposites, collaborators, or something more fluid?
John: Both digital and analog making is an inscription of memories, patterns, intentions into material forms. However, analog processes are more complex from the perspective of an embodied practice, they tend to be more repetitive, meditative, grounding.
For us, these processes are not opposite. Instead, we see them as entangled into each other, technologically, materially, culturally, politically. The Jacquard loom, developed in the early 19th century, used punch cards to control complex weaving patterns—an early form of programmable logic based on binary instructions. Ada Lovelace, often considered the first computer programmer, was inspired by the Jacquard loom when conceptualizing the Analytical Engine with Charles Babbage. Further, both the practices of knitting and crochet are the active executions of algorithms—the patterns—that knitters and crocheters design and make.
We are excited to communicate and study through our work how digital and analog processes, labor and technologies bleed into each other.
What’s something you're curious about right now that hasn’t yet made it into your work—but might soon?
Alina: We would love to bring more textile techniques into our work. We are intrigued by knitting & crochet and have been developing small scale prototypes and swatches to understand the material & technique better. It would be very exciting to experiment with bringing metal and textile together, with wire, chain link and metal mesh.
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