Dream team

Introducing Wallpaper* Moonshots Division collaborator, Studio Swine

The British artist Alexander Groves and Japanese architect Azusa Murakami, collectively Studio Swine, provided the visual for this feature and for this issue’s limited-edition cover (pictured below). They are also part of the freshly minted Wallpaper* Moonshots Division. The pair established Super Wide Interdisciplinary New Explorers (Swine for short) in 2011. Since then they have produced objects, furniture, sculpture, installations and films, exhibited at the Pompidou and the V&A, and earned gongs at Cannes and other film festivals. The talented duo first grabbed our attention with a remarkable range of objects made of compacted human hair, and later with their furniture collection inspired by Fordlandia, Henry Ford’s failed urban experiment in the Amazon rainforest. Last year, they created New Spring for COS, a tree of arcing columns that birthed mist-filled bubbles or ‘blossoms’ and became a social media sensation at Milan Design Week. As their image for this feature makes it clear, the pair continue to explore how the ephemeral – mist, bubbles, scent and noble gases – can represent the obscure workings out of digital technology. Earlier this year they installed Infinity Blue – a 20-tonne ceramic sculpture that exhales scented fog rings – at Cornwall’s Eden Project. The piece was inspired by cyanobacteria, one of the first organisms on the planet to produce oxygen. The pair are currently in residence at the Brooklyn cultural space A/D/O, creating more wonder with fog and Krypton lights.