Tomás Saraceno

An artist trained as an architect, Tomás Saraceno deploys insights from engineering, physics, chemistry, aeronautics and materials science in his work. He creates inflatable and airborne biospheres with the morphology of soap bubbles, spider webs, neural networks or cloud formations, which are speculative models for alternate ways of living. His ongoing residency at MIT has focused on advancing new work for the ongoing Cloud Cities series. On Space Time Foam, a project created in 2012 for HangarBicocca in Milan, Italy, is the stimulus for a wide-ranging discussion in the CAST Symposium “Seeing / Sounding / Sensing” of current understandings in neuroscience about the human capacity for joint action and bodily awareness.  The work is a multi-layered installation of plastic membranes suspended 24 meters above the ground.  Each level has a different air pressure and reacts to the movement of visitors in each layer, creating an extraordinary interactive experience for its inhabitants. Saraceno envisions the work in a later iteration as a floating biosphere above the Maldives Islands, which could be made habitable with solar panels and desalinated water.