Twenty-two-year-old student Alica Grebáčová from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague explores the connection between body, technology, and nature in her work. The design created here is more than clothing. It is a vision of posthuman aesthetics in which the human, the digital, and the organic merge into a new whole.
The ensemble plays with the idea of a synthetic nature where the boundaries between growth and construction blur. The silhouette recalls a cocoon that symbolizes both protection and transformation. Mutating textures and organically appearing spores emerge on the surface, developed with 3D printing processes. They seem to grow out of the body as a sign of a symbiosis between technology and life.
Leather, mesh, synthetic fabrics, and experimental materials such as PLA, metal filaments, and resin were used. This combination creates a tension between digitality and corporeality. While leather evokes something primal, the smooth, glossy surfaces of the prints stand for the digital and the unfamiliar. The ensemble is complemented by glass elements that function as sunglass objects and open another layer of artificial seeing, a filter between reality and digital perception.
In the creation process, Alica Grebáčová combines craft and digital methods. She models forms virtually, experiments with parametric design, and translates digital simulations into physical prototypes. 3D printing becomes a creative tool, not a means of mass production, but an expression of a new way of thinking.
“I am interested in how the digital world changes our ideas of the body, identity, and aesthetics. We live in a time when reality has become elastic and can be shaped, simulated, and expanded. In my design I wanted to make this new reality visible. For me, the aesthetics of the posthuman mean that the human is no longer at the center but becomes part of a larger hybrid system.”
