Beyond Sight & Surface: Yasaman Sheri and Gab Bois in conversation

Yasaman Sheri and Gab Bois bend reality in different ways. The former, a LA-based researcher and designer, explores the intersection of ecology, technology, and perception. The latter, a visual artist in Montreal, transforms everyday objects into surreal creations that challenge how we see the ordinary. Meeting for the first time, they discuss everything from Julia Fox to emojis, the shifting nature of materials, and whether iconography is more than just what we see—could it live within touch, texture, and the unseen forces shaping our world?

Originally published in Dazed MENA Issue 01| Order Here

Sarra Alayyan: Something you both do incredibly well is manipulate materials in ways that change how we perceive them, whether through digital augmentation or physical transformation. I’d love to know what draws you to working with materials in this way.

Yasaman Sheri: I started as a designer of materials, so learning about them has been eye-opening. Not just manipulating materials but investigating where they come from, too. This includes understanding excavation, modification, usually via heat and pressure and disposal—all the things that humans in industrial processes do for us to have the objects that we have. That’s my history in general, but very quickly, I became interested in just how diverse materials are. If we think of plastic, for example, it has a very different time-scale availability than, let’s say, something like ceramic or wood. I see the world as different types of materials, solid or not, living or not. Everything is a material.

Gab Bois: I relate to that a lot, especially that last sentence you said: everything is material. I’ve felt for the longest time, and still to this day, that I approach subjects as texture rather than material. Just going off how something looks and how it feels to the touch, and then from that, subverting and connecting it to something else. For example, sewing organic materials is a whole different ballgame from trying to sew thin metal. We’ve done both. My process is very idea-based; it’s always reverse engineering. I rarely find something and think, I want to make something with that. It’s more that I think of an idea and ask how we can make it happen, which comes with its own set of challenges because a lot of the ideas are just not feasible. But again, a lot of them surprisingly are. I think materials are a kind of tool for me to get to an end point.

SA: Curiosity is at the core of your work. What sparks your curiosity the most right now, and how do you follow it in your creative process?

GB: For me, I grew up an only child and had a lot of time on my hands, but I’ve never felt boredom in my life. There’s always too much to do and not enough time. Curiosity has definitely been with me forever, and I owe a lot of that to my dad. He is one of the smartest people I know. He’s someone I could ask anything, like some random history question, and he could tell me the date and the place, and that’s all through his own little obsessions. It takes the same form for me as well. I get these bursts of obsession and, right now, I’m really curious about video as a medium for my art practice and more in the technical sense.

YS: As a designer, I see that the world of materials has completely shifted from what used to be physical interactions to pure digital, so the digital-physical has recently been a dance of my work. But I keep finding my way back to the physical space—I’m interested in materials that are porous. I see materials as interfaces, ones that separate and keep everything contained and orderly, the others as porous materials where they kind of mix together, exchange molecules with your body or the food inside it. These materials become this relational interaction, and I’m really interested in that. So, coming back to it in my own practice, I’m trying to think of ways that I can build objects and interfaces with very analogue and elemental materials that are not less close to a high- tech digital space and still tell a story of interaction, engagement and conversation. Very particularly, I’m interested in clay, especially unglazed clay.

SA: How do you approach shifting people’s habitual ways of seeing and sensing the world?

GB: People can sometimes mistake my work for AI, and that’s something I’m always curious about: those double takes. Those moments, where you experience magic for a fraction of a second because, for a small period of time, you’re convinced something is what it’s not—that’s something I crave a lot and love so much. If I can recreate that at a different scale, where someone is scrolling through Instagram and can do a double take, that’s the ultimate goal: to create a few seconds of silence in the intensity of the digital landscape that
we’re in today.

YS: I think the way you describe AI, Gab, and this “trick of the eye” is fascinating. And I particularly love the French name for trompe l’oeil—it’s something that’s been around in the art world for a long time. More recently, my lab did a project called the Compendium of Synthetic Ecologies, where we deep dived into Microbial Lores, with the idea of trick of the sense, beyond the eye and within other sensory experiences. I find it interesting that it’s also happening in AI, but it feels less intentional, so I like what you’re saying: to consider a moment of magic within this sea of noise. In my work, I think a lot about materials, but also the way our senses engage with the world. I do think we have an overdominance of visual culture and, with our devices, we’re very much visually oriented. If you think of swiping or scrolling as probably the most important gesture of the 21st century—it’s mindless, not intentional, kind of like we’re in a trance. Coming back to texture, I think it is a great way of understanding the senses entirely differently, decentring the eye and visual culture and moving on to different senses, like touch. With my team and students, I do exercises called smell walks, where we go for a stroll and experience the world without the visual.

GB: I’m super curious, Yasaman, about how teaching has informed your practice and vice versa. 

YS: Yeah, so much. I accidentally fell into teaching, I was asked by the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, and they gave me full openness to create my own curriculum, so I just kind of went for it and created a very out-there curriculum that focused on the senses, both through play and criticism and discovery by site visits. I don’t really see teaching as a hierarchy, I just see it as a knowledge transfer—working with students, I feel like I’m learning just as much as they are.

SA: Both of you explore renewal and regeneration in different ways, from microbial aesthetics to repurposing old Y2K technologies as clothing. How can fashion and design rethink their relationship with waste and obsolescence?

YS: This is a major topic discussed in the fashion world, but somehow, the way it’s being discussed doesn’t always feel creative. If we go back to the idea that anything is a material, and I really love this in your work, Gab – skin or flowers, microbes, even air – then I think you can open up the space of what is fashion from both a creative perspective of building interesting garments and relationships with what we’re wearing and identity and so on.

SA: That’s really interesting. It reminds me of that outfit Gab designed for her collaboration with Back Market that Julia Fox wore [featuring outdated Y2K technology transformed into wearable art].

GB: That was such a fun one. I gravitate towards older stuff, so the Back Market partnership was amazing because it’s all silhouettes of items that are so current in the visual landscape that even though they’re considered ‘vintage’, it doesn’t feel like it because you can ask a Gen Z person about a Nokia phone, and they’ll say, “Okay that’s tough.” For that project, it was cool because it was trendy with visually appealing obsolescent items, which got a lot of people interested.

YS: I love the Nokia phone and the old iMac. In the physical design world, we have designers trying to build objects with old devices, so I find the intersection of fashion and technology – older recycled interfaces specifically – really interesting because it taps into reuse, but more interestingly, nostalgia as well.

SA: It is so nostalgic. There’s something about regeneration that’s quite nostalgic in its own sense, specifically as it relates to tech. I always think about how, on our phones, apps are often designed to look like analogue materials, you know? Like how the Notes app is a notebook.

GB: Even the concept of emojis, they’re digital representations of your feelings. At the same time, nostalgia doesn’t even have to be lived. I remember two or three times that my mom looked at photo slides on the projector, and that’s not something I’ve ever put together to use myself… but I still love them as items, even if they’re not from my generation. I think nostalgia can transcend personal experience and goes back to what I was saying about Gen Z being into a flip phone without ever having the experience of actually using it.

YS: I’m thinking about what you were mentioning, Sarra, ‘skeuomorphism’ is the word used in digital technology, which is what happened when we went from physical devices to digital screens. It was about replicating the physical icon or the feeling in the digital space. I do think we’re entering a new phase of skeuomorphism around physicality by bringing it back to biology and its materials. There are so many materials – from leather to some forms of plastics – that we might not be using as much, but we have this nostalgia around them. And some folks are looking to create biological plastics to replicate the texture or that feeling beyond the visual culture.

SA: Both of you guys have explored food in very unexpected ways. Why is it such a powerful medium for design and experimentation in your practices? 

GB: For me, much of what I do today goes back to childhood. As a kid, I was a pretty anxious child, and that played a lot with my appetite. To help, my dad would put together compositions of my fruits or eggs in a certain style or carve shapes into my cheese slices, telling a whole story with the food. It honestly felt like a magic trick to me, so I’ve always associated playing with your food with something that isn’t wasteful or disrespectful, but something that can enhance your experience of eating. That’s where the interest and curiosity started—seeing how a visual composition of the same stuff could create a complete shift in my emotions and even physical reactions.

YS: Similarly, I grew up with a lot of good food. The kitchen was always a space of experimentation. My family fermented a lot, so we made pickles and yoghurt, and it was interesting to see that nothing was dead. Food materials are alive. And in the kitchen, you can build things like a plant. You can come back and see that the yoghurt is becoming thicker with time. You can see this time interaction in which you go back and forth. I always love giving this example: when I lived in Denmark, kids were taught to hold sourdough starters at school and, every day, they’d go against the warm morning window and look at their state, which is so cute. But also, if you think of it as this kind of relational experience of an organism that’s like a pet. I like to think of food and living things that way—the relationship is one of symbiosis and respect, but also interaction.

SA: Are there any existing icons – whether in tech, culture or art – that you feel are due for a radical redesign or reinterpretation?

GB: I started operating with a team, and some of these women have been with me for almost three years now, and we are in the process of doing a kind of visual branding of the studio. We were chatting, and they were like, “Oh, well, we should just do a list of, like, the icons.” I asked what they meant, and they replied, “Well, there’s the olive, the shrimp, and the wired headphones.” My team started breaking down the list of 10 recurrent motifs in my work and were able to do it so quickly, and I thought that was just so cool—them creating this very concise list that could be broken down in the form of icons without necessarily thinking about it. I think it’s so cool to have those things in my back pocket, turning to it when in doubt. Then it’s kind of like, oh, this is my interest of the last five years in a nutshell.

YS: I think emojis could be seen as descendants of iconography in ways that we communicate with each other through visual culture. And I find it really interesting the kinds of emojis are missing from our interactions. One project we ended up doing was creating a new vocabulary of emojis and keyboards, like a typeface around microbes and different living organisms so that you can download a typeface and anyone can share it. That was really fun, and spoke to the power of iconography in teaching us how to see the world—because so much of what you’re talking about is a misconception of, like, what is a germ? What is a microbe? Is it dirty or dangerous? It has these negative connotations and, obviously, that’s only a subset of living bacteria. We can also create positive associations with the biome that is around us. If we come back to the swipe as the gesture of our century: I feel like that needs a radical redesign because even though the swipe is very convenient and we all use it every hour, we need to come back to other cyclical gestures that might have positive feedback loops – as in the physical space – like playing with your food, playing with your clothes, going outside and being curious to physically engage with the world again.

SA: Is there a material or object you’d love to experiment with, but haven’t?

YS: Definitely clay, wood and paper, as well as softer materials that can potentially be wearables because I’m interested in porous materials and the relationship we build with microbes.

GB: I love that. I’m interested in trying to find a way of putting the visual stimuli of a texture in something like a garment.

SA: What’s next for you both? What are you working on?

YS: For me, some upcoming projects are an investigation on rethinking what a computer is as a gestural ritual, a physical intimacy, and relational to elements and life forms.

GB: So cool. I’ve been into making things that serve different functions, that people can touch and have in their homes. Some of them are functional, but the goal is to always have the aesthetic forward so it can also be just a display piece. We have a lot more of those lined up, and it’s something I’ve been finding so fulfilling because I get to see the finished product, and people not only see it in a photo, but also have a little part of it. It’s been really special. I’m super curious, though, Yasaman. You work with so many different mediums and, for me, that’s always been very intuitive. I’d love to know if, for you, there’s a specific structure that this goes into—maybe the writing or R&D informs something else? Have you found a structure where they somehow feed each other in a way that you can see a pattern?

YS: I feel like I’m now coming back to building everyday objects with a different way of thinking that I wouldn’t have before more blurring of the analogue ritualistic interactions. And, honestly, I wouldn’t have arrived at this interest if I hadn’t been practising and doing the emerging science and technology work. What I love about my mom is she reminds me to follow my curiosity and that whatever path it takes you on, you will find your way and sometimes back. So, I’m trying to follow my curiosity that allows me to create my own path, and I’m hearing that from you as well.

Originally published in Dazed MENA Issue 01| Order Here