Wednesday Indie Artist Fixx with Nervous System

I interviewed the super talented and interesting Jessica Rosenkrantz and Jesse Louis-Rosenberg, who are the designers & creators of Nervous System, for this week’s Wednesday Indie Artist Fixx. I love their jewelry and I very excited to see their upcoming line of housewares. Learn more in my interview below.

1. What’s the name of your business, what do create and sell and how did you get your start?

Our business name is Nervous System, and we primarily make experimental, algorithmically generated jewelry.  We are also developing furniture and housewares.  Our business began as a bit of a whim.  It came out of work we were doing for architecture school.  Looking at some of the projects we were working on, we said, “Hey, this could be jewelry.”  Now sometimes people look at our jewelry and say, “Hey, this could be architecture.”

2. Share some of your inspirations.

Our inspiration comes from the natural world.  We do a lot of traveling and hiking and we document a lot of what we see through photographs, so you can see a lot of our inspirations in our flickr stream.  To name some: basket stars, spider webs, sister terraces, slime molds, lichen, coral, cholla cactus, radiolaria… We are also interested in new technologies, new ways of making, and new ways of doing business.

3. Who are 3 of your favorite artists of all times?

Well that’s a hard one….so we’ll just pick three: Olafur Eliasson, Ernst Haeckel & N55.

4. Do you cook? If so, what is your favorite thing to cook? Have a recipe?

We are both vegetarians, and Jesse likes to cook.  We use a lot of seitan, and we like Asian and Italian flavors.  Two recipes we often make are a garlicky vegan pesto and a vegan strawberry smoothie, which is just plain soy milk, frozen strawberries, and sugar.

5. What blogs and mags do you read and what shops do you shop at?

We read a lot of blogs.  For design we primarily read dezeen and designboom.  We read some science and technology blogs, like the open science journal PLoS.  Jesse also reads boingboing.

6. What have you recently been reading, watching and listening to?

Jessica is reading books by David Foster Wallace.  Lately, she likes to listen to Joanna Newsom and Music for Falling From Trees by Peter Broderick.  Jesse is reading At Hell’s Gate by Claude Anshin Thomas.  He is currently listening to the Bowerbirds.  We are looking forward to the Where The Wild Things Are movie.

7. What’s new? Any products or projects you’d like to share?

We are working on a few projects.  One of them is a new line of housewares (lighting, vases, etc) that will be produced by 3d printing.  You can see the early stages of that developing on flickr.  We have also been designing line of plywood furniture that will produced using CNC routing in the US, using all domestic woods.  Both of these lines are based on tree like branching systems.

Things we made recently, images of potential interest (these are really works in progress): housewares line concept, housewares line  concept prototype, branch table, branch chair, bent plywood jewelry display.

Newest production pieces we’ve released are the cell cycle line, which is 3d printed nylon made via selective laser sintering and also 3dprinting in wax for casting in silver.