Nandi Nobell is not your typical artist. 

By creating what he calls "relics from the future," Nandi’s challenging the norms of the art world, exploring the convergence of technologies and ideas to reimagine what art can be. For him, the process is as significant as the final creation. 

Born in the Indian Himalayas and raised in Sweden, Nandi’s creative journey is as eclectic as their heritage. Gothic ruins and the Baltic Sea became childhood playgrounds, while a family of artists instilled an early appreciation for self-expression. A move to London for fashion studies at Central Saint Martins revealed a fascination with technology and future possibilities, sparking a shift from haute couture to transdisciplinary art.

In our conversation, Nandi discusses his inspirations, philosophies, and the intricate layers behind their creative process.‍

How would you describe yourself as an artist?

Describing myself professionally has been tough ever since I discovered the fashion world ironically was too old-fashioned for my way of thinking, this was in 2009 when I was working for Jean-Paul Gaultier in Paris. Sadly, more has advanced in fashion marketing than in fashion design over the last decade and a half. I think transdisciplinary artist is a pretty good title since the areas between and beyond disciplines has an added layer of potential compared to categories someone else occupies and directs, but it also does not tell you too much about me. "Artist, designer and futurist” is what I say on my website, and this speaks to my interests and skill sets. Ultimately, I am obsessed with the possibilities of the high-tech future, I love art and think of new art forms as a level above making art itself, but making art is more satisfying and projects that take forever also have a mental cost that although worth it takes a toll on you throughout the journey. I also think the realm of the arts can be seen as stagnant in that it is controlled by collectors and institutions as that is where the funds come from. This limits even super-famous artists as they are directed by their collectability - artists are kept in a recognisable form, media, etc. which in principle works against many artists inherit drive and passion to explore, create and bring new things into existence. Instead we see artists who are making millions per piece repeat themselves instead of renew themselves. Personally, I do not want to be fixed to a single category as the thoughts and ideas about art forms and artworks are the real passion for me. The works I eventually bring into physical, mental or digital existence is not even the tip of the iceberg, having the thoughts is the true reward, but often less interesting or comprehensive for others. If I were to describe the type of art I do, I think “It’s complicated” is a pretty good phrase to wrap it up - but other than that I like to think of my works as relics from the future. This concept reverses the idea of lineage which is a main fetish of the arts otherwise - what inspired who, what came first, blah blah blah. In this sense I think of my work as detailed imaginations from future convergence of current technologies and ideas. 

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Could you share a bit about your background? 

I was born on a table in front of a fireplace in the Indian Himalayas, near Almora, by my Swedish mother and grew up in Sweden. Genetically I am Swedish, Finnish, French and German - a European cocktail if you wish (an alien Dry Martini if you ask my friends!). My first ten years I grew up in Visby, which is the only city on the biggest island in the Baltic Sea. It is a city filled with gothic ruins from the Hansa trade times, and this was my childhood playground by the sea. At ten we moved to Stockholm, where I lived until my early twenties. This is when I moved to London to study fashion at Central Saint Martin’s that led me to work in haute couture, before realising that fashion is more about the past and the present than it is about the future. Several of my fashion tutors did not get me at all - I had an obsession with technology and an even greater fascination for possible technologies and expressions thereof. I was sometimes penalised for my interests instead of pushed to go further, but luckily my close friends were all very pushy too, so we ended up being each others’ mad mentors - always pushing greater and more complex concepts, as well as attacking one another with ever-higher standards of perfectionism. Clearly a painful path, but also one that has led us all to really be experts of concepts and incredible levels of detail - something that makes others exhausted or amazed. In the interest of lineage - I have fine artists in my family at least stemming back to my great grandfather in Germany: Reinhart Heß. He was a painter and the artist behind many new church windows that had been lost to the world wars. Both my grandmothers were artists too - my maternal grandmother has worked in a wide range of media and has been my foremost mentor in my early years, and my paternal grandmother was a creative director for film and animation - together with her husband who was doing a lot of the animation. My uncle is also a painter and sculptor based in Stockholm. With this family background, the arts always seemed like a viable life. In retrospect I don’t know if it is viable, but at the same time, not exercising self-expression as an artist just is no life at all for me.

The latest artwork I completed was a West London flat I changed to be a collection of artworks you move between and within, titled “Smoke & Mirrors”. After a research trip I did in Japan in 2017 I got obsessed with the ultimate artworks being ones you live inside of. I tend to think of every artwork as a prototype for the next one. This London flat was very small, and I tapped into my interests with both optics and optimisation to make the most of the space. I think it is fair to call the outcome a spaceship in the sense of spatial space, and ship in how it is planned to make use of every bit of volume efficiently. About one third of the surface is mirror as this allowed me to make every vantage point interesting. Small spaces often feel restrictive because you see the end of the space from wherever you are. My use of mirrors extends every space so that you are never in a position where you can see the end of the space - there is always an opening to the horizon or to a kaleidoscopic twist of the realm you are in. I also have a handful of art collections in the making at various stages of development - some sculptures based on a principle from a sci-fi novel, another is based on an imagination from a Hermann Hesse novel, a third is a spatial sculpture collection that can be owned digitally, physically or both, and a fourth work is word based - although some of my friends are trying to talk me into making the latter a digital journey. I think the word-based work will become a set of media pieces that continue across media instead of staying within one form. Essentially I am an ideas machine from the future - the amount of artworks that only exist as descriptions for myself is ridiculous (hundreds if not thousands of interesting but often very complex ideas for artworks, startups, etc.). What led me to my art today, is a combination of “experiences of spiritual magnitude”, and my MFA in Experience Design. Systems design, storytelling, future forecasting, spiritual techniques, digital manufacturing, and a love for intricate details - all form part of my love for form and experience. 

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How has the presence—or absence—of guidance or mentorship influenced your path and evolution as an interdisciplinary artist and designer?  

I have not really had a mentor in a classic manner, and I think I could have benefitted from having one, but I am also aware it is not too late for that. If anything, I trust my experiences of spiritual magnitude and my close circle of perfectionist friends, as well as my maternal grandmother, have shaped my path the most - together with the works of my favourite authors and the imaginary worlds they have offered the world. Combined with the principles I learned and cultivated from my MFA - all beyond particular forms of media - these parameters have all served to change how I think and how I work towards making others think new thoughts and even new types of thoughts. I primarily strive towards complexity and like (as well as suffer from) barely being able to hold all parts of a concept together, yet forcing it all to assemble into something that inspires awe in myself and others. Awe is a keyword for my inspiration and my works. When I blow peoples’ minds I know I am moving in a direction of value - so that very effect is my North Star - not quite a mentor, but a mentoring quality that leads to my own orientation in the realms between present and future.  

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Your work combines complex fields like design, science, and experience creation. What tools or rituals help you stay grounded and manage the mental load of working at these intersections?  

I trust the easy answer is that I am not grounded. I live for the lofty visions of the higher echelons, but am capable of pulling together enough elements of these realms to make magic true for you - my audience - once in a while. In practice I am more in need of a persistent patron than of further grounding. My therapist agrees I am unusual in that I have developed from above towards the ground rather than the more common opposite. In other words “I like it up here”. This may make me less relatable to many, but also, this is how I have come into being - fighting that won’t help. My rituals change over time. I meditate, write, exercise, eat healthy, and dance a lot. But as mentioned earlier, I get obsessive, so I could also shape a day that is mostly rituals until that drives me crazy and I organically revert to something with some rituals as well as ample space for the spontaneous. There is definitely an element of “fuck it”, where I might just have enough and drop any category of life and just swap to something new. As for mixing and matching knowledge and interests of different disciplines, it probably looks less clear to others. For me, anything I have knowledge of I can generally incorporate into how I think. Anything is an ingredient in something greater. Not all elements form synergies, but some do, and those are the golden nuggets I try to find or otherwise extract. In your question of how I manage the mental load of working at these intersections, I think it is different for me. I thrive from expanding, transforming, or inventing categories rather than fitting in. I also have not deliberately been seeking a following. I like the idea of leading without followers. I am sure there are ways of fitting in that could benefit me, but instead of trying to fit into something that is bound to change at some point anyways, I aim to find perspectives that feel rewarding or inspiring - whether there is a category for this experience right now or not. This approach does not make it any easier to communicate myself, my interests and my talents, but progressive aims seem most noble to me (fewer iterations is ultimately more economic in some manner). I have recently discovered that linear thinkers can be scary to me, and I have in the same process of realising this, also understood that I tend to keep my information, knowledge, understanding etc. in “a cloud-form” within my mind (wherever it is located). This way there is no one linear way of seeing something, but instead, there is always the opportunity to seek new perspectives and routes within the same moving, growing, cluster of elements. New ideas can emerge, novel connections can be made etc.  

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The line between cultural appreciation and appropriation is often murky. How do you ensure your work respects its sources, especially when integrating diverse cultural elements?  

The honest answer is: I don’t think very politically about anything. I don’t work from a perspective of critiquing culture or politics. I have ideas that could be doing this, but those are not the concepts I further into form. Instead, my inspirations might come from any culture, technology or spiritual practice, from a place of love, awe and excitement. If this shortcuts over anyone's toes, I would depend on friends letting me know before anything goes public, but also my true stance is that future culture is more important than past culture - even though the word culture suggests something has grown. As mentioned earlier, like the idea of reversing lineage - viewing the present from an aspirational place of the future. Witnessing our world today I think it is pretty clear we do not learn perfectly from past mistakes as a species, and we all know history is written by winners - and who knows, with modern wars being reported, shared, filmed and stored digitally, they might be erased, hacked, or transformed in retrospect by political forces too - much like our human memories are distorted by the functions of biological interference anyways. As a result, I think it is more inspiring to reverse engineer a present from our imagination of a future we want - at least it is a free-form imagination as opposed to the culture of the past that enforces shapes of the mind that are there as a narrative we established with less information than we have in the present. I appreciate that I have been formed by parameters I know of and do not know of, but if I am to let that control me more than I unconsciously am, I would be a different me. I allow you to be any of your possible “selves”, I trust you will change or at the very least form part of a wave that results in some changes for others of your own or the next generation. I like the Buddhist stance of “becoming” as the ultimate form factor. One person respects the next person’s culture, and yet another person of today does not seem to care if they push a button that literally erases another culture altogether. As an artist I think my responsibility rests in a realm of safety compared to many other areas of society and culture. I am not here to dominate your mind unless you want me to - ideally I have your mind blown in the name of inspiration - and I am aware that what I do often lacks broad appeal - and I take some pride in that - my art is mostly for creators, and if others enjoy it as well - they are most welcome to! In other words, I do not ensure I have it all worked out, but I also do not seek to hurt anyone through my work and processes. I respect the amalgamation of the modern world, and praise the future rather than cling to the past - as much as I can.

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When it comes to creative opportunities, the playing field isn’t always level. What steps do you believe the art and design industries should take to better uplift and support underrepresented voices?  

I have thought about this throughout life, and I don’t know if there is a meaningful answer. The art world is practically run by collectors and institutions and they have their individual agendas, and personal narratives. It is not clear to me that supporting underrepresented voices is one of them. There are examples of collectors that create artists by commissioning a fixed number of future artworks from a new or just discovered artist. Likewise institutions are mostly run by a little clique that forms a local elite in their nation and culture, so their decisions are made in a realm of power play and terror balance as well. Who knows who? Who needs to impress who? and so forth… Even though it is not all driven by market forces, power imbalance and various hierarchies shape these landscapes, and mandating new rules in these contexts will shape new imbalances, hierarchies, winners and losers. Of course, I can envision some tokenised reality where we can introduce chance, votes, etc. but ultimately anything that is selected by humans has bias. And so far we have seen whatever is done by A.I. is also tainted by human bias in various ways. The appreciation of the outcomes cannot be guaranteed, but the survival and maintenance of the artists could be serviced and cultivated. Some nations could certainly afford to pay an artist salary that is similar to a universal basic income for a set amount of time. This could serve as a form of gap year(s) but would likely have to enforce some type of outcome so it is not just a paid holiday. Lots of residencies could serve as this function already, but due to selection processes etc. they are all biased, and technically they require some bureaucratic journey or another which is preventing many neurodiverse people (of certain flavours at least) to even have the mindset to apply in a competitive manner. Naturally, this is counter intuitive since a good portion of artists are likely to be neurodiverse in the first place: one of the reasons they have unique perspectives and ideas.  

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Your work emphasizes consciousness as the primary material. How does this perspective influence your creative process and the experiences you design?  

Ultimately this view makes me free from working any particular media and think of the experiential first and foremost. When I am finding myself in the realms of art, I do acknowledge that objects, actions, agents etc. all help steer the minds of the audience. From a financial point of view, collectability is something I am beginning to think more about, but really, the physical side of art is for me more about mnemonics in relation to experience. I think of all my works as part of a giant evolving game in some sense. This means I think of every little thing I have created as an intricate system where they all belong to something greater that is in constant development. This helps me think of the media as secondary - and I love how something begins in one media format only to continue in another. Most of us are lucky enough to have several senses and our experiences are due to the interplay of these, not the isolation of them from each other - and we would exclusively experience even the isolation as a result of the multitude we have access to, because prior experience can contrast with present experience and future experiences. In my works I trust each person has their subjective experience, and I often emphasise the subjectivity by shaping the parts that create the whole, to give rise to individual stories so that any discussions between members of the audience who have had these experiences, create new perspectives and new stories. There is therefore a meta-reality beyond my control, and beyond any one individual’s control, which makes my works and thoughts the seeds of mental journeys and memories I never intend to fully own. The sun is symbolically my inspiration - it just offers opportunities to arise as the result of its process - it does not actively control but influences greatly. 

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Your projects often appear as relics from a future yet to come. How do you envision the role of art and design in shaping our perception of the future?  

Technically I think pop culture and literature has influenced the most - probably because these are the forms of culture that have reached most individuals in total. Art overall is freer than design as there are no demands on what art has to be, but most art is still painting which feels old. There are demands on individual artists - known or unknown - but not on the artworks. Design is different as there are always demands on design. I wish we would see designs able to leap rather than incrementally advance. So clearly, between art and design there is a huge difference - but as mentioned earlier in this interview, most successful artists are forced to only advance incrementally which is a great route for some minds, but also restricts the realm of art a fair bit. For me, thinking a new thought, envisioning a new type of experience, and ideally being able to kick-off a chain reaction that furthers this in the minds and lives of others, is what shapes the perception of the future. A limiting factor of most views and articles about the future is to speak about the future of singular activities and technologies. That is not even how our present day works at all. It is mostly useless to think about present day social media without considering present day mobile devices - erase one or the other and the experiential landscape fundamentally would change. We as humans, whether artists or not, have to consider a wider realm of converging technologies, activities, and situations as we envision the future. This front of convergence forms a realm of experiential possibilities in which we can imagine and create mental futures that stem from multitudes of context and information. The reality as it takes form won’t give rise to all converging elements at once, for example XR might slow down while A.I. speeds up, and you would have to adjust your exact view of the experiential landscape as it takes shape, but you still have a grand vision of a realm that is different from the present. “Inspiring new thoughts” is the real short answer, but the path to this varies, and is not the same for each spectator, participant or artist.  

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What has been the most rewarding aspect of creating immersive, extended reality experiences, and how does this align with your vision as an artist?  

Simulation of scale and experiential qualities was my first mind-opening journey with extended reality. I had begun even earlier as I exhibited several multi sensory artworks using a combination of installation, sculpture, performance, multimedia, hypnosis, and mnemonic practices combined. XR allowed me to explore a few things that I would otherwise not be able to afford, and in some cases things that are not possible to do physically. Most rewarding has been to bypass recognition and just do things straight away - even if the recognition would have had wider positive consequences for my artistry. Having worked both as an artist with XR, and as a researcher for many years in the same field, has given me a quite unique view of future art forms and the wider experiential landscape. This allows me to integrate new ideas from new technologies freely - as if I am from that future - meanwhile I constantly hear other people’s perspectives on the future that seem so siloed they are almost pointless to listen to (but I still do listen). This makes my position quite lonely too - as artists, management consultants, enterprise leaders etc. all sound like they view the future in a limited way. Multiplying experiential possibilities is my true aim. Working with vanguard technologies and ideas help me move the needle further into the future, and thus changing the horizons of time for myself, and whenever I have time to, for others. That is one factor in blowing people’s minds. 

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In your experience, what emerging trends in art and design do you find most exciting, and how are you incorporating them into your work?  

It is the convergence of multiple things that excite me the most. I do think A.I. can help create things that were not possible before and don’t think Generative A.I. is an artist killer only. Any artist that can only stay in one single media form probably has to grow in themselves and expand into new territories of creativity. New types of art is also something A.I. can help with, and as A.I. technologies become more capable, the middle man in the form of software developers should not be needed to make it happen. Certain vanguard experiences will always require technical knowledge, and this is beneficial for some and restrictive to others. But I think it is safe to assume the cutting edge of art in the future cannot be flat. And the cutting edge of A.I. cannot enforce you to change your use of language to make A.I. do what you want, it should be the A.I. that adapts to understand you better. That is a current weakness of LLMs etc. the mind's relationship to poetry is more advanced because its meaning varies by individual and context. As soon as language has to be interpreted as if you were in a legal trial with hawkish lawyers and prosecutors the poetry is lost, the depth of the art is lost, and yes there can be art in this very layer, but that is like saying art is always blue - which might be true for a deep sea creature but not for those above the surface… Extended realities will increasingly allow us to shape experiences that transform our experience of the physical realm. And A.I. will increasingly enable these experiences to be personal and constantly transforming, adapting, and evolving. This is already a lot to look forward to. Factor in a dozen extra technologies at various timescales and the realm of future art has the potential to be alien to most of our contemporaries, and that is what I want to be true! 

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Finally, looking back, what’s one gem of wisdom you wish you’d learned earlier in your career?  

I actually wish I was better at staying true to my naive younger self at (nearly) all times. Compared to many I think I still have a great success rate in this regard, but as you age and experiences shape your view of reality, there is something innocent and careless that gets dented and impacts your own relationship to confidence and so forth. I think personal resilience, and refusing to grow up to blend in and fall in line is crucial for an artist. Staying true to yourself, owning yourself, and pushing through hardships even when it feels you might break, all makes you you. I am not saying that will be pleasant, and perhaps there are other routes - no journey is identical. The becoming never ends, broad appeal should not be the ultimate aim - in some ways that just shows you are basic. 

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What have you been up to recently?

I am experimenting with designing mostly club wear for the London queer rave scene. For this, I am combining my old haute couture background with a range of material studies and 3D printing of various sorts. Right now we see that 3D printed fashion has largely stagnated with Iris van Herpen as the only real player - and a every other brand doing more or less knock-offs of her work - and often even Iris - despite a lot of interesting work, suffering from leaning too much into a recipe that begins to feel done. What I want to manifest is more akin to an haute couture vibe but at a price point that does not match a sports car. The digital nature of 3D printing has the potential to tie in to other digital technologies - and therefore synergies with the physical-digital continuum of products, services and innovation, that I would love to contribute to in a meaningful way.

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