I remember going on a field trip from school to a scientific institution. The lecturer was a glass-blower, and I was fascinated by what I saw: the material, the flame, the creation. Later in my life, I decided to study Art in a glass and ceramics department, specializing in glass-blowing. After graduating, I became a scientific glass-blower, and I have come full circle. As time and technology changed, I also began working at an academic 3D-printing center, where I led various projects in the natural sciences and medicine, developing different appliances and eventually managing the center. What fascinated me about these two kinds of practices was to explore the similarities and differences between handcraft and machine-craft; the first connects to humanity's earliest phase, when technology began, while the latter relates to our technological present and scientific world.

 

Just as that childhood glass-blowing demonstration sparked my path, my earliest memory—of observing my own hand, as expressed in Sphinx—has guided me to investigate the hand itself. This led me to start a Master's in comparative religion, to explore how hands, divine and human, shape stories, beliefs, and practices in scriptures and rites. In this regard, I aim to research the role of the hand in the embodied lives of the heroes of sacred stories and Western canons. From craft and fire, through machines, ancient languages and texts, I keep returning to the hand, in a time when human intelligence incarnates in physical artificial intelligence.