Abstract This poster presents A Colourless Colour, an artistic research project developed within the Computer Sculpture Lab, Athens School of Fine Arts that investigates how structural colour-produced by nano-scale organization of matter rather than pigments—can reframe artistic materiality and ecological responsibility.
The project emerges from the experimental 3D Biohub, an interdisciplinary platform connecting digital sculpture, biotechnology and genetics, in collaboration with the iGEM Athens Team and the Agricultural University of Athens. It explores how living systems that naturally exhibit structural colour, such as colonies of Flavobacterium IR1, may inform the development of non-toxic, bio-derived materials for 3D printing and sculptural practice.
Unlike chemical colour, dependent on pigments and toxic dyes, structural colour arises from the self-organization of micro- and nano-structures that refract light. Certain bacterial biofilms display vivid iridescence through this mechanism. By studying genetic pathways enabling cellulose secretion as an extracellular matrix, the research examines whether this colour phenomenon can be imprinted onto a printable biomaterial.
The poster documents the methodological pathway—interdisciplinary workshops, artistic archiving, digital modelling and laboratory observation—through which biological self-assembly becomes both a conceptual and material model for artistic production. Structural colour is approached not simply as an optical effect, but as a paradigm for re-imagining how matter organizes itself, how colour can exist without pigment, and how art can mediate biotechnological knowledge in the public sphere.
A Colourless Colour addresses ecological concerns linked to the paint and textile industries and proposes colour as an emergent property of living matter, opening a dialogue between art, science and environmental ethics.