Museum of Science, Boston  The physical features of natural
tissues express the distribution and magnitude of the forces
that have brought them about. These forces embody the complex
relations between physical matter in its given environment and
denote its multi-dimensional force field. The work explores the
notion of material organization as it is informed by structural
load and environmental conditions. Natural micro-structural 2-D
tissues are visualized, analyzed and reconstructed into 3-D
macro-scale prototypes by computing hypothetical physical
responses. An object-oriented finite element application is used
to determine material behavior according to assigned properties
and performance such as stress, strain, heat flow, stored energy
and deformation due to applied loads and temperature
differences. The interaction between the directional morphology
of the specimen and the tensor direction produce physical
effects that emphasize the tissue's spatial texture in different
ways. The resulting model is six d