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DIGITAL revoLuTIon swarovski’s first dedicated exhibition at a major museum was a mark of the important part it has to play in the future of design Words: Nick compToN
More than a decade ago, Swarovski began a unique project, Swarovski Crystal Palace. Public fascination with design was intensifying and its first international stars were emerging. The company provided a creative platform for them to indulge their wildest fantasies, try out the latest technologies and, using crystal as a core material, shed light in miraculous new ways. Since then, the results have been shown at major global events, including Design Miami and Salone Internazionale del Mobile, establishing Swarovski as a serious patron of design, and crystal as a material that could be used to magical effect.
program, which included key events during the London Design Festival and Frieze Art Fair and talks by the designers. It will tour globally until 2015.
This decade of experimentation was recently celebrated in Digital Crystal: Swarovski at the Design Museum. Fifteen designers, some of them – Troika, Fredrikson Stallard, Paul Cocksedge, Arik Levy, ron Arad, Marcus Tremonto and Yves Behar – old hands, and some – Anton Alvarez, Philippe Malouin, Hilda Helström, Semiconductor, Hye-Yeon Park, rAndom International and Maarten Baas – new recruits, came up with fresh works, fundamentally rethought old ones or gave existing projects an entirely new conceptual context.
‘Digital Crystal questions our relationship with the changing world,’ says Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic. ‘It’s all too easy to lose our connection with the tangible as we move ever faster through a digital age in which memories and the personal possessions we once held in such high regard are either online or gone in an instant. With the demise of the analogue era, our relationship with diaries, letters and other ephemera, even time itself, has changed.’
This was Swarovski’s first major exhibition in an internationally renowned museum, but it is unlikely to be its last. It formed part of a larger cultural
There is more to this, of course, than sparkling indulgences, however radical in conception and execution. Swarovski is renowned for encouraging designers, established and emerging, to engage with technologies and ideas, old and new. And, combining the two, the thematic driver of Digital Crystal was an exploration of how our memories are being expanded or diminished by digital technology.
This proved a rich source of inspiration for the designers involved. Troika and rAndom International have pioneered the use of digital technology in design works, rather than just the process, and questioned the nature of digital information itself.
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Indeed, Troika’s book, Digital by Design, was a showcase and manifesto for this new movement. Their ‘Hardcoded Memory’, designed especially for the exhibition, examines the way digital media allows us to externalize our memory, collecting countless photos on hard drives, rather than in the form of the traditional treasured but fading snapshots in albums. It comprises three low-resolution images, made up of growing and contracting dots of light shone through custom-made Swarovski lenses. Its old-fashioned analogue mechanism means these three images are all you can get or are ever going to get. It reminds us how limited and transient – and perhaps more meaningful – our physical records used to be. rAndom International, whose ‘rain room’ is currently wowing (but not soaking) the crowds at the Barbican Centre, channels sunlight in a different way: through a series of lenses and shutters (although they had to use artificial light in the Design Museum) to project a moving image. ‘Study for Sunlight video’ converts the crisp, digital form back to something analogue and fuzzier, pushing viewers to work harder and use their memory to sharpen and fill out the image. Yves Béhar’s ethereal ‘Amplify’ sparks memories of a traditional large-scale chandelier but rethinks it