2018

Current obsession

Phygital Jewelery Imagine a jewelry piece as a file downloaded to your computer. Suddenly, as a piece, it has infinite possibilities—to share it and to tweak it, dissecting and re-arranging, and then re-render and re-upload it. And while this reality might detract from the notion of its uniqueness, it also allows hundreds of people to be exposed to it for the first time, and perhaps differently every time. We can now, tangibly, experience the realm of the digital. Let’s call it the phygital. Physical + digital. Wear it to an online date.The old-world ideas of materiality and craft don’t do justice to the rapidly expanding potential of the phygital. It relates to remix culture, where the lines between authorship, ownership, and appropriation get blurry. Iterations of the phygital can exist in the real-world,beyond the screen, but what we’re interested in for this edition of Current Obsession is the 2-D democratization of jewelry— file-sharing never looked so good.Featuring Bastiaan de Nennie’s interpretations of the work of Robert Baines, Belperron, Lulu Frost, Oscar Heyman,and Verdura.