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 Oscar Heyman, Lulu Frost, Robert Baines, Verdura and Belperron.
Bastiaan de Nennie (1990, the Netherlands) positions his practice at the intersection of the two ever-more intertwining worlds of the physical and the digital. He departs from a pre-digital reality and the world of things we have, mostly, experienced in their forms, colors, fragrances, and textures. Once they are selected, the objects are 3-D–scanned, the scans are dissected, and the components are used as building blocks for new digital creations. After a multifaceted computer-based creative process, they then reappear as a new blend of “phygital” presences materialized in the form of 3-D–printed sculptures—a new creational process that is the basis for sculptures comprising unfamiliar shapes and colors.
This article was first published in the #6 Current Obsession Paper for New York City Jewelry Week
