Swarovski Explores the Future of Memory with Digital Exhibition

Swarovksi has long provided unforgettable crystal elements for designers and artists, allowing them to create almost anything crystallized and imaginable. Now, they take a big step forward, collaborating with London’s Design Museum to challenge some of the most important contemporary creatives to manifest with they call “the future of memory” in this digital age.

“We have been able to work with an array of new designers,” explains Nadja Swarovksi, “to create unique pieces for the exhibition, alongside a selection of some of our most cutting-edge archival pieces.”

New commissions include design studio Random International’s “Sunlight Video”, in which light travels through a Swarovski lens to invoke analogue film projection. Previous Design Museum designer-in-residence Hye-Yoon Park pushes Swarovski’s manufacturing ability to its limits by creating a 30-cm ring of crystal encompassing a polar bear figurine of the same material.

Swedish designer Hilda Hellstöm goes mythic for her piece “The Monument”, in which a film joins totemlike piece of crystal and Jesmonite to tell the original story of Wattens, Austria, Swarovski’s home. Maarten Bass, meanwhile, goes a more interior route, creating a house with a chimney puffing out thought clouds, a high-tech invocation of the human mind.

“Digital Crystal: Swarovski at the Design Museum” runs at the Design Museum through January 3, 2013.