Singular Multiples. Contemporary Jewellery Beyond The Digital.

The multiple, in its relations with art and industry, is the starting point for an investigation into the evolution of jewellery design. In going beyond an obsolete notion of industrial serial production, contemporary jewellery stands out as a highly innovative field of research, for its ability to understand the object through new aesthetics, meanings and materials, towards an idea of a singular multiple. Research opens a design perspective to jewellery that is designed for both tangible and intellectual consumption, because it expands its meanings to a wider spectrum of themes and goals, such as sustainability, material and technological innovation, political and social issues that concern contemporaneity. Moving away from the domain of rationality, the essay analyzes digital technologies as elements of reflection through which the most humanistic and emotional component of the project finds space, for the establishment of an intimate relationship with the human being. From digital to post-digital, mixing atoms and bits, even jewellery design builds new scenarios, where innovative software, 3D scanners, manipulations of materials and cross-disciplinary contaminations expand the boundaries of research. The book ends with the story of a collective design experience that involved several figures of the contemporary jewellery scene in Italy, through the organization of co-projects and workshops, aimed at the dissemination of a design culture that takes into consideration new technologies and digital processes currently under way.