faithless puller: Have we forgotten how to remember?

Tiffany O?Callaghan, CultureLab editor

Thought Cloud by Maarten Baas (Image: Luke Hayes/Design Museum)

Before you see anything, you begin to hear it, crackling and creaking just beyond view. Then, when you actually enter the exhibition at the Design Museum in London, you find that those noises are coming from a cave - or rather, a large hall painted black, with two giant screens on opposite walls that recreate the feel of a cave. Only in this case, the crystals clinging to rocks and rising out of crevices aren?t moving in geological time. They are growing in bursts of seconds and minutes. Time is sped up and the crystals are in constant vibrant flux.

Changing our perception of time to make visible often unseen aspects of the world around us was the point of the animation, say film-makers Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, who together make up Semiconductor. ?We are really used to thinking about landscape as a static thing, but it?s a constantly changing environment,? says Gerhardt.

Their gigantic, site-specific film installation The Shaping Grows is on display as part of the Design Museum?s new Digital Crystal exhibition, in partnership with luxury crystal company Swarovski. The show features 14 different works that explore how digital culture impacts upon our memory and concept of time.
Semiconductor digitally depicted crystals inside a cave and then sped up their development by varying degrees - depending on the type of crystal - so that change could be seen by the naked eye. ?Some may form over years, some tens of thousands of years,? Jarman explains. ?We condensed the earth?s movements into a timeframe you could imagine.? The moving crystals are synced to a groaning soundtrack of seismic data, gathered from earthquake recordings over the past couple of years. ?

As well as toying with perceptions of time, many of the works on display examine our changing relationship with physical objects and the memories they summon, now that photographs, music collections and many other elements of our daily lives mainly exist in digital form. As we make this shift, do we lose something in the process?

?It?s a paradox,? says museum director Deyan Sudjic. ?On the one hand, the digital world means we all have immortality with a Twitter account.? A few generations ago a single grey image may have been the only documentation of an event ? and a single jumping-off point for a plunge into memory ? but today we can turn to digital snapshots for minute-by-minute records of events. ?Our memory muscles are not being exercised,? Sudjic says.

Lamenting the atrophy of our physical worlds, artist Maarten Baas has sculpted Thought Cloud, a dark figure, hunched within an otherwise empty, tiny black house. Yet even this dystopian portrait of a future without? physical things, or the space to house them, leaves room for optimism: out of the claustrophobic little cell, the figure?s thoughts escape in dazzling crystal clouds through a tiny chimney, growing and expanding as they rise.

We may increasingly be leaving the physical world behind, but New York-based artist Marcus Tremonto imagines a future in which we will come full circle ? and a flat digital world will be rendered three dimensional again. From a few paces away, his HOLO Center Table seems to be a mirror-surfaced dining table with a pale blue oval at the middle. Yet when you step just a bit closer, a 3D crystal vase appears above the pool of blue, projected from overhead. ?In 100 years, will we just have holographic centrepieces?? he asks.

To create the work, Tremonto used software originally developed for rendering 3D projections for military and architectural applications, and now also used for creating 3D printed objects. He imagines a future in which our photographs are not simply images, but able to bring our former selves back to three dimensions in front of us. It seems to be a future in which our need for physical objects has disappeared, but our desire for them lingers.

Pandora by Fredrikson Stallard (Image: Luke Hayes/Design Museum)

That desire for tangible beauty is summed up perfectly at the centre of the exhibition with a glittering, shifting and utterly dazzling chandelier made of nearly 2000 large crystals. On long strands suspended from the ceiling, these crystals rise and fall according to an ever changing, digital program. The work, by artist Frederikson Stallard, is mesmerising and delightful, at once ephemeral but unmistakably real. ?

Digital Crystal runs at the Design Museum in London until 13 January 2013.