It’s decorative art – it’s a text messager:
- You’re swirling around the ballroom, colourful skirts shimmering under the chandeliers when all of a sudden one of the crystal cascades above your head asks you for the next dance.
A surrealist dream? No, a design from the house of Swarovski crystals as it blazes a new trail in the often stuffy world of chandeliers.
The Austrian crystal group teamed up with 10 designers to reinvent luxurious lighting at Milan Design Week, mixing 21st century technology with the clean cuts D. Swarovski & Co has been perfecting for the last 109 years.
Glimmering in a black warehouse, an Art Deco falling spiral chandelier had crowds of party-goers mesmerised as they sent text messages to the light and watched their SMSs trickle through the crystal strands like a luxurious ticker tape.
“It’s time to shake up the industry. There are too many chandeliers around with no life and soul — just expensive cookie-cutter designs,” said Nadja Swarovski, grand-daughter of the company’s founder and vice president of communications.
“We’re challenging designers to rework the chandelier any way they want. The results are so modern in both terms of beauty and interactivity,” she said, as the ‘Lolita’ light behind her sparkled with the news that ‘Davide loves Carina’.
The technology behind ‘Lolita’ is more likely to be found in a physics lab than a design studio. Electronic processors strip data out of a mobile phone and send it to strings of LED lights hanging inside crystal cylinders.
Electrical impulses then switch the tiny white lights on and off in sequence so the words of the SMS seem to slide along the sparkling strings. [Reuters]
More on the Swarovski site here.
I guess it’s kind of like proposing on a stadium scoreboard, but European.