Our lives have more or less rebooted in this post-Covid world, but they still remain divided between the digital and the physical dimensions. After all, many of our activities and passions - think about meetings with colleagues or friends in other countries, playing videogames or shopping for bargains - still take place in digital environments.
So in today’s post let's look at two inspirations - digital and physical - reunited by the same shade, fuchsia.
The first one is an NFT, "Singularity" by generative artist Hideki Tsukamoto, who uses the blockchain as an artistic medium. The digital work of art was part of the Native Digital 1.2 sale on Sotheby's Metaverse, an immersive destination for collectors of digital art. The sale comprised 53 lots of culturally significant art from the vaults of 19 collectors and Hideki Tsukamoto's artwork (sold for 60,480 USD) consists in a series of purple, bright fuchsia and pink circles on a dark background.
The circles form a visually intriguing effect, but if you're after a tactile thrill go for something handcrafted like soprarizzo velvet fabric by the Venice-based Tessitura Bevilacqua.
The soprarrizzo fabric featured in this post is characterised by the lion motif - a symbol of power that historically appeared in different cultures and civilisations, from Egypt to Mesopotamia. The lion motif arrived to Italy from the Middle East through the Silk Road.
This type of velvet that we often mentioned in previous posts is made employing silk threads arranged on a loom in 400 reels. From the reels, the threads run through the holes in the cardboards placed above the loom, allowing the pattern to take shape.
The weaver slips between the threads of the warps coming out of the loom thin needles to weave the velvet overlay, which will then be removed with great precision. These needles are not identical to one another: those with a round section are used to create the effect of curly velvet. Others, however, have a groove through which the weaver runs a razor blade that cuts the threads of the pile, obtaining the cut velvet, higher than the curly one. Hence the name "soprarizzo" (or "sopra-riccio", that is "over-the-curls").
Guess apart from the digital/physical medium, there is another difference between these two pieces: it can take a long time to make a digital work of art, but soprarizzo velvet takes longer. This is indeed a time-consuming activity and an artisan can only make a 30cm piece of textile a day. So what will your inspiration be, digital or physical?
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