virtual made physical

has digital really become the “new standard” for storing?

It is a matter of fact that words like “folder” or “archive”, or even verbs like “drag”, “send”, and so on.. have broadened their original meaning to the digital world. There was a time when mouses did not have right-bottons and did not have the power to create folders, stores did not sell apps but milk and we were dragging sleds instead of icons.

What Zygmunt Bauman calls the “liquid world” seems suddenly make sense while I witness this process of virtualization of the physical world. Things that make sense in our life are more and more growing in number and complexity, and they also has to flow fast. This is why making things virtual is kind of handy. Until the point we realize that we keep spending more and more time in virtual spaces, rather than real, and this can be also frustrating if the escape from reality is not the intention.

New Folder turns the process the other way around, making concrete something typically peculiar of a virtual interface. Virtual and real issues contaminate each other in one object. The folder is back an object that is touchable and visible into the real world, yet light and transparent. In fact its body is made of PMMA and it is portraying a “new folder” icon with a 4 colours silk-screen printing. As a monitor does, the 3 folder formats (A4, A3 and A2) give room to a different number of pixels, making the printed image sharper with growing dimensions.

Client: Lettera G