18 May 2022 | Opinions,People

Andrés Reisinger: Furniture in all dimensions

Hybrid furnitures that remain collectible in all their forms (digital and material).

DS.WRITER:

Sophia Throuvala

Image: The upholstery consists of 20,000 fabric petals | Source www.dezeen.com

Andrés Reisinger is an Argentinian designer of “non-existent” furniture. Non-existent because they are digital and not actual-functional objects. Last February (21st) Reisinger sold ten pieces from his NFT collection titled The Shipping, which he informally calls “impossible”, reaching the “unbelievable” total amount of 450.000$, while one of these objects was sold for almost 70.000$ in an online auction. Specifically, the furniture pieces were “sold out” in less than 10 minutes of being on the Nifty Getaway platform while the piece that reached almost 70.000$ was created by Reisinger in collaboration with its buyer.

All of Reisinger’s furniture is compatible with all three-dimensional metaverses and open worlds like Minecraft and Decentraland, thus broadening the target group of potential buyers. Moreover, these objects can be used in digitally augmented reality and platforms like Unity so that they are included in the “scenography” of games, animation and CGI movies, revealing a new aspect of the word “functionality”.

The authenticity and property rights of bought, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are certified by the transcription of the encrypted transaction within the object itself. Reisinger stated to Dezeen that it was a very ambitious project and he hopes that more projects like this will follow, equally or even more successful ones, from other new creators. He hopes that he “opened the door” to a new path which promotes the careers of digital designers increasing their demand in the respective market.

The now well-paid designer of digital furniture creates surrealist pieces, which initially gained a lot of popularity through social media, and specifically Instagram where he first became famous, concentrating unprecedented amounts in online purchasing. In particular, already in 2019 he realised and exhibited in Barcelona his previously 3D armchair titled Hortensia Chair, which had been in high demand on Instagram back in 2018. The armchair, which appears soft like a cloud, was eventually crafted from 20.000 artificial petals in collaboration with Julia Esqué with whom they worked on how to best render the texture of the 3D chair as to manifest its essence.

The first real version of the chair is now on display in Barcelona | Source: www.dezeen.com

Andrés Reisinger, the Deep Space sofa exists only digitally | Source www.dezeen.com

The furniture of the NFT collection The Shipping is a reference to the dream-like and otherworldly while focusing once again on texture. The designer himself chooses to name some of the collection’s furniture impossible objects since they constitute direct references to the surrealist constructions and painting but with the use of a more futuristic and extraterrestrial, we could say, palette, like Complicated Drawer for example -a digital version of the 1936 “Anthropomorphic cabinet”- a renown work of Salvador Dali. Some of his “impossible” pieces are formalistically inspired even by foods or the sensation of consuming something. For example, Shiny Pink Table evokes the process of chewing gum or getting stuck to it, and the extra movement of the objects makes them seem even less functional or comfortable.

Complicated Drawer is an "impossible object" | Source: www.dezeen.com

However, five of these digital furniture pieces, which were recently sold, are also about to be realised into material objects and sent to their buyers. For this purpose, Reisinger will once again collaborate with furniture and material specialists, like the Spanish architectural brand Isern Serra, with which they will co-design and actualise, amongst others, the Pink Time Table.

The Tangled chair resembles Terje Ekstrem's Ekstrem lounger | Source www.dezeen.com

As he stated to Dezeen, buyers can maintain the digital form of their furniture in an online gallery and sell them once their value increases even more. As he characteristically mentions, NFTs, contrary to other digital forms of art, like music, preserve an authenticity within the product itself, there aren’t any reproductions, while he also mentions the autonomy granted by online buying and selling, opposed to galleries and auction houses, since the artist keeps the largest possible percentage from the profits and addresses a global audience more easily, increasing and regulating prices by will, while continuing to receive percentage from resales according to its NFT content copyright.

The intrigue of this furniture lies within their hybrid conception since they can be circulated digitally as well as physically, preserving their market and collectable value in both forms. As stated by Reisinger himself "we are not escaping from the material world anytime soon… Instead, I believe we are expanding our experience into a new hybrid era of extended reality, in which art and culture are freed from spatial and temporal constraints and the rules of experience are rewritten."