Part of the Material Spirits Serie.
Since ancient times objects have provided scaffolding to people’s lives and deaths by giving expression to their hopes and fears.
This is why humans have always decorated objects – because they felt them as inhabited by sentient spirits.
It was only with modernity that objects lost their magic to become merely functional, with their decoration being removed.


Today, as we enter the digital era, objects are awaking again. Though this time not metaphorically – digital technology is giving objects an actual life as it makes them literally able to “sense”.

In so doing, digitization engenders a process of “secularization” of objects, whose magic soul becomes an actual function.

Will soulless highly-performing objects still be meaningful to us?


Stefano Caggiano,
Design Critic.


Photo by Francesco Minotti