A shell, a branch, a ring

A shell, a branch, a ring. Or are they? I ask myself and wonder how they feel when touched. Soft like styrofoam or cold like porcelain. Do they float or sink, break or bounce? Like Ludwig Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit, I can only imagine one possibility at a time. My mind is inevitably stuck in a spacio-temporal physical prison, not free to roam the hybrid worlds of conflicting possibilities like those inhabited by Florian Adolph’s digital sculptures. But are they truly free? In the end, they also need a surface on which to manifest themselves. They are but instructions that manifest themselves whenever summoned to the surface of our screens—a line of code, and nothing more.

Like many of the works in the artist’s oeuvre, these sculptures exist in hard to define spaces between the virtual and the physical, between the hand made and the mechanical. They are digital renderings, of course, yet they feel handmade. And they are, in a way. A hand is still controlling a device that navigates between code-lines and display-pixels. And it’s a painter’s hand, no doubt. I look at them idly spin on their axis, displaying themselves like the objects they are. I imagine they were found in a cave, a deep underground cave in a —verse, one of the sprawling —verses, maybe even ours. Fantastic post-archaeological treasures that shine in their unspectacularly. A shell, a branch, a ring. Merely this, and nothing more.

For me, they float. They get carried away by the streams like coconuts from island to island. You can find them on the beach amongst the tidewrack. Perhaps they grow roots when they reach the sands, slowly getting bleached by the scorching sun. Or perhaps they stay as they are, like pyroplastic, defiant of all the eroding powers around them. I pick up the shell and put it up against my ear. I hear the sound. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. Tis the wind, and nothing more.

By Ben Livne-Weitzman

The NFT contains additional files as collector rewards and grants the holder access to the artist's discord.

The individual pieces of the limited edition can be broken at a later date and thus be transformed into unique pieces (shards). "Break link” can be found on the artist homepage www.florianadolph.com The date will be announced shortly thereafter.