Maintaining Authenticity: Transferring patina from the real world to the digital to retain narrative value

Abstract

This research is concerned with utilising new technologies to harvest existing narrative, symbolic and emotive value for use in a digital environment enabling ‘emotional durability’ (Chapman 2005) in future design. The projects discussed in this paper have been conducted as part of PhD research by Rosemary Wallin into ‘Technology for Sustainable Luxury’ at University of the Arts London, and visual effects technology research undertaken by Florian Stephens at University of West London. Luxury goods, digital animation and perfection Luxury, as a concept and field, is of interest as it speaks about the values of a given society. The historian Maxine Berg refers to luxury in the eighteenth century as a ‘catalyst and a signpost of social and intellectual change’ (Berg 2003). In a contemporary context, high-end image making and advertising give luxury goods, bags and shoes a plastic, hyper-real, glossy surface, which has now become generically associated with luxury products. Leather is one of the materials associated with luxury goods. Selected from the highest grade, un-marked and homogeneous, all trace of the animal skin from which it is made obliterated, luxury leathers are expensive in financial, ethical and environmental terms.

By contrast, this homogeneity of surface is a source of frustration in the world of 3D animation. Hours are spent re-creating the detritus of human life. Wear and tear patina is applied to objects intended to look real, which in their raw digital form would otherwise look too perfect and therefore unrealistic.

Whilst the world of luxury goods attempts to remove all trace of reality from its vision of perfection, animators are trying desperately to re-introduce it. The point of convergence for both these practices is the skin or surface, and the site of value is the patina. Patina and value – A historical context
Before fashion became the predominant cultural system of status, there was a system of status in England which utilised similarly encoded and nuanced information provided by patina. Novelty and the ever-changing tastes of fashion are a product of a consumer society, which exploded inthe eighteenth century. Before this, English society revolved around family, honour and the transition from what was known as ungentle to gentle standing – to become a gentleman. This process followed a ‘five generation’ rule (Ferne 1586). Patina was one of the indicators that possessions – and therefore wealth – had been in the family for a long period of time. Patina helped to maintain the social hierarchy by converting money into status very slowly.
The PhD research, which provides a context for part of this paper, examines the potential of patina as a site of value linking objects and people. The value of objects and our relationship to them is particularly important in the sphere of sustainable design. For an object to be traded as authentic or preserved in a museum collection, it must have the signs across its surface of the narrative denoting its age and heritage. Similarly, for products to be kept, saved, and cherished by consumers rather than quickly discarded due to perceived obsolescence, we need to find systems of design which both activate and harness the bonds that connect us to the objects we own and use. Value is not simply housed in the cost of a precious material or the quality of workmanship; beautifully crafted work is destroyed every day
to make way for the new or fashionable. Value is attributed through a network or constellation of qualities, of which materiality and craftsmanship may be important, but not exclusive aspects.

The historic emphasis on slowness and inter-generational ownership is in many ways echoed in the move towards sustainable design thinking. Perhaps the notion of patina deserves re-examination in this new light.

Could patina help to preserve an emotional bond, and if so, how could patina be utilised in a sustainable design process today?