A close-up of a wooden cabinet featuring an intricate marquetry pattern of geometric shards in various brown tones. A small door is attached with a gold-coloured hinge, accented by a few small inserts of blue, red and grey.

Studio Swine's Prism Cabinet is a portal to a tiny digital world

Words: James Cartwright
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Date: 15 October 2012; Work
Art

Studio Swine have been producing a run of superb work recently. We featured their studio space not long ago, but since then they’ve been hard at work concocting yet another visually stunning piece of interior architecture – this time with a technological twist.

The Prism Cabinet is not only a striking piece of furniture created from the very finest reclaimed London hardwoods (the design alone would be enough to have us raving about it) but within the cabinet’s interior is a 180 degree holographic representation of Keiichi Matsuda’s Prism installation, an elaborate data visualisation of London’s vital statistics.

As a progressive use for traditional furnishings the Prism Cabinet is second to none, forcing us to reconsider the ways in which we engage with the digital world – why always brushed aluminium and retina displays? – but on a primitive level we just love the idea of a hologram inside a beautiful box. The future’s here!