Furniture like a badly loaded image: Jonas Hejduk weaves pixelated Persian rugs
The French designer deliberately blurs rugs, benches and wallpapers – a response to photorealism, AI and algorithms. His model is the graphics of old video games.
Symbolic image · Photo: unbekannt (gemeinfrei) / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain (cropped and resized)
French designer Jonas Hejduk creates furnishings that look like heavily compressed digital images. His works include a blurred Persian rug titled 'Traditional-rug-1.jpeg' and a tiger-skin rug from the 'Crash.jpeg' collection; a bench called 'Log-texture-1.jpeg' is wrapped in a blurry bark skin, recalling logs in 1990s video games. The rugs have their file name and file size woven into the surface.
For the rugs, Hejduk deliberately reduces the resolution of a high-definition pattern and then has it woven from wool and cotton on a computer-controlled jacquard loom. According to his website, the pieces are designed in Rotterdam and produced in Heeze in the Netherlands with EE Exclusives; the Persian rug measures 220 by 150 centimetres and is limited to seven pieces.
Hejduk positions his work against photorealism and artificial intelligence; to social media algorithms, he says, the pieces look outdated. Speaking to Dezeen, he described the pieces as 'objects of mourning and resistance'. In the same aesthetic, he also makes ceramics, garments, bed sheets and wallpapers.