Infinite Loop by Silvia Weidenbach & Jon Emmony

In Infinite Loop, Silvia Weidenbach (Glasgow) and Jon Emmony (London) fed an artificial intelligence with images of historical finger rings from over 3,000 years of human history. These include images of Greek, Roman and Etruscan jewellery from the Staatliche Antikensammlungen in Munich, images of objects from the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg and the Alice and Louis Koch Collection in the Swiss National Museum in Zurich.

These ring images convey the wishes, dreams and realities of their creators at the time. The AI learns from these pieces of jewellery and explores the meaning of materiality, form and features in her own way. It then begins its own creative journey, designing endless new rings for us that somehow feel familiar yet distant.

The physical ring, alongside the video below will be presented in autumn 2022 in the new permanent exhibition “Handwerk. 1500-1900” at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nuremberg.