Swarovski has teamed up with London Design Museum to unveil a Digital Crystal exhibition which is aimed to examine the perception of memories in the digital age.

Photo: Pandora by Fredrikson Stall, from artinfo.com

Digital Crystal: Swarovski At Design Museum includes 15 stunning installations from contemporary designers who were tasked to play off the theme of the lost connection between objects and time. The exhibit is open until January 13, 2013.

The installations vary but all of them use crystals and technology to present incredibly beautiful works. For example, Ron Arad created Lolita, a chandelier with more than 2,000 Swarovski crystals and 1,000 white LEDs—these make the object function like a big interactive pixel board and displays tweets (#DigitalCrystal) and SMS messages.

Ron Arad, Digital Crystal: Swarovski at the Design Museum from Design Museum on Vimeo.

Yves Behar also created a chandelier but used only one crystal, one low-energy LED light and one faceted paper shade, which resulted in multiple reflections and the rainbow color-burst achieved through the amplification of a single cut stone.

Paul Cocksedge created a set of classic diamond shapes floating in the air by shooting 2mm-wide laser beams off a series of aligned mirrors. The object is perceived real but in fact it’s an illusion, which disappears at the flick of a switch.

Paul Cocksedge, Digital Crystal: Swarovski at the Design Museum from Design Museum on Vimeo.

«With the demise of the analogue era, our relationship and connection with personal memory, photographs, diaries, letters, time and ephemera is changing,» said Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic. «‘Digital Crystal: Swarovski’ explores the meaning of memory in the digital age.»

«[The show] takes this as its starting point, to question the future and our relationship with the changing world, where it seems all too easy to lose connection with the tangible and the real, as we move ever faster to a digital age where memory and the personal possessions we once held so highly are now online or gone in an instant.»

Recently, Yoko Ono has collaborated with Swarovski to create a limited-edition key-cut crystal fall 2012 collection.