The AURORA TABLE—with a glass vortex top that's embedded with a network of user-controlled LEDS—reskins itself, chameleon-like, at the touch of a button, sending out a breathtaking array of shifting light patterns. PHOTO: Brad Swanets

DESIGN ANIMISM
If Antonioni’s retail spaces unfold like environmental narratives, then his furniture designs are like material poems, drawing from a surprisingly more diverse set of references than his flight fixation might have you believe. With his Mantis Workstation, for example, slices of mahogany and long-grain ash rotate from a central apex to imitate the movements of a praying mantis, while his Waltz and Disco Tables feature kinetic, tempered-glass tabletops that swing with measured and unpredictable motions to reference the syncopation of each dance.

The EOS family of floor lamps. EOS is the mythological Greek Goddess of the dawn, whose "celestial light beams on the world with reddening splendours bright," according to an orphic hymn. The tubular, milk-white lamps sway gently as LEDs display patterns of similarly celestial light. PHOTO: Visopia

Many of Antonioni’s designs are undertaken with a kind of animistic approach to furniture making, an inclination most fully realized in the Aurora Table, part of his Living Furniture series. Embedded with a user-controlled network of LEDs developed by Aaron Rincover of Los Angeles’ Visopia, the glass tabletop displays a range of shifting patterns of light, programmable from a remote control, to mimic the halo effect of the aurora borealis. Were they not so wedded to his larger vision, the high-tech bells and whistles would run dangerously close to gimmickry. For Antonioni, however, technology isn’t the end itself but a means to explore his fascination with objects that behave like living organisms, as the Aurora Table reskins itself, chameleon-like.

FROM THIN AIR
It’s easy to imagine Antonioni hurtling through the 750-squarefoot construction site of Flight 001, yelling and screaming—but in a fun way. His passion for ideas is boundless, and he discusses his FutureDesk concept with the fervor you’d expect from a man of Italian, Argentinean, and Greek descent. The piece, which currently exists only on paper, hinges on the notion that a desk should be more than a clunky slab of wood on which the clutter of life sits. “Instead,” he says, “let’s make something that is your life. This piece is an extension of the user.” Once realized, the FutureDesk would clear out the tangibles of office life, unsightly realities like file folders and stacks of paper—even the computer.

The desk, in fact, is the computer. Made of light-sensitive LCD film sandwiched between angled panes of glass, the desktop would exhibit an array of digital tools as 2D interfaces. Downloadable keyboards and multiple computing windows would glide across the surface, or disappear altogether, at the touch of the screen. Antonioni’s ultimate goal is to capture the attention of an electronics company—Apple comes immediately to mind—with the expertise and deep pockets to develop the technology. “Instead of designing according to the limitations of a desk,” he says, “where the concern is how many pencils or file folders can its drawers hold, the FutureDesk is limitless.”

In the course of a conversation, Antonioni tosses out dozens of visions like this for a brave, new world. He proposes retail spaces with digital walls that undulate and change colors, salvaging the shopping experience from the banality that is “going to kill retail.” He waxes poetic about the potential for RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification, to “revolutionize the way we interact with products.” With his trademark manner of speaking in italics, he tells you that “the technology is available to make this happen today,” but what he really means is that today isn’t soon enough. And if Antonioni seems impatient to see his ideas realized, blame it on the warp speed with which he pulls them out of thin air.
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