Ada Sokół, the 3D Digital Artist who Brought Extinct Animals Back to life at Design Week
Why is digital art a language that attracts big brands like bees to honey? Knowing how to draw in 3D and how to sculpt shapes in space? With Ada Sokół we will dispel any doubts.
She defines herself as a digital sculptor. Ada Sokół , barely 30, is one of the most courted names in 3D design. Her works incorporate an evident fascination for flora and fauna, cultivated with a clinical eye, thanks to the use of three-dimensional technology. Hers is a glossy pastel palette that radiates and transfers fantasy lymph into surreal and metaphysical scenarios in a clear restitution of her personal contemplation of beauty. Burberry, Nike, Apple and Rimowa are just some of the fashion and lifestyle brands seduced by her work, awards that in a few years have made her the most popular 3D digital artist of the moment. We met her at Fuorisalone 2022 during Design Week the occasion of A Life Extraordinary, the presentation of the novelties of the Dutch furniture brand Moooi.
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As a digital artist expert in 3D, Sokół had already collaborated in the past with the company founded by Marcel Wanders, a hybrid fashion project where the surreal animation of Gentle Monster's sunglasses managed to distort the actual reality. It is evident that a first approach like that has served to trace a new path in the modern communication of dynamic and visionary brands as they may have been in 2017. But let's go back to today. The Extinct Animals of Moooi are a series of magnificent creatures rediscovered in the documents kept in the archives of natural history museums around the world evolved into increasingly magical and dreamlike species thanks to the creative minds of the Dutch brand. Returning to the breath of life at the hands of the digital artist Sokół was like closing a great narrative circle. Asking her to tell us how Mimic Moth, the chameleon moth, or Queen Cobra , the blue snake with hairy rattle, have come back to live within the extra-extraordinary scenarios designed by Moooi was as natural as accepting that in some part of the oceans there really is a specimen of the jaguar shark (cit.)
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Moooi's Golden Tiger comes back to life in all its feline beauty thanks to Ada Sokół
As soon as we ask her how the second collaboration with Moooi came about, Ada immediately replies: « It was strange. When I moved from Paris to Stockholm at the end of the year, I started looking for beautiful furniture to decorate my new home. And when I remembered Moooi, a few days later I received an email from them with the collaboration proposal for this project. A dream that has come true. "
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Knowing some technicalities of 3D art is useful because of the bervity of Sokół's digital "pieces" could deceive as easy to implement practices. If 10 seconds of animation, that is the length of the moving sequences ofSokół's digital art, are equivalent to 250 images, glimpsing a disproportionate amount of hours, days and weeks necessary for the virtual mapping of the subjects contained in each single frame, make the perfect complexity of the company. Renderings included. The work of a digital artist therefore requires a dedication and patience that equals, or even exceeds, those of restorers. Where in the case of digital art in motion there is nothing pre-existing but only completely rebuilt from scratch. "In these months of working on the Moooi project, I had to deal with two rather engaging and new opposites for me: from working on large-scale animals such as the tiger, then inserting it into its surrounding enviroment, I then had to dwell on the smaller ones for a long time. Details of an insect - I am thinking of their infinitesimal hair - with a determination so superior to that of a tenaciously passionate entomologist. But it was worth it. A truly beautiful journey.
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For Ada Sokół, 3D Art opens up new worlds that we can't help but enter
While we chat comfortably seated on Aldora, the new sofa as sinuous and caressing as the petals of a calla, a novelty designed by Cristina Celestino, a crucial question arises. We ask her why in this moment of return to presence and where the direct tactile and visual experience of objects and enviromentas is appreciated and lived with a new awareness, brands are however attracted by the digital and immersive representation of products and contents related to them. "To keep up with the times," she replies candidly. With argumented reality, the Web3 and therefor the Metaverse, brands feel that the moment is approaching more and more where thoughts, products and experiences can and must be shared on multiple levels and, if desired, also save on production and storage."
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Mimic Moth, Moooi's chameleon moth with Sokół ends up becoming an orchid
Finally, we also talk about her home. Once in Warsaw, then in London and Paris, now Ada Sokół's roots have taken sprout in Stockholm. The most important complement? His name is Tomasz, he doesn't lose sight of her for a moment and, on the contrary, during our interview he even hands her a glass to accompany the conversation. On the living side, the computer room is obviously her favorite room: full of plants that coexist with the rays of the cinema-sized monitors, if necessary it becomes a very relaxing meditative space. We want to believe her. What are the pieces of furniture that Sokół would love to have at home? Anything by Neri Oxam, mother of the concept of Material Ecology which with each product is created only in collaboration with nature, she also mentions without hesitation the art of the Korean artist Anicka Yi, where metamorphosis, interdependence, ecosystem and symbiosis are the key words of his interdisciplinary works. What awaits you in the future? Echibits and the conversion of his 3D art into NFT. The stargate between Here and There has opened definitively.
