When the File Comes First: What Is the Original in Contemporary Jewelry?

A few weeks ago, I tried to reconstruct an old photograph of two rings. The physical pieces were no longer with me, but I still had the photograph and the original STL files. I thought that should be enough. I imported the geometry into Blender, rebuilt the material, lighting and camera, and tried to align the render with the old image.
It would not quite fit.


Three records of the same ring design: archival photograph, surviving STL geometry and CGI reconstruction, 2026. During reconstruction, the archived STL was found to differ slightly in proportion from the photographed physical pieces. Jewellery, 3D modelling, archival photograph and CGI reconstruction: Sogand Nobahar.


Eventually the problem became clear. The STL I had kept was proportionally different from the ring visible in the photograph. Slightly taller, slightly more open. The file was real. The photograph was real. But they did not describe exactly the same object. It was a small discrepancy, but it brought me back to a question I have been circling for years.

Which one was the work?

The file that survived? The object I once held? The photograph that documented it? Or some earlier digital version that may no longer exist? I have been working with 3D modelling in jewellery since 2014 and producing physical jewellery from digital files since 2017. In previous articles for Klimt02, I looked first at the wider digital transformation of the jewellery industry and then more specifically at additive manufacturing. This time I want to stay with something that seems simpler, but becomes less simple the longer you work digitally:

When the file comes first, what is the original?


There is no single “file”

We often talk about the digital file as though there were one stable thing sitting behind a physical object. In practice, there may be many. I might begin with a native Rhino .3dm model, make several working versions, export an STL for production, prepare another version for rendering, change a wall thickness after a printing test and later create a new production file. These files are related, but they are not equivalent.

An STL, for example, describes the surface geometry of an object as a polygon mesh. It does not retain colour, texture or other common CAD attributes, and when NURBS geometry is exported to STL, it is converted into a mesh according to the chosen export settings. 

So even asking “Is the file the original?” immediately creates another question: Which file?
The first sketch model? The final native model? The STL sent to the printer? The corrected version produced after the first physical test?

A digital workflow does not remove the problem of originality. It introduces versioning into it. And this matters because digital jewellery is often described through its reproducibility. A file can theoretically generate another object. But reproducibility only works if we know which version is supposed to be reproduced.


Stefania Lucchetta. Ring: Digital 65, 2008. Stellite and diamond. Two views of the finished piece. Photo: Stefania Lucchetta. Courtesy of the artist.


When the design exists before the object

This is not a new condition. Stefania Lucchetta began concentrating on 3D software and rapid prototyping around 2000 and developed limited-edition jewelry using polyamide, resins, titanium and stellite soon afterwards. Her work is particularly important because the technology was not used simply to reproduce forms that could already have been made conventionally. It became part of how those forms were conceived. 

In this kind of practice, the physical object is not necessarily where the design begins. The geometry already exists. Yet I am not convinced that this automatically makes the file the original. The file may be where the design is defined, but jewellery becomes something else through scale, weight, material, finishing and its relationship to the body.

Shahrzad Motallebi's work makes that translation visible in another way. The development studies she shared for Code to Cast show several digital variations before fabrication. In her practice, algorithmic modelling is combined with 3D printing and lost-wax casting, moving from mathematical structures through digital geometry and finally into metal.

There is no simple one-to-one movement from “digital original” to “physical copy.” There is a chain. And each stage can contain decisions that affect the final work. Perhaps that is the first important distinction: the digital file can be the source of a work without being the whole work.


Shahrzad Motallebi, digital development studies for Code to Cast, Spring 2023. Courtesy of the artist.


One file, five finishes

I encounter this constantly now in visualisation. For one recent CGI study, I took a single Lolita earring model and rendered it in five finishes. Silver. Blue. Cream. Black. Green. Only the black version had ever been physically produced. The other four were completely plausible. They used the same geometry. They could be photographed from the same angle, lit in the same way and shown with a convincing material surface.

But they were not physical jewels. They were possibilities.

My current CGI work often begins before an object has been manufactured at all. A brand can use one model to evaluate metals, plating, enamel or stones before committing to samples. The image may be visually convincing enough to look like a photograph of an existing object, while actually describing something that has not yet been produced. 

That creates another distinction that I think jewellery increasingly needs to document carefully:
A visualised variation is not automatically a produced variation.
A file can contain more possibilities than the physical collection ever realises.


Sogand Nobahar: Lolita earrings, 2020. One digital model visualised in five finishes; only the black version was physically produced. Jewellery, 3D modelling and CGI: Sogand Nobahar / Nobahar Design.


This becomes particularly important with limited editions. If a model can technically be produced indefinitely, the size of an edition is no longer determined by whether another object can be made. It is determined by what the maker has chosen to authorise. Technical reproducibility and authorised reproduction are two different things. The first belongs to the technology. The second belongs to authorship.


And sometimes the object comes first

The direction can also reverse. For a CGI project involving Maymoma's Contrarié Sphere Ring, I did not receive CAD geometry. The physical ring already existed, documented through photographs. I reconstructed the model from those images and its dimensions, then used the new geometry to build the CGI scene. 


Maymoma: Contrarié Sphere Ring. Original physical piece and CGI reconstruction created from photographic references and dimensions. Jewellery: Maymoma. 3D modelling and CGI: Sogand Nobahar.


In that case, the file clearly cannot claim to be the origin of the piece. It is a translation of an existing object.

Another project required the opposite decision. A handmade piece by Clara Del Papa had irregularities that were intrinsic to it. Building a clean digital model would have smoothed those differences away. I therefore kept the jewellery photographic and created the environment around it digitally instead.


Clara Del Papa. Convivium, 2013. 925 silver, mixed media, balsamic-vinegar fire oxidation, natural sands and fine spices as colours. The physical jewel was retained photographically inside a digitally constructed environment rather than remodelled. Jewellery: Clara Del Papa. CGI environment and compositing: Sogand Nobahar.


That decision interests me because digital skill is often demonstrated by showing what we can recreate. Sometimes the more important skill is knowing what should not be recreated. If digitising an object removes the information that makes it itself, the file may become technically accurate and materially false.
 

A file can survive and still be ambiguous

Digital files are often imagined as stable because they do not tarnish, crack or wear. But they have another kind of fragility. Formats change. Software changes. Exporting changes what information is retained. An STL does not contain everything held in a native modelling file, just as a rendered image does not contain the editable geometry that produced it. Digital preservation itself treats file format and retained information as serious questions when considering long-term access to CAD and 3D material. 

The freedom of digital production therefore comes with infrastructure. A file can move easily, duplicate perfectly and cross borders almost instantly, but it still depends on software, formats, machines and enough documentation for somebody in the future to understand what they are looking at. I came across a similar problem while writing Reading a Block Explorer for The ALANA Project. Blockchain records can be publicly visible and still mean very little if the person looking at them does not know how to read the record.  A jewellery archive can have the same problem.

A folder containing twenty files does not automatically tell us which one is definitive.
ring_final.3dm
ring_final2.3dm
ring_final_PRINT.stl
ring_new.stl
Anyone who has worked digitally for long enough knows exactly where this is going. The problem is not whether the data survived. The problem is whether its status survived with it.


So where is the original?

I no longer think there is one answer. For some jewelry, the physical object is clearly primary and the file is documentation or reconstruction. For other work, the geometry exists digitally before any physical object and the file carries a much stronger authorial role.

In limited digital production, the first print may not even be the most important physical piece. It might be a test. A later version may correct something and become the version the artist actually authorises. And a render may represent the geometry perfectly while showing a material version that was never produced. Perhaps the word original becomes less useful when we force it to identify one privileged object.

What matters more is the authored continuity between versions. Which file did the maker approve? Which physical objects were actually produced from it?
What changed? Which variations remained visual possibilities and which became part of the edition? What records connect those things?

In a file-first practice, originality may therefore sit less in being first and more in being authoritative. The more technically reproducible jewellery becomes, the more important those decisions become.

Digital technology did not eliminate the original.
It made us responsible for defining it more carefully.

 

About the author

Sogand Nobahar is an Iranian designer, writer and creative director based in Italy. Her multidisciplinary practice moves between contemporary jewelry, physical objects, 3D/CGI, digital fashion and emerging technologies. She founded Nobahar Design in 2017 and later co-founded Orbyline, working across physical and digital forms of design.

Her work is particularly interested in what happens when design moves between file and object, and how digital tools and infrastructures affect making, authorship, ownership, representation and access. This has led her practice beyond digital fabrication into questions around decentralisation, digital ownership and the systems that increasingly sit behind creative work.

Alongside her design practice, she writes about the changing relationship between jewelry, technology and digital culture. For Klimt02, her previous essays have examined contemporary jewelry today, the digital transformation of the jewelry industry, and additive manufacturing and 3D printing. She also writes for ALANA on digital infrastructure and creator-facing technologies, including blockchain, DAOs, wallets and digital ownership.

Her current practice includes jewelry CGI and digital visualization, working with existing objects, archival files and 3D models to create new visual environments and to investigate how jewelry can exist before, after and sometimes independently from physical production.


sogandnobahar.com
LinkedIn | Instagram