‘Matter is always already an ongoing historicity’ – Karen Barad, 2003

This paper explores reinterpretations of ornament derived from historical styles and made through contemporary craft skills; particularly through technological methods such as artificial intelligence, and virtual and augmented reality. As ‘ornament has once again advanced to the status of a legitimate means of artistic expression, the vehicle for content or messages …’ (Lindemann & Trier, 2011), this paper expands upon and develops these ideas to consider jewellery objects as ornaments which are animated, dynamic, and vibrant; performative within a post-digital realm inhabited by human and more-than-human entities. While Modernism diminished much of the language used previously to explain ornament, and therefore its meaning as materiality, we suggest current post-digital ways of making provide a space for reassessing vocabularies of ornament and decoration which were abandoned in the early twentieth century, and, by doing so, reinstate the significance of ‘matter’ as meaning-making in and beyond jewellery design in technoscientific processes. As Barad recognises, historicity is deeply enmeshed in posthuman collisions of matter, and this paper describes how historical, critical, and interpretative analysis might come together in a creative practice inquiry to reveal complex approaches to materialisation, affective experiences, historical distance, time, and technology. Collaborating with AI in reimagining historical jewellery matter encased in a Labradorite (a calcium-enriched feldspar mineral) ring (Infinite Loop, 2024) or reinterpreting an eighteenth-century gold snuff box through machine data (Visual Feast, 2018), such experimental jewellery projects illustrate exactly how ‘matter comes to matter’ according to Barad, creating new object morphologies and spatial representations of performativity. This paper contributes to current themes related to an understanding of design theory and ornament in jewellery objects in the twenty-first century. Specifically, by foregrounding matter as body, phenomena, material, substance, the paper reconnects and reestablishes jewellery objects in their foundational semi-natural realms, but with the additional constituent of non-human and more-than-human performativity.