Rug, Nebula Heic

The first rug was a bachelor’s degree project in the art and technology module. After completing the photography class at Zurich University of the Arts, David Schönen and Nadja Stäubli founded the label Schoenstaub (Schönen + Stäubli). For their first collection with photo motifs, they used pictures taken with the Hubble space telescope that had just been made public by NASA and ESA. The spectacular image of a spiral nebula provides a glimpse of a far-off galaxy. It is made up of 1.5 gigapixels, which the designers reduced for the rug template to 1.6 million knots/m² and translated into the color scale used by the manufacturer, an industrial carpet factory in Iran. Transferred into material form, the image has a lower resolution, but the solid-colored, closely woven nylon yarn lends it a magical depth, and it feels surprisingly soft and velvety to the touch.