Since I’m not much of a comic book fan, my first exposure to Romolo Stanco’s GreenLantern sent me straight to the reference corner for a quick schooling vis a vis the emerald-tinted hero. Apart from discovering that the persona has appeared in multiple guises with multiple narratives since circa 1940, I learned that the character’s power depends on his possession of a magical ring created from a light source of “green solid energy,” thus imparting to the user such potent powers as flight, instantaneous interstellar transport, time travel, telepathy, language translation, invisibility, phase shifts, and shape-shifting. So the Lantern–if I may–is a fictional construct fairly bursting with metaphoric potential. This plasticity is likely one reason Stanco chose the name to characterize his very own magical lantern, a combination vase/lamp with a phase shift all its own.

GreenLantern. Designed by Romolo Stanco for Nonesiste.

Stanco’s GreenLantern is made of something called “liquid wood,” a notion that might seem to turn physics on its head, until one encounters the explication: “The lignin, the main part of liquid wood, is a natural polymer that melts when heated allowing it to be injected as a chemical polymer.” So you can see the transformability quotient herein is high indeed. GreenLantern embodies fusion and synthesis–from liquid to solid, biological to chemical, darkness to light. The notions are inextricably bound, as Stanco explains, since the “natural” and “artificial” aspects are symbiotic. The functionality of the piece depends on this inter-relationship: the dark soil of the plant is the origin of an “electrochemical energy surplus” that powers the battery that lights the LED that imbues the very same plant with its life-giving rays. If you think you spy the edges of the classic chicken vs. egg paradox, that’s precisely the point. As Stanco says, “GreenLantern does not lead to an exclusive use of the object but invites us to consider its multiple nature, complex and contradictory, just like the nature of a living organism. Organic and artificial, biological and technological co-exist in a formal and functional balance, giving to the object an unexpected (new) life.”

So ultimately GreenLantern is a kind of cyborg for the A&D set, a hybrid object created with hybrid technology and hybrid materials, giving us the best of each dichotomy in a slightly bizarre, highly captivating, certainly surreal, and absolutely compelling package. And it has a talismanic quality that makes me want to rub it for good luck, if not to summon some otherworldly specter who’ll grant me a measure of worldly satisfaction. But if this GreenLantern can’t translate Sanskrit or send me to Tahiti in the blink of an eye, at least it can have its greenery and illuminate it too. That alone is a superpower to covet.