Neclumi is a necklace that beams a pattern of tiny light projections onto the wearer’s neck. According to its inventor, its presence on a jewelry blog sparked some resentment because the commenters reasoned it’s neither silver nor gold, so it wouldn’t classify as jewelry. “We have less and less of our own things,” argues Jakub Kozniewski, one of the four artists of the art collective panGenerator. “We don’t have books, we have data that lives in the cloud. We don’t have CD cases for music, it’s all streamed through Spotify. With the same logic you could stream jewelry, or treat it like software.”

The Warsaw based collective created Neclumi while they were experimenting with projection mapping and wearables. They decided to see what would happen if they would fuse the two to create wearable projections. The result is Neclumi, an app that is paired with a picoprojector, attached to the collar of a shirt, to shine tattoos of light onto the wearer’s neck – like a glow-in-the-dark choker necklace. For now, Neclumi is still a prototype and comes in four styles: Airo, Movi, Roto, and Sono. Each responds to different sensors in different ways and patterns. For example, Movi reacts to your phone’s accelerometer and changes its pattern according to your body movement. Roto, on the other hand, pairs up with your phone’s compass.

Before it’s ready to be put on the market, Neclumi needs to undergo some changes. For now the projector connects to the smartphone through an HDMI cable, so it would need smaller batteries and chips to make it a standalone device. Light projected jewelry could help wearable-developers to creates more customizable wares. “How could you use the sensors to creatively express the user visually?” Kozniewski asks. “I think the necklace is poetic, there’s something romantic there—a bigger trend apart from the jewelry.”