a tale on textile (at urbanscreen)

A textile sculpture augmented with projections

together with joshuah howard and jonas wiese at urbanscreen in cooperation with svenja keune

“A tale on textile – The colony” combines a three dimensional, textile surface with the medium of projection. The organic appearance is supported by a subtle illuminated animation, which blurs the boundaries between real and virtual.

The project was a cooperation between Joshuah Howard, Lorenz Potthast and Jonas Wiese at URBANSCREEN.COM and the Hamburg based textile artist and designer Svenja Keune. It was developed for the internal research project “Lumen“ where it won the Urbanscreen Lumen Award.

You can download more information about the project here.

„A tale on textile“ explores the possibilites of textile surfaces with a dynamic content. A particular potential lies in the material properties in terms of light permeability and impermeability, color brilliance, as well as the tactile qualities.

In the collaborative work between textile and virtual surface emerged new possibilites and approaches to support, but also to disrupt the other field. Whether as installation, interface or media room elements: Textile surfaces with media content are opening total new perspectives.

The content is a 10 minute loop which follows the idea of a livecycle of a fictive organism. Over different cycles the narrative story wins presence and space. It starts with a death phase with almost no noticeable movements and changes. Then the life slowly starts spreading, takes over the whole sculpture.At a certain point a virus breaks out that increases the life in a unnatural way and finally leads to an overkill. Then the story begins again.

The general ideas and concepts were developed together with Svenja and Josh. Svenja then started working on the sculpture , while Josh and me started with the technical, visual and content development. Finally I was animating almost all of the animations while Josh was in charge of constructing the technical setup and Jonas was developing the sounds for the loop.