Breathing Softspace – Vienna Designweek – Matthias Rosenthal

Breathing Softspace – Vienna Designweek

Breathing Softspace adapts to the visitors’ behavior through shapes, lights, and sounds. The interactive installation by the multi-disciplinary Swiss-German collective creates a space to discover dimensionality, movement, and the play of material of woven textiles. Loose threads add dimension to the textile while motion enhances the optical volume and gives the textile the ability to grow and shrink and, due to that, change the space around them. Shy or bold? Near or far? The behavior depends on the visitor.

The tech setup of Breathing-Softspace consisted of 4 main components: DMX-Winches and -Hardware, a Unity-3D Application, and an Azure-Kinect tracking camera. Nine electronic winches fixed to the ceiling controlled the textile dynamically via a DMX interface. Moreover, led lights and a fan were connected to the DMX network. A self-coded Unity-3D application simulates the room, the textile, and the connected hardware, such as light colors and sound, on the PC in real-time. With the help of the current Azure-Kinect tracking camera, we eventually tracked the movements of users in the room. That way, we created an interplay between visitors and textiles.

Broad material experimentation and technical support were made possible in a weaving mill in Switzerland. The jacquard weaving machine was technically pushed to its limits to produce a loose and three-dimensional textile. Materiality and movement were augmented through loose threads. With their reflective material, they invite to a tangible and playful interaction with the material driven by curiosity. Pencil drawings show the first concepts of how those threads condense and lose in motion.

The earliest drafts included a wooden construction to contain the winches and the textile suspension. In the further process, they were replaced by a ceiling mounting and a hanging fabric which was giving the illusion of a second ceiling.

To be able to test the interaction and hardware concept we used a prototypical setup. First tests were made in Touchdesigner before changing to Unity-3D. The user interaction is subdivided by six states imitating lifelike behavior.
Those states were mirroring a storyline of being defensive and suspicious in the beginning, but getting trusty and even befriending the visitors if they seem trustworthy.