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4TU Design United Expo

making motion

Shaping kinetic expressivity of textile through embodied interaction

Dynamic expressivity of light textile

Making Motion examines the shaping of movement in large textiles. It allows visitors to animate floating organza with their bodies, shifting them from passive observers to designers. It proposes an alternative to the current kinetic discourse where movement often reflects pre-rendered states.

Animating textile motion with the body

Making Motion explores shaping kinetic motion in large, flowing textiles. In Aerial Sketching, visitors lift their hands and bodies to animate light, floating textiles, transforming from passive spectators into active designers. Each gesture produces unique motion, revealing the subtle interplay between human movement, gravity, and soft material dynamics. The installation encourages experimentation with speed, direction, and rhythm, creating a performative, immersive dialogue between body and textile. By translating embodied gestures into live visual motion, the work challenges the norm of pre-determined kinetic patterns and reframes how audiences engage with textile animation in real time.

Recording and Preserving Kinetic Expression

Aerial Sketching records every interaction and translates it into Kinetic Captures: golden point clouds encoding the tracking data driving the motion. Inspired by light painting, these captures condense sequences of gestures into tangible representations, preserving subtle nuances and timing. Visitors can take them as keepsakes, extending the installation beyond the immediate performance. By freezing motion in time, the work creates a dialogue between the present and past: gestures made “now” can be replayed, echoed, and re-experienced, highlighting how embodied interaction, responsive textiles, and technology intertwine to produce dynamic, performative, and generative kinetic experiences that bridge doing and observing.

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About Thomas Kaufmanas

I see design as a way to explore complex entanglements between people and technology. Working between interaction and industrial design, I use making, playfulness, and technology as materials to question, reconfigure, and deepen our understanding of relations - both with technology and each other.
Animating motion through embodied interaction