ENTANGLED THREADS
Part of the opt:exp Research Framework
Entangled Threads is an artistic research project exploring how relationships between bodies, materials, signals, technologies, and environments become perceptible through material, sonic, visual, and embodied processes.
Developed within the opt:exp research line, the project investigates what changes when phenomena, knowledge, gestures, and signals move between different systems of matter, technology, and sensation. Textile provides a material space where embodied knowledge, scientific structures, sensing, sound, light, and computation can meet and influence one another.
The project unfolds through a series of artistic studies. Folding Field works with electromagnetic phenomena, nanostructured materials, origami geometries, and scientific modes of experimentation, translating these encounters through textile, sound, light, movement, and improvisational making. The Golden Signal shifts the focus toward embodied and culturally situated knowledge, working with Zlatovez embroidery, gesture, memory, conductive textiles, and responsive audiovisual systems.
Across the project, translation is understood as a process of transformation: data becomes sound, scientific structures become material forms, gestures become signals, and invisible relationships become sensory experiences.
The works develop as responsive installations that can also be activated through live performance, allowing systems to move between autonomous, environmental, and embodied states.
Investigates
Invisible relationships between bodies, materials, signals, and environments
Translation between physical phenomena, data, and sensory experience
Textile as a medium for connection, sensing, and transformation
Embodied interaction and material knowledge
Relationships between sound, light, movement, and computational processes
Folding Field (2025)
A performative wearable system developed through an ArtScience residency at TU Chemnitz / Research Center MAIN. The work translates electromagnetic field recordings and structures encountered in nanomembrane research into textile, sound, light, movement, and embodied interaction.
c photo: Fabian Thueroff
// The research currently develops through two related studies:
The Golden Signal (2026, in development)
The Golden Signal begins with Zlatovez embroidery from Eastern Croatia, where I grew up. I approach embroidery as a form of embodied knowledge: something carried through the hands, through repetition and gesture, and through the memory of how a material is handled.
There is something slow in this kind of knowledge. It develops through repetition, attention, and time. A gesture is learned by doing it again. A pattern becomes familiar through the hands. A technique can remain present even when only fragments of it are remembered: a gesture, a sequence, a shape, a way of working with the material.
The work begins from these fragments and asks what happens when such knowledge moves across time, place, and technological systems.
This question is also connected to my experience of migration from Croatia to Berlin. Moving between places has made me attentive to how knowledge changes as it travels. What we carry with us is shaped by memory, context, distance, and reconstruction. Something remembered can become something slightly different when it is repeated, adapted, or encountered again. In The Golden Signal, this movement becomes part of the artistic process.
The pace changes when the textile becomes a sensing surface. Conductive embroidery allows sewing, touching, tracing, and movement across the material to generate electronic signals. A gesture becomes a signal; the signal becomes sound and light; the embroidered surface becomes material, memory, interface, and instrument.
The work brings a slow, embodied form of knowledge into dialogue with a fast technological process. Repetition and variation meet computation and response. A movement of the hand can immediately alter sound or light. The material remembers through its structure while the system responds in real time.
Through this process, traditional craft knowledge enters a computational environment while remaining connected to the body and the material. Partial memory, repetition, variation, and improvisation become active forces within the system.
The Golden Signal is developing toward a responsive sound installation and live audiovisual performance in which textile, gesture, sound, light, and environmental signals continuously influence one another.
At its centre is a question that connects the personal, material, and technological: what happens when knowledge carried through the body crosses into another system, and how does the experience of that knowledge change through the transformation?
c photo: artist archive