Folding Field

Folding Field
Performative Wearable Installation | 2025

Folding Field is a performative wearable system exploring how movement, electromagnetic signals, and material structures can shape perceptual experience through sound and light.

The work was developed during the FUNKEN × MAIN ArtScience Residency at the Research Center MAIN, TU Chemnitz, in collaboration with scientists and physicists. Encounters with electromagnetic environments and nanostructured membrane research became starting points for an experimental process combining textile, sound, light, computation, and movement.

Electromagnetic field recordings made in the laboratory form the basis of the sound composition. The resulting sound activates LED structures embedded within the wearable, translating electromagnetic phenomena into changing sonic and luminous behaviour. The textile structure draws on folding principles inspired by origami geometries and structures encountered through nano-robotics research. Layered translucent materials translate these microscopic structural relationships into a body-scale form. The work develops through an open process of folding, sewing, layering, testing, and improvisation. In performance, the artist's movement enters the system, allowing gesture, sound, signal, and light to continuously influence one another.

Folding Field exists both as an autonomous sound installation and as a live work. Across these contexts, the system shifts between environmental behaviour and embodied activation, creating changing perceptual conditions rather than a fixed visual form.

Year: 2025
Medium: Performative wearable installation; responsive light, sound, and movement
Duration: Variable
Dimensions: Wearable / Performative

Investigates