Poietic Veil Tilburg, Is it Alive?

Poietic Veil Tilburg is an installation composed of an interactive, suspended veil, the dress Lucid authored by Iris van Herpen, and an innovative new projection system, Living Shadows, which couples the dress to the sculpture with light and shadow. Poietic Veil was conceived and fabricated with students at TU Delft, featuring a lace-like structure with responsive components that invite curiosity and visitor interaction. The installation is part of the immersive exhibition Is it alive?, staged at the TextielMuseum in Tilburg from October 14, 2023 to April 7, 2024.

The exhibition Is it alive? features the work of Philip Beesley and Iris van Herpen alongside Tanja Smeets’ ‘Nebula and the Soft Machine’ from 2016, along with two interactive works by Bart Hess from the series ‘STIMULUS cord reflexes’ (2016). The new installation ‘I am Storm’ by Studio Drift forms a centerpiece composed of self-supporting structures made from woven fabric.

Living Shadows brings life to the seemingly inanimate. Using real-time projections, it creates a virtual world that augments the physical shadows of a sculptural environment. Creatures inhabit this virtual shadow world. Set free as “living shadows,” they are a way of exploring how these normally static components might behave if they were given the autonomy to move through and interact with the world around them. The creatures that inhabit this virtual world help develop the identity of a sculpture’s static physical components and, in turn, the ability of a visitor to relate to and identify with the sculpture. This projection technology holds the potential to animate traditional exhibition spaces and programming using an elegant, compact intervention. The world of the digital double is populated with simulated sprites and virtual actuators, manifesting as animated shadows activating the walls and floors of the installation space, and as dynamic lights, illuminating the glass vessels within the sculpture.

Poietic Veil Tilburg asks: what might living cities look like? A new city built to be able to handle unstable conditions where it can shed heat, cool itself and then rapidly warm up and gain heat again might look like a hybrid forest, where each building is made from dense layers of ivy-like filters and multiple overlapping layers of porous openings.