The Orchestra Scarf, Recording Shoes and Melodized Pillow Hammock connect sound to distinct bodily and spatial gestures.
Interactive sonic installation / wearable instruments · 2013
Sonic Fabric
BLESS garments and spatial accessories become instruments for composing a personal ‘sound perfume’ through touch, movement and wear.
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Project typeTool / prototype · Collaboration · Installation / environment · Fashiontech
ThemesEmbodied & haptic interaction · Wearables & e-textiles · Materials & making
FormInteractive sonic installation / wearable instruments
Year2013
CollaborationBLESS × POPKALAB
PresentedMAK Fashion Lab #01 · Vienna
01 · Proposition
Clothing becomes a way to compose sound
Sonic Fabric transforms familiar fashion and domestic objects into an interactive soundscape that visitors can wear, manipulate and play.
Developed for the first MAK Fashion Lab, the installation brought together BLESS N°45 Soundperfume and POPKALAB’s interactive engineering. BLESS’s existing accessories for bodies and spaces were ‘sonified’ without allowing the technology to dominate their appearance or interrupt their familiar material qualities.
Three commissioned works asked visitors, ‘How do you want to sound?’ The Orchestra Scarf mixed tracks through the selection and manipulation of its closures. Recording Shoes captured and replayed footsteps with delays, creating a disorienting impression of walking while standing still. The Melodized Pillow Hammock extended the experience into space: moving its large textile cushions generated sound and turned resting into performance.
Together with an analogue Metalstringcurtain, the objects transformed the MAK Design Space into a participatory sonic landscape. Rather than treating clothing as a display surface for electronics, the project used the habitual gestures of dressing, fastening, walking, sitting and touching as its musical vocabulary.
Video documentation
Wear a sound perfume
02 · Experience
Dress, manipulate, compose
- 01
Sonify
POPKALAB integrated interactive sound systems into existing BLESS garments and spatial accessories while preserving their material character.
- 02
Manipulate
Fastening a scarf, walking in shoes or shifting a pillow becomes the input for recording, selecting, mixing or triggering sound.
- 03
Compose
Visitors combine these actions into personal and collective soundscapes distributed across bodies and the exhibition space.
03 · Reflection
Technology recedes into everyday gestures
Sonic Fabric makes interaction legible through actions already embedded in clothing and domestic objects.
Its strength lies in resisting the idea that wearable technology must look technological. Closures remain closures, shoes remain walkable and a hammock still invites rest, yet each object acquires another expressive register. Sound emerges through the body’s ordinary negotiations with textiles: fastening, stepping, leaning and rearranging. The installation therefore treats fashion not as a passive carrier for electronics, but as an embodied interface with its own gestures, expectations and intimacy.
Wearers compose through fastening, walking and manipulating soft structures rather than through a conventional controller.
Interactive technology supports the character and use of the original BLESS objects instead of becoming their dominant aesthetic.
Exhibition history
Selected presentations
MAK Fashion Lab #01: Sonic Fabric feat. BLESS N°45 Soundperfume engineered by POPKALAB · 26 June–13 October
MAK Design Space
Vienna, Austria
Sonic Fabric test presentation · 29 September
Vienna Design Week / MAK Design Space
Vienna, Austria
Credits & archive
Project record
- Fashion concept and design
- BLESS — Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag
- Interactive engineering
- POPKALAB / Ricardo O’Nascimento
- Guest curator and project initiation
- Dr Sabine Seymour
- Curator
- Thomas Geisler, MAK Design Collection
- Scientific advisor
- Barbara Karl, MAK Textiles and Carpets Collection
- Commission and venue
- MAK — Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna
- Exhibition photography
- MAK / Katrin Wißkirchen
