Featured Projects
Klangteppich
A multisensory experience that invites the viewer to touch, see and listen. 100 jacquard-woven pieces accompanied by live-generated visuals and music.
About The Artist
Andreas Rau
Andreas Rau (b. 1990) is a generative artist exploring the interplay between humans and their physical and digital environments. He works with code and electronics to build bridges between the physical and the digital in a continuous dialog with the machine. His work includes interactive installations, audiovisual pieces and physical artifacts created fully from code. It has been shown internationally and collected by individuals and institutions around the world.
About The Project
Klangteppich is an invitation to slow down and feel a sense of home in our fast-paced, mobile world — wherever you may fare. It creates a calming virtual enclosure, and a physical base to rest on.
Every Klangteppich NFT has its woven counterpart. Each pixel is mapped to a thread in the fabric, and woven on a computer-controlled jacquard loom.
Klangteppich is a woven work that belongs to the physical as much as to the digital world. You can touch it, feel it, hang it on the wall, sit on it, roll it up and take it with you. Coming from code, it is digital at heart, yet physical in nature. A blend of age-old weaving techniques with digital aesthetics and production methods.
Klangteppich is a digital piece that slowly evolves in endless reverberations. The visuals and music change as you view the piece. So does the tapestry, only slower. The abstract shapes and patterns reference the aesthetics of weave patterns while remaining digital in essence. The soundscape incorporates audio recordings of the loom, a remnant of the physical piece within the digital.
Alongside the live-generated visuals and music, the code produces the instructions for the loom. Every frame of the animation can be woven. Holders of a Klangteppich NFT will be able to order a tapestry (ca. 66 × 106 cm) of any frame of the digital piece. This will come at an additional cost, and will take some time to produce.
About the piece
Klangteppich is a collection of 100 digital pieces, minted as a generative collection on fxhash. Each iteration has one out of four colour palettes, and one out of four musical variations that are randomly assigned at mint time. Both the music and the visuals are generative and will endlessly change over time.
The custom code of Klangteppich can produce different versions of the same piece in real time: front and back side, a preview of the weave pattern, and the instructions that can be sent directly to a TC-2 loom.
The Tapestries
Klangteppich will be woven in Norway, made from 100% wool. You can expect soft, textured tapestries elevating what you see on screen into another dimension. The size of the tapestries is ca. 66 × 106 cm (26 × 42’’).
The process of making a Klangteppich tapestry is manual and will thus take time. It won’t be an exact reproduction of the screen-based piece, rather an interpretation of it. Colors and patterns might differ from what you see on screen. Every frame of the digital pieces can be woven. The selection process will be done in a dialog between collector and artist.
How a Klangteppich tapestry is made
Background
Muralnomads for the digital age
Klangteppich is loosely inspired by the textile works of Le Corbusier, and the thoughts behind them. Le Corbusier viewed tapestries as a means of bringing warmth into the supposedly cold interiors of modernist architecture. To him, these “Muralnomads” — murals you can easily carry with you — were the natural evolution of the mural, defining and enriching space wherever you are.
Klangteppich can be seen as a continuation of these thoughts in the digital age. We are living our lives on the go as never before, and spend a good share of our time in the digital realm. And still, we experience a need for haptic experiences, a need of belonging to the spaces we are in. Klangteppich, being rooted in the digital and physical worlds, is an animated, hyper-nomadic mural that fits this contemporary lifestyle and has the ability to define and enrich our surroundings both digitally and physically.
Les Des sont Jetes (The Die Is Cast) tapestry by Le Corbusier, 1960. Image courtesy of Google Arts and Culture
Context
Weaving is computing
The series is deeply rooted in the historical interdependence of the loom and the computer. The jacquard loom was an important milestone on the path towards today’s computers. In turn, today’s digital jacquard looms are usually controlled by computers — including the one used to produce the physical Klangteppich series.
Departing from this idea, Klangteppich inseparably connects weaving and computing both visually and procedurally. Although the process of designing textiles is highly digital already, it still relies heavily on brain and hand of the weaver, who manually applies weave patterns that often have been used for hundreds of years to their digital creations. Klangteppich, in turn, allows the computer complete autonomy in this process.
Starting from the digital, the abstract shapes and pattern fills are generated inspired by traditional weave patterns, while maintaining a flat “computer” aesthetic. In the transition towards the physical, the algorithm takes the role of the weaver and assigns the final weave patterns to the visual output. Here, a blend of emergent, computer-generated and pre-defined, traditional weave patterns is used. From this blend, a plethora of unique textures emerges that underline the inherent physicality of computer and code. In that sense, Klangteppich opens a world that blurs the lines between weaving and computing.
The digital output of Klangteppich #4 previewing its weave pattern, the back side of the same piece and the instructions to weave it, as sent to the loom
Technical Notes
Klangteppich works best with Chrome. It was tested on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari on macOS and iOS. Limited compatibility with Android, and plenty of uncertainty with Windows.
Controls
Klangteppich works best with Chrome. It was tested on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari on macOS and iOS. Limited compatibility with Android, and plenty of uncertainty with Windows.
[ ] or click to play / pause
[f] or double click to view in fullscreen
[s] save a still of the current frame
[p] preview weave pattern
[i] instructions for the loom
[o] original view
[b] show back side
[c] copy URL params of current frame
[e] export current frame with URL params
[r] start / stop recording
[d] randomly displace the composition
[1..5] set the deformation of the shapes
[0] return to standard deformation
[+] zoom in
[-] zoom out
[→] fast forward
[←] rewind
URL params
&fullscreen=1 start in fullscreen
&autoplay=1 autoplay animation and music¹
&deformation=0.5 set deformation to 0.5²
&displacement=0.5 set displacement to 0.5²
&zoom=0.5 set zoom to 0.5²
&time=2.0 jump to second 2.0 of the animation²
&res=0.5 reduce the resolution in fullscreen mode to 0.5׳
¹ requires a browser setting to allow sound playback without user intervention
² adjust the value to your liking
³ the token is displayed at your screen's resolution in fullscreen mode. Depending on your hardware, this might lead to a reduction in performance. Use this parameter to scale the resolution up or down
Klangteppich #1, Andreas Rau, 2023
The Generative Art Museum thanks Andreas for lending Klangteppich #1 for showcasing purposes at Sónar 2024 and Responsive Dreams 2024. 🖤