Anthozoan Veil

De Electriciteitsfabriek, TodaysArt Fest 2019

Featured at the 2019 international art, music and technology festival, TodaysArt, Anthozoan Veil was a life-sized living sculpture created in collaboration between the Living Architecture Systems Group and the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) academic community. A small pavilion is organized as a lightweight expanded space truss, integrating spread-foot thin posts and finials and extended by clouds of spiral-shaped interlinking skeletal membranes. Visitors passed within arrays of grouped struts arranged as capitals that branched out from each position. Responsive fronds fitted within voids between the branching struts curled in coordinated cupola-like contractions in response to the gestures of viewers.

In 2018, the Technical University of Delft and the Living Architecture Systems Group launched the “Responsive Matter and Living Architecture” residency, which resulted in a week-long workshop, supported by five LASG research associates, to develop a large-scale interactive sculpture, Anthozoan Veil. An initial period of material production preceded the seminar, which allowed Hyperbody students to explore topologies and emerging fabrication methods used to create lightweight meshwork and plate components. The workshop included the configuration of electronic controls and specialized software supporting distributed arrays of multiple kinds of active components. The Anthozoan Veil prototype included LED lighting, IR sensors, shape-memory alloy, and servo actuators. New software developed during the workshop included Processing-based visualizations.