Felt, tbc: A Collective Felting Installation

Felt, tbc is an interactive felt sculpture that glows from within and responds to touch. It invites visitors to keep making, one stab at a time.

Project Video

Abstract

What does it mean to make something together, in public, with your hands? Felt, tbc is an interactive felt sculpture that invites visitors to participate in an ongoing act of making. Built over an internal skeleton, the piece glows from within. Light passes through layers of wool, revealing the accumulated labor of every hand that has touched it. Embedded sensors in the felting needles detect each stab, generating a soundscape that grows richer over time. The music begins slowly, guiding the maker's rhythm without rushing it. The technology does not make for you. It makes with you. The project grows out of a broader research question: how can technology support embodied, sensory engagement in making, rather than replacing it? Drawing on craft theory, embodied cognition, and therapeutic making, the work argues that repetitive, tactile processes carry psychological and emotional value that industrial and digital systems consistently flatten. Felting was chosen not as an aesthetic preference but as a material argument. Its resistance, warmth, and texture demand presence. You cannot felt from a distance. What was unexpected was where the work's pull actually came from. During development, passersby consistently stopped, not because of the light or the sound, but because they wanted to touch the wool. The material spoke before the technology did. This raised a question that continues to shape the project: in a public space, what gives someone permission to slow down, to stay, to make? People were willing, more willing than expected, but something kept them from fully settling in. Whether that is social pressure, spatial uncertainty, or simply the absence of a clear invitation remains open. Felt, tbc does not resolve this tension. It sits inside it. The wool is never finished, and neither is the question of what it means to pause, touch, and leave a mark in a world that rarely asks you to.

Photos