Tapis Magique: Machine-knitted Electronic Textile Carpet for Interactive Choreomusical Performance and Immersive Environments

Tapis Magique is a pressure-sensitive, knitted large-scale electronic textile carpet that generates three-dimensional sensor data based on body location, postures, and gestures and drives an immersive sonic environment in real-time. Inspired by traditional textile arts and cultures, we applied an artistic approach into technological textile design and merged new materials, sensing technologies, and digital fabrication with contemporary dance and music into one united and harmonious piece of object and performance. In this pictorial, we present and discuss our textile design rationale, fabrication strategies, hardware systems, musical mappings, as well as our collaborative effort with a professional dancer to demonstrate the interactive electronic textile carpet. Our work challenges the conventional relationship between choreography and music and unveils dancer and/or sound artist’s creative possibilities of agency, intimacy, and improvisation over the choreomusical performance through a novel textile interface.