Nascence: the tactility of ceramics

Thibaut Devulder

Ceramic artist Amanda Krantz, holding the Nascence vessel

As part of the SYNERGI exhibition, organised by Kroloftet, I collaborated with Swedish ceramic artist Amanda Krantz to create a multi-sensorial ceramic sculpture, titled ´Nascence´.

This is a continuation of my experiments in induced synæsthesia — when our senses overlap and weave into one another — through installations and performances that actively blur the boundaries between our visual, acoustic and haptic perceptions. Visually amplifying touch in Ooo-Ya-Tsu, shaping images with music in Symetriades, and now feeling soundscapes with the fingers…

This collaborative piece is based on the idea of combining sculpture, made from the residual clay from Kroloftet’s ceramic workshop, with mixed sound recordings from the process of reclaiming and reusing the material.

The clay recycling process itself involves gathering waste clays from used tools, filtering, dehydrating and kneading the materials together before reintroducing them, in its new amalgamated form, into the creative process of ceramic art.

Here are some images of the clay recycling process, at the ceramic workshop in Kroloftet:

Close-up of the Nascence installation

Our installation takes form as a ceramic vessel with the title ‘Nascence’, which alludes to the regenerative and physical aspects of the material and its relation to the body. The sculpture is levitating in mid-air over a pedestal, only connected to it by a thin textile umbilical cord. A small tactile transducer inside the sculpture softly vibrates it, conducting through its matter the sounds recorded during the clay recycling process.

Acting both as a sound filter and as a resonator, the ceramic vessel interprets and conveys elements of its own history and materiality. Nascence explores how the recycling process can be expressed by the ceramic object itself — beyond its visual appearance — through the tactile experience of the material and movement.

The installation reacts to the presence of a visitor, producing intriguing noises that lure you closer and encourage you to touch the clay vessel to explore its tactile qualities. Upon contact, you experience these sound vibrations through your hands, hearing them through your fingers, adding a new dimension to the touch.

As you bring Nascence to your ear, the feeling is reminiscent of seashells children hold to their ears to hear the sea: how much of the sounds you hear are traces of a forgotten past? A resonance of sounds in the space around you? The friction of your fingers holding the vessel? Or your own body pulsing in your ear?

Extract from the Nascence installation, Gamle Much Museum, Oslo, 2025

 

Nascence is on display and awaiting your touch as part of Kroloftet’s SYNERGI exhibition at the Gamle Munch Museum in Oslo, open until 21st September 2025. You can also discover more about Amanda’s fascinating work on her Instagram account.

Setting up the Synergi exhibition

Thibaut Devulder

Vernissage of the Synergi exhibition

Thibaut Devulder

The new Synergi exhibition organised by Kroloftet opens at the Gamle Munch Museum on Friday 5th September. I have contributed two collaborative pieces to the exhibition, which will be on display until 21st September.

Poster for the exhibition

I have been working over the summer on this project, together with creative people at the Kroloftet collective, where our Norwegian office has its office and workshops.

Based on the concept of synergy, our exhibition will display 11 projects, each developed as a synergetic collaborations between creatives from different disciplines at Kroloftet, spanning across ceramics, architecture, poetry, photography, sound art, biology, woodworking, illustration, history, micro-edition and crystallography!

We kickstarted this concept four months ago with a fun “creative speed-dating” event: meet each person at Kroloftet for a 3-minute chat (with timer!) and explore new creative possibilities for cross-disciplinary art!

The sign I hung around my neck for the “creative speed-dating” event, illustrating my interests and skills. “Tibå” is the pronunciation of my name (“Tee-bo”) in Norwegian phonetic…

Nascence sculpture

Nascence

The Frithjof Reppen Memory table at the Synergi exhibition

Memory table to Frithjof Reppen

I will present two collaborative pieces: Nascence — a tactile sound installation in collaboration with ceramic artist Amanda Krantz — and Memory Table — a commemorative engraved wooden table celebrating architecture, community and the free press, in collaboration with artist Carlos Martin Román.

The vernissage is on Friday 5th September 2025 at 17:00 at the Gamle Munch Museum (former Munch Museum) in Oslo. The event and exhibition are free and open to all.
Come and join us!

Creative solutions for plastic waste

Tom Hughes

Plastic is a material that we’ve tended to avoid, put off by our awareness of the environmental problems that its irresponsible use has created. The reduction in plastic use, finding more ecologically friendly alternatives, is still a great idea. But what about the mountains of plastic waste that already exist? Can we contribute in some way to preventing these carbon-intensive materials from ending up in landfill, or in the gullets of turtles, fish and sea birds?

At Future Makers, a creative hub in Nottingham, we’ve been learning about plastic waste and helping set up facilities for turning it in to useful recycled (and recyclable) products. Adding value to a waste product makes the process of collecting and recycling it worthwhile and cost effective. The Future Makers ethos is to approach these problems in a creative way; they bring together the infrastructure required with the expertise and knowledge that enables artists and designers to explore new ways of working.

Importantly, there is an economically sustainable approach. New ideas aren’t just conceived as one-off experiments, instead they build the knowledge and experience required to create viable commercial opportunities. In this spirit we were commissioned to work with the initial, terrazzo-style production run from Future Makers’ industrial sheet press, to create some simple-to-build furniture pieces.

Using the HDPE sheets, made with waste left over from artist Joshua Sofia’s 2001 Regulated Exhibition at Backlit, and in collaboration with Marcus Rowlands (Sheltered Spaces), we designed a slot-together furniture system for an armchair and coffee table. Easy to assemble and disassemble, without fixings or complex brackets, this can be transported to exhibitions and events. As a product, it could be mass produced and shipped, flat-packed to customers. As a single type plastic, it is recyclable again at the end of its useful life as furniture.

In itself not THE solution to the problem, but hopefully another piece of evidence that plastic waste has value. And a thoroughly rewarding project to be involved in!

 

Natural clay floor

Thibaut Devulder

The finished clay plaster floor

Hands-on course last week at our collective work space Kroloftet in Oslo, where I got a chance to practice natural clay flooring techniques under the guidance of our collaborator Kristian Møystad Bjørnland (of Ur Arkitekter) and Marc Charneau (of Kroloftet).

This little practical exercise aimed at resurfacing the unfinished floor of one of our meeting rooms, exploring clay plaster mixes, workmanship and surface treatments to create a natural, durable and, of course, beautiful floor.

We aimed are reclaiming as much existing materials as possible: taking as a starting point the strangely laid out parquet in the middle of the room over a rough concrete floor, we collected unwanted clay materials from our ceramics workshop, waste wood shavings from the wood workshop and hand sifted sand from a local quarry to experiment with various mix of clay-sand-fibre-water.

The rough concrete floor around the parqueted area, before applying the clay plaster

After an initial layer of clay mix compressed in place, we progressed through several layers of finer clay mixes to achieve a smooth end result. Since we used reclaimed materials of uncertain composition, we decided to experiment with various mixing proportions, some of which more successful than others, which gave us a chance to practice our reparation techniques on the less optimal mixes that developed cracks upon drying!

We finally applied a coat of boiled linseed oil and wax, purchased from the local building conservation shop, to seal and harden the surface.

The workshop was rich in discoveries and allowed me to experience the theory and process behind clay plastering.

With beautiful moisture control abilities, low embodied energy and full recyclability, we are looking forward to applying clay plastering techniques to create stunning and durable interior finishes for our future projects!

Samba in the stair

Thibaut Devulder

Following our complete remodel and extension of their cabins in Hvitsten, overlooking the Oslo Fjord, our clients asked us to also fit an extra living space in one of the little annex buildings on the site.

Sections through the proposed tiny annex cabin, showing the “samba” stair to the sleeping space above

The tiny cabin that we designed accommodates a play space for the children during daytime, a small workstation, sleeping space for two adults and two children, as well as a small terrace for summer breakfast overlooking the fjord. To reach the private sleeping space tucked up over the small living-room, we custom-designed a compact alternating tread stair, called sambatrapp (“samba stair”) in Norwegian, which also doubled as a bookshelves for the desk underneath.

We love working on self-build projects and custom-made furniture, so we were thrilled when our client announced that he wanted to build the stair himself. As with our custom-made screen wall in the main cabin, we developed in collaboration with him alternative designs for the stairs, adjusting the design to joinery techniques he mastered, to produce a full cut-and-assembly manual to build the stairs.

Portfolio project
Symétriades: visualising contemporary music

Thibaut Devulder

View of our live projection mapped onto the performance stage

Symétriades/Extension is a visual experience that we created for an eponymous contemporary music piece for solo double bass and musical artificial intelligence.

Commissioned by Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains in France, this art performance was presented at a contemporary music festival in October 2018.

In this project, art director Alain Fleischer and music composer Yann Robin wanted to express the idea of an abstract immolation of the soloist through the performance of this powerful musical piece, “plunging the audience into an immersive experience of engulfment” and “a fusion between the worlds of the seen and the heard.”

We developed with the artists a scenography and live video projections generated in real-time by the sounds and movements of the musician on stage, merging the expressionist visual universe of Alain Fleischer with poetic elements from Stanislaw Lem’s book Solaris.

“This is what I call an immersive experience! It was incredible to witness my own avatars being destroyed in real time, as I performed the piece.

2hD’s work, under the artistic benevolence of Alain Fleischer, gave an exponential dimension to Yann Robin’s composition, merging the visual and musical architectures into one.”
— Nicolas Crosse, soloist in the performance
 

Extract from Yann Robin’s musical score, codifying the complex movements of the soloist on the double bass (image © Yann Robin)

Symétriades as a musical piece

Composed in 2013 by Yann Robin, Symétriades is the second opus of three abstract compositions, all titled after the incomprehensible architectural formations described in Lem’s fictitious discipline of solaristics.

Inspired by and written for Nicolas Crosse’s double-bass powerful playing technique, the composition of the musical piece also includes an artificial intelligence that reprocesses in real-time the soloist’s live performance. This electronic system, developed at the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM), distorts, filters and reconfigures the music into a network of 8 loudspeakers and 4 sub-woofers that spatialise the sounds around the audience.

 

The visual experience

The artists wanted to visually express the contained ferocity of the music, using the metaphor of the bass as an instrument of self destruction.

Echoing some of the themes from Lem’s enigmatic book, we constructed the visual narrative of the performance as a succession of digital incarnations of the bass player.

Overlaid onto his physical presence on stage as video projections, each of these “doppelgänger” gets corrupted and eventually destroyed under the assaults of the sounds and movements of the musician on stage. Progressively turning into an abstracted version of his image, it finally recomposes itself into a purely abstract visual representation of the music.

To achieve this, our approach mixed real-time filming, 3D motion analysis of the musician on stage and sound analysis. We coded a custom computer program that could dynamically create and composite layers of animations over the image of the musician being projected onto the stage and coordinate them with the electronic sound processing.

The dynamic nature of our system allowed the video projections to adjust to the improvisations of the musician during the performance — something that the musical score specifically encourages during certain parts of the piece!

 

Double-bass solist Nicolas Crosse during rehearsals, seen through the shifting moiré of the translucent projection screens of our scenography.

The scenography

In parallel to the visual effects, we also designed a stage scenography for the performance.

From an early stage, we wanted to keep the powerful delivery of the soloist at the centre of the visual experience. Its perception by the audience should therefore be altered not only by the means of digital video projections, but also through the physical, direct medium of the scenography.

Playing with the perception of depth, we shrouded the stage with multiple layers of finely meshed black fabrics. These translucent surfaces create the screen for the video projections superimposed onto the stage and blur the projection into an elusive volumetric presence.

Positioned between the audience and the stage, they further distort the direct sight of the bass player through shifting patterns of moiré, adding to the expressionist makeup and costume of the performer, and echoing the liquid nature of the book’s protoplasmic being. Modulating the contrast between stage lighting and video projections, we could also shift the audience’s focus between the performer on stage and his abstract projected doubles.

 

The creative process

As we developed and refined the effects over the course of the production phase, we produced a series of video prototypes that precisely simulated the effects, based on high-definition videos and 3D captures taken during the first rehearsal. This allowed the involved artists to visualise the performance in real conditions at each design iteration, keeping the artistic discussion open and adjustments to the system simple.

We also took care of sorting out the technical solutions for the performance, selecting adequate equipment and producing detailed 3D models of the scenography and technical workflows, so that its feasibility could be checked with the technical team as the project developed.

Credits for the project

Art direction: Alain Fleischer
Music composer: Yann Robin
Double bass soloist: Nicolas Crosse
Electronic sound treatment: Robin Meier
Scenography & live video projection system: 2hD
Production manager: Bertrand Scalabre
Stage manager: Alexis Noël
Sound setup: Geoffrey Durcak
Production: Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains, in co-production with L’Ensemble Multilaterale

More articles about the Symétriades performance:
symetriades-sparks.jpg
Symétriades: visualising contemporary music
Symétriades-technical.jpg
The tools we used for the Symétriades performance
Symétriades live performances this weekend!
Symétriades live performances this weekend!
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First rehearsals for the Symétriades art performance
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Visualising interactive art installations with Processing and SketchUp
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New art performance project at Le Fresnoy

Are you an artist working with interactive installations or performances?

The tools we used for the Symétriades performance

Thibaut Devulder

Technical diagram of the performance setup

Capitalising on our experience in the Ooo-Ya-Tsuproject, we developed for the Symétriades/Extension performance a custom program in Processing, which managed the sound, video and motion captures and generated the projected visualisation in real-time.

Some open source libraries were also used to interface together the different components of the system: Open Kinect for Processing (for real-time video and 3D analysis on stage), Minim (for real-time sound analysis) and oscP5 (for OSC network communication).

The different computers in the performance were communicating via OSC, using the excellent OSCulator (controlling the multi-track audio playback) and TouchOSC, for which we developed a custom graphical interface to tune the parameters of the Processing program in real-time.

Symétriades live performances this weekend!

Thibaut Devulder
Screencapture.jpg

I am at the Studio National des Arts Contemporains (a.k.a. Le Fresnoy) for the final rehearsals of the Symétriades art performance, for which we developed the scenography and live video projections.

Double bass player Nicolas Crosse will be interpreting Yann Robin’s Symétriades piece for solo double bass and electronics, spatialised over a complex electronic post-processing system and overlaid with the live video projections we have created with visual artist Alain Fleischer.

The performance will be shown as part of a contemporary music festival within Panorama 20, the yearly exhibition showcasing the art projects developed at the Studio over the last year.

There will be four public presentations of the performance over the weekend:

  • Friday 5 October 2018 at 20:00 and 22:15

  • Sunday 7 October 2018 at 15:00 and 17:00

Come and join us for a mighty musical and visual experience!

Visualising interactive art installations with Processing and SketchUp

Thibaut Devulder

While developing the scenography for the Symétriades performance, I experimented with mixing the 3D model of our proposed stage setup with a sketch program, to communicate our proposed concept.

This simple example maps an early animation prototype of our Processing program onto layers exported from our SketchUp model of the scenography. The multiple projections are mapped over surfaces using the KeyStone Processing library, while lighting is controlled by dynamically adjusting layer opacities in the program. The mapped animation responds to a real-time spectral sound analysis of a rehearsal recording, as well as mouse movements on the modelled stage screens.

The integration of Processing sketches and SketchUp 3D models has a great potential for communicating ideas of the art installations in an interactive way. To be explored further…

Designing self-build projects for artists

Tom Hughes

A recent project at One Thoresby Street artists studios and gallery gave us a chance to develop new techniques for designing with self-builders.

Artists at the One Thoresby Street gallery, building our design themselves

As part of a longstanding relationship with the artists at One Thoresby Street (OTS), we were asked to design a lobby space for the top-floor Attic Gallery. This would sort out circulation between the gallery and studio spaces and provide a vital fire safety feature by separating the occupied space from the access stairwell. Unusually, the lobby would be built entirely by the artists themselves.

We approached the project through a careful survey of the existing building and designed the lobby to create a great experience for visitors as they approached up the stairwell. A sliding fire door, held open on electronic sensors linked to the fire alarm system ensures that movement and views through are eased. The height of the lobby is reduced to contrast with the tall gallery space, which also minimises the materials used and creates a storage and projection deck overhead.

High technical standards had to be met in the project to create a fire resistant construction, the budget was tight for materials and the building team (skilled makers but not construction professionals) needed to have excellent clarity over the build process.

This put huge demands on the communication of technical information, so we took an approach more normally found in larger scale projects - we created a 'Building Information Model'. This was a CAD model showing every structural member, board and component, organised to give the artists a coordinated picture of the materials to order, the dimensions for cutting, the assembly sequence and the spatial relationship between every item in the final assembly. We then lent the group a laptop with the CAD model installed so that they could take the information directly off it on site.

The build proceeded smoothly with a tiny number of requests for additional information, wastage of materials was kept to a minimum and the end result is a happy self build client, an effective adaptation and an safer, better Attic Gallery space at OTS.

Photography: Kubik's new office for Norman & Co

Thibaut Devulder

Kubik Interiørarkitekter — the talented interior architects with whom we are sharing an office space in Oslo — asked me to take photos of their freshly completed new interior for Norman & Co, Norway's oldest law firm, in Oslo's exclusive Akerbrygge neighbourhood.

Here are some of my shots, trying to capture Kubik's delicate contrast of warm materials and cool light...

“Photos taken brilliantly, in all aspects of the word!
Nice, precise, detailed and beautifully captured with brilliant colours. We will definitely ask 2hD again to photograph our interior projects!”
— Hege Liven, interior architect at Kubik

In the snow

Thibaut Devulder

The Hvitsten cabin under construction, in the snow...

From the window niche in the play area, overlooking the snowy approach and the existing annex cabins

Hvitsten — a seaside resort on the Oslo fjord where we are redesigning a cabin — can still be pretty cold in winter. Yesterday's visit to the building site showed me an aspect of the project I hadn't experienced yet: the summer cabin in the snow.

Part of the client's brief was to make the cabin comfortable to use all year round, so I could finally put our design to test, overlooking the snowy landscape from its cosy interior.

The interior is nearing completion and the new oak-clad storage wall was being installed, with its integrated kitchen and window niche in the play area.

The new kitchen and storage wall being installed