Osmos Kosmos

Linda Nurk shows visitors her grown textiles with pressed flowers, hanging above clear vitrines against a rust-red container wall at Open Cell.

Augmented reality for Linda Nurk's grown textiles. Point a phone at a piece and a digital garden grows out of its pressed flowers.

Osmos Kosmos was a collaboration with couture artist Linda Nurk, shown at Biodesign Here Now at Open Cell in London during the London Design Festival, 19 to 22 September 2019. Linda grows her own textiles with what she calls the Couture Vivante method, joining raw elements of nature with couture: home-grown bio-textiles, and silkworms raised on a torso mould that weave petals and leaves into the fabric itself. Through pattern recognition we treated each piece as a digital garden, so the life that made the fabric could carry on virtually. I built the AR as an iPhone app in Unity and Vuforia, with the textiles themselves as tracking targets. Erik Norrhede modelled the 3D flowers and Alexander Wallin made the music.

Three of Linda Nurk's lit textile sculptures hang above a bed of dried grasses at Sven-Harrys konstmuseum.

In 2020 Linda showed the series as Embodiment in Art in Fashion at Sven-Harrys konstmuseum in Stockholm. For it I made a new version of the AR in Spark AR, Meta's platform for camera effects. Seen through the phone, her Flora bustier, grown from a culture of bacteria and yeast on a cast of her body, grows an algorithmically generated bloom. The effect also worked on the bustier's photo in the exhibition catalogue. Meta closed Spark AR in January 2025, so the AR now lives only in screen captures like these. Linda and I took the photographs and recordings.

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Jonas Johansson