Abito Sonoro Canvas is a Jacquard e-textile that responds to conductive needs integrated into the textile structure, taking the form of a membrane, woven as sound panels used for installations and interiors. The Jacquard e-textile fabric is conceived as a textile canvas, for a space in continuous transformation. The first e-textiles were designed and woven  Fondazione Lisio in Florence, in 2022, thanks to the consultation of designer and weaver Eva Basile.

How does sound-mediated interaction reshape bodily perception and spatial experience?

This research explores the relationship between body and space through device Abito Sonoro Canvas, a e-textile that translates movement, touch, and proximity into sound. Developed since 2020 in collaboration with Gioele Villani (robotics) and Francesco Zedde (sound design), the device evolved from a sensor-equipped sweatshirt to advanced versions using Jacquard loom with conductive threads fabric in Fondazione Lisio, Florence.

The project originates from Abito: an exercise to explore space through weaving, a community project from 2016 in Vico Tronari (Sanità, Naples), where the manipulation of textile matter was a driving force for cohesion and an activator in dialogue with the inhabitants. This experience of participatory practices strongly inspired the development of Abito Sonoro as a responsive e-textile device. The evolution toward such an instrument responds to the necessity of making tangible the invisible interpersonal relationships with the environment and between bodies.

The Abito Sonoro Canvas device generates an interaction space in proximity to the e-textile, highlighting how our bodies are included in the continuously changing ecosystem. By sonifying Hall's proxemics, thus the spheres. The sonified proxemics transforms anthropological theory (Hall's interpersonal distances) into embodied aesthetic experience, uniting theoretical research and experimentation in a creative process.

The project examines the body as a threshold (Merleau-Ponty) for interacting with space. By incorporating the body within a sonic membrane, Abito Sonoro creates synaesthetic (synesthetic) aural (auditory) experiences.

Movement generates and reacts to sonic stimuli, activating a reciprocal cycle where body and space co-constitute each other. The research is grounded in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology (the body as lived threshold) and Donna Haraway's cyborg theory (human-technological hybridization), developing the concept of sonic threshold where the clothed body becomes an active generator of relational sonic landscapes.