Constructing Lightness with On

The Berlin Marathon is a test of endurance. For the average runner, it involves months of preparation—extending runs from long to longer to insanely long then tapering off and praying for no nagging injuries—all to achieve the rush of crossing the finish line at a decent time. But with On LightSpray™ shoes, the marathon is much more than the race. Inside the famed Kraftwerk space, home to Tresor and Berlin Atonal, the Swiss sports brand constructed On Labs Berlin.

There, runners and non-runners alike can experience their Lightspray™ technology and watch a robot spray the uppers of Cloudboom Strike LS shoes. But On Labs is much more than this. Rounded out with panel discussions, guest performers, and DJ sets, visitors can also take part in community workouts or receive analysis on their running form. All of this unfolds across two floors, with the activations spanning the entire space around and beneath Boris Acket’s breathtaking Architecting Lightness installation. The artwork itself floats on the second floor inside the massive industrial hall, evoking the lightness of the Lightspray™ technology. We spoke to On and Acket about On Labs Berlin and the creation of his piece.

032c: How did this exhibition come about? And how does Boris’ aesthetic align with On’s values / brand intentions?

On: At On, design and innovation go hand in hand. We believe true creativity sparks where diverse perspectives collide—designers and engineers working side by side, challenging and refining each other’s ideas. This energy, born from diversity and dialogue, fuels the breakthroughs that shape both our products and the culture around them.

Boris Acket was chosen because his work moves fluidly between design and technology—values that are equally central to On. They are the very principles we prioritized in developing LightSpray™, the innovation presented at On Labs Berlin.

His installations distill light, sound, and movement into immersive experiences, echoing LightSpray™’s pursuit of ultimate lightness by stripping away the unnecessary.
At Kraftwerk, Acket translates the core pillars of LightSpray™—ultra-lightness, responsiveness, and energy—into a living installation of fabrics and light.

032c: Architecting Lightness literally uses air currents to animate textile. How do you think poetry, metaphor, and physical reality intersect in motion you can’t see but only sense?

Boris Acket: I have a big fascination for the human experience of time, the way we perceive our now is really the only reason why we can imagine things.

While you spend time with this large-scale installation made of fabric—slowly moving, lit from above, animated by not so hidden mechanics—it’s clearly a machine: cloth, ventilators, lights. And yet people rarely describe it that way. Instead, they talk about clouds, seascapes, drifting sand beds, or distant planetary atmospheres.

That shift in perception isn’t accidental, nor is it mere illusion. The work activates memory. You see a seafloor in moving fabric because you’ve seen one before. You read wind into light because you’ve felt wind. Your perception of what is in front of you is layered with everything you’ve already experienced.

I love the time philosophy of Henri Bergson. In his view: the present is never experienced on its own; it is always shaped by memory and expectation. You never see something just as it is—you see it through what you carry. That is why something as mechanical as a piece of fabric can still register as a landscape, a dream, a windy cloudy sky or a waterfall. The material hasn’t changed; the perceiver has.

032c: How do you hope the audience’s experience of the art installation and the product/technology (LightSpray™, Cloudboom Strike LS) interact? What is the narrative you want people to carry away?

On: The installation and the product are two sides of the same story. In Architecting Lightness, fabrics hover in the air, constantly shifting and reshaping—a metaphor for the intangible quality of lightness. Beside it, a robot sprays the upper of On’s lightest performance shoe to date, before visitors step into the Cloudboom Strike LS themselves.

The message is clear: lightness is not just a feature, it’s a principle—efficiency in production, freedom in movement, beauty in perception. It’s how On imagines movement beyond gravity: innovation that feels as poetic as it is radical.

Position LightSpray™ not just as a shoe technology but as a metaphor for weightless exploration – of the body, the city, and the mind. In Berlin, a city known for its experimentation and grit, LightSpray™ becomes a provocation for what’s next in movement and expression.

032c: In practice, what does “lightness” mean—in product design, in user experience, in perception?

On: For us, lightness is radical reduction.

In product design, LightSpray™ redefines efficiency: a shoe upper that traditionally requires around 200 production steps can now be created in one single automated step—in about three minutes. That means less material, less energy, fewer emissions.

In user experience, lightness is freedom: less weight on the foot, less distraction in motion, more focus on running itself.

In perception, lightness is a mindset—rethinking what seems impossible and always looking for new and more efficient ways to drive innovation.

032c: Boris, your “Einder” series forms part of this work. What were the conceptual or material through-lines in “Einder” that led you to Architecting Lightness?

BA: “Einder” at its essence really still is an artistic research project delving into the artistic potential of these specific lightweight fabrics with an intrinsic light quality. The juxtaposition between control and surrender is central to the work. In this building, this was felt very clearly again. The fan placement was slightly different, the fabrics higher, and new vortexes arose. When blowing the fabric outwards, a downdraft keeps it under a spell in a specific shape. Every space is always different with this one.

We can only control the fabric to a certain extent. The rest is up to the flow of the building, the heat of the air, and the specific currents in the building at that time of the day.

In this specific iteration, I was really inspired by the height and the length of the space. With this intervention, we introduce a cathedral that in essence weighs less then 20 kg for the full amount of fabric.

032c: The installation asks the audience to walk beneath, pause, navigate; in what ways do you see the body’s movement (or lack thereof) as part of the artwork itself?

BA: My pieces are often perceived as non-human dancers. I like that way of looking at them. They have a life of their own, some kind of autonomous presence.

I see the “Einder” series works specifically as amplifiers. They amplify movement, air, light behavior. They bring the overlooked into focus, magnify subtle forces, and reframe the world so that it becomes strange again—and therefore newly perceivable. In this space, the work hopefully brings a new perspective. While walking underneath it, every part of the building gets a new reframing. I would say I try to invite you to become a better observer.

In relation to running and moving, I hope the sheer free space underneath and next to the fabric will be an invitation to actually use that space. People in my works still tend to be careful and mindful of where to stand, not really giving the full space a spin. So, I invite people to do that in this intervention.

032c: With workshops, running analysis, panels under the umbrella of On Labs Berlin, how are you aiming to build community? What kind of demographics or audiences are you trying to reach or activate?

On: On Labs is designed as an open ecosystem—a space where runners, designers, technologists, and cultural pioneers can explore the future of running.

We aim to engage a forward-thinking audience: next-gen runners, athletes, cultural leaders, and people living at the edge of tomorrow. To do this, we activate the space with community-driven formats that connect key figures across Berlin’s diverse scenes and collaborate with matching partners.

032c: As a brand hosting artwork like Architecting Lightness, how do you see experiential art and technology events expanding what customers expect from running brands?

On: By hosting Architecting Lightness, we show that a running brand can also be a cultural platform: a place where engineering meets art, where technology is transparent, and where innovation inspires beyond sport.

It’s about collapsing boundaries. Sport becomes design. Design becomes culture. Culture becomes movement. The shoe isn’t just worn—it’s experienced, like light, like air, like fabric shifting in space.

Such events raise expectations: it’s no longer just about having the fastest shoe, but about offering a meaningful narrative around how innovation is created and what it represents.

032c: How much of Architecting Lightness is about creating a specific mood or feeling (tranquility, urgency, weightlessness), and how much about provoking critical reflection (on industrial space, on what’s “natural,” etc.)?

BA: I don’t really like to tell people what to feel when they enter a piece I made. Some people enter and feel deeply touched, others feel that the space is more playful. I think it’s powerful to keep that space between the observer and the piece.

In my works, I always like to remind people, though, of the sheer dystopia they also represent. They’re elegant, beautiful, they might seem to make you reconnect, but they’re also artificial. They are not so much about water or about air. For me, they’re more about the fact we’re able to see that in them. They can act like a mirror.

At one point, a director I work with turned to me and said, “You do realize you’re making gigantic plastic trees, right?”

We are perhaps the only species that would accept a plastic tree as a stand-in for a real one—and not only accept it, but build it ourselves, and sincerely enjoy it. We research the positive effects of bird song on mood and then stream those recordings through a speaker while sitting indoors. We simulate clouds in exhibition spaces. We recreate wind. We project images of the sea instead of going to the water.

It raises a difficult question: in doing all this, are we getting closer to the thing we long for—or only reminding ourselves how far away we’ve drifted, confirming a collective loneliness and an ongoing difficulty in making sense of it all?

This is the paradox that is also often at the heart of my work. The same tools that create distance also offer the possibility of return. Technology is neither the solution nor the problem either. It is the language we speak—and, in some cases, the only one we have left to describe a world we are trying not to lose.