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Crawl Inside a Museum-Sized Scotch Tape Web

Created by art collaborative Numen / For Use, 'Tape Paris' invites visitors to Paris's Palais de Tokyo inside what looks like a giant spider's web.

Tape Paris by Numen / For Use @ The Palais de Tokyo, Images via

What might it be like to fall into a wormhole, or become trapped inside a spider's web? Tape Paris by Numen / For Use invited visitors to find out for themselves, by inviting them inside web-like tunnels suspended over the entrance of Paris’s Palais de Tokyo museum. As a part of the Inside exhibition, curated by Jean de Loisy, Daria de Beauvais, and Katell Jaffrès, Tape Paris used over 27 miles of transparent Scotch tape to form an immense, immersive installation, one that looked an awful lot like Shelob's lair from Lord of the Rings.

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Numen / For Use is a Croatian/Austrian design collaborative that was formed by industrial designers, Sven Jonke, Christoph Katzler and Nikola Radeljković in 1998. For Tape Paris, the trio came together from different parts of Europe to create an otherworldly experience, one that “reveals glimpses of its organic innards." On the Numen / For Use’s website, the artists state that, “the journey through [Tape Paris] constitutes the first stage in the exploration of an inner space that is physical as much as it is mental.”

The floating structure hung over the high ceilings and entrance of the building, forming both a feast for the eyes and a futuristic playground. Five museum visitors at a time were allowed to enter and wander through its soft architecture. The translucent tape allowed for participants to feel both removed from the tunnel-vision induced by similarly enclosed spaces, and connected to the museum visitors below them.

The Inside exhibition commissioned 30 artists to cover two floors of the museum with their ideas on interiors, and of space as a metaphor. The curators’ statement says that, when moving “from one installation to the next, we remain constantly immersed in the works, which lead us within ourselves—from our skin to our most intimate thoughts.”

Tape Paris was supported by the Swedish apparel line COS, and ran at Palais de Tokyo through January 11, 2015.

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