What I basically did was putting my thoughts on paper. I walked around the school and observed the people. While doing that I just wrote and sketched down what came to my mind. Because of this some of the sketches are untrue and some of them are true. I like this part because no one can tell witch sketches are true and witch are not. I choose to dig in to the part of the heads. The hair and hats and this way off dressing. The next step was to photograph the students to discover more.
What I discovered is that a lot of Rietveld students don’t cover their ears, with hair or hats. But why? Is it because most students don’t hear their native tongue and because of that they have to listen carefully? Or is it just a practical thing, for instance when your busy making beautiful art you don’t want your hair in the way. I printed the pictures I took and experimented a bit with it. I covered everything but not the ears.
Then I was looking for the surrounding and how the sound influence us. Where are our ears when we listen?
So I focused myself on the listening part. We hear a lot of things but we don’t listen to all of them. You know when someone says something and you hear him but still you don’t understand and you have to ask him what he was saying. Most of the times this is because your mind is somewhere else. I want to make an outfit that makes you hear better. But how? block all sounds? let all sounds come in? enlarge sound? …….. What I did was making sure your mind is at the right place for listening. This means all senses have to be blocked so you can only focus on listening, like a blind man.
This is the result. It is an outfit made out of sound isolation material and speaker wire. The sound isolation material will reduce noise and makes sound more clear. As you can see I blocked all senses. The only thing you can do in this outfit is: walk and listen.
