MIARD: Instruments

Presented at the Milan Design Week,“Instruments: Reimaging the Music Room” is an exhibition centred on the theme of the domestic soundscape and the place of music in the home.

“Instruments: Reimaging the Music Room”, curated by Piet Zwart Institute Master of Interior Architecture & Retail Design (MIARD), explores the detection and recognition of an immaterial audio presence or sonic architectures that exists in the home, engendered by our domestic rituals, their space and objects.

This audio presence requires the inhabitant to recognize a spatial acuteness, cognition, and mapping, which isn’t necessarily rational, visible or haptic. In turn, the inquiry has generated projects, which offer novel design solutions and alternative ‘sonic’ experiences for contemporary home life.

Videos complemented each project, planned as performative narratives to illustrate how the projects work in space, while they also reflected the designer’s idiosyncratic domestic ‘sound diaries’ that originally inspired the project.

Building upon the past two exhibitions “Fabrikaat” (2012) and “Altered Appliances” (2013), “Instruments” is part of a trilogy that investigates making, materiality, and application in the context of the domestic space. The projects were researched and made during thematic design studios by a group of international designers in the Master Interior Architecture & Retail Design (MIARD) program at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam University, Netherlands.

Iulia Circei, Sina Steiner, Auscultable. Auscultable is an intimate listening device that makes hidden sounds of the user’s heart audible. It reveals the fragility of the heartbeat, the heart as an organ and thus the fragility of life itself.

Eglė Jacinavičiūtė, Savvas Lazaridis, Domestichordophone. The Domestichorpophone is a playful cabinet with the features of a string musical instrument. Users can experience it individually or in company and find their own means of sound within the domestic space.

Bianca Yousef, Kleoniki Fotiadou, Obsessive Cleaners. Five cleaning mechanisms are designed to clean details of the house that are often neglected. To enhance the individual cleaning experience, the quintet of Obsessive Cleaners creates a micro soundscape within the domestic space.

Marco Busani, Natalie Konopelski, sonic f.lux. sonic f.lux is a set of lights that reinterprets the idea of listening by extending the aural domain to the visual realm. It creates a new audio-visual experience by projecting continuous fluctuations of sound into space.

Albina Aleksiunaite, Devika Mirawitani, The Paperscape. The Paperscape is an installation that refers to the sound as air in motion. It inhabits domesticity as a sonic drapery that is activated by the fluctuation of air.

Instruments: Reimaging the Music Room
Thematic Design Project: Alex Suarez, Thomas Vailly
History + Theory: Füsun Türetken
Technology, Visualization + Communication: Sander Boer
Research Methods: Catherine Somzé
Project Coordination: Vanessa Tuitel
Graphic Design: Daphne Heemskerk , Oliver Otten
Exhibition Woodwork: Stephan Gotz
Guest Critics: Marta Male-Alemany, Füsun Türetken, Jacob Voorthuis
Editing: Füsun Türetken

MIARD: Instruments

Presented at the Milan Design Week,“Instruments: Reimaging the Music Room” is an exhibition centred on the theme of the domestic soundscape and the place of music in the home.

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