Screaming Coat

There is a long story behind the origins of this garment that Jolie Klefeker has written eloquently in her paper about ASMR and design. It starts from an exploration of binaural audio and how it might lead us to notice our environments different. Namely, in tests and walks, I found that the audio I was hearing emphasized the droning sounds in my environment: an airplane far over head, an air conditioning vent, and lawnmower in the distance. At the same time, I had been playing with wearable designs and found a nice little way to use a knitted i-cord as a breath sensor. So I decided to connect breath sensing and the audio to record with my breath. I search for sounds of motors, capture them for the length of a long exhale and when play them back on the subsequent breath so that I can scream along with the sounds. This is very much inspired by Kelly Dobson’s work with blendy, a long time fascination with Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s work, and the strange way we can form kinships with machinery by aligning our voices. I particularly loved the way that it has changed my relationship to sounds of motors, bringing diversity and texture to sounds that I otherwise found obnoxious. Making those sounds with my own body in deeply enjoyable and, at times, therapeutic. The need to scream is one that I find myself confronting fairly often, and I like forming partnerships in this sound making practice. More details on the construction of the garment, and the overshot stitch that I used to weave it, can be found at my lab’s website http://unstable.design.