drawings from home

snowing

QR

Exhibition "Adieu Marie"

Outside

I'm sewing a QR code on the outside of my suit. There will be a big one on the back of my jacket and a small one on the frontside. A QR code is like a barcode, you can scan it and get information. This particular QR code is linked to a website showing images of what is inside my suit. There will be new images every (couple of) day(s). When people see me in my suit they can scan the code with their phone and see at that instant what has been on my mind most recently. I will make sure I will move around in my suit a lot. Not only to be part of the world around me and give an account of how I experience it but also to meet as many people as possible and make them part of the process.

The QR code links to this site: a soft harness

suit thoughts

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. (p. 23-24)

Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dress-maker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. Every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer's character, until we hesitate to lay them aside, without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies. No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. (p. 21-22)

From Henry David Thoreau's Walden

the suit and where it took me

since last Tuesday I'm wearing a suit

I wore it on the train, in the optical museum in Jena, in a mild snowstorm, in a cafe,

in another cafe (where I spilled coffee over it), eating diner at a friends’ place, holding a ladder while two people were painting a wall, in my own house, in the supermarket and everywhere inbetween

I will wear it the coming weeks, months, while sewing my thoughts on the inside

and wondering what this is all about

is it a diary? a mindmap? a performance? an egocentric ego-document or can it communicate something more than what is on my mind?

what is the role of inside and outside? how can I use the voyeuristic element?

is the value in my perseverence to wear it?

does the content matter or does it matter there is content?

should i go on a trip again and wear it while walking?

it makes me more attentive to the world but does it makes others more attentive?

While sewing in the train to Jena I sat next to a woman who was shouting the private details of her life in her phone so we could all hear it but nobody took notice of it. Do you have to be secretive to make people interested these days? Silent? On the inside?

I had some nice conversations during the process. And saw a kingfisher in the snow. Only because I am wearing a suit. I'm sure.