When Jon Wozencroft left the Royal College of Art at the beginning of my second year of masters, my heart broke.
Jon developed his sound seminars in the late 1980s as a means of promoting the art of listening and seeking to rebalance the dominant bias of visual culture which favours the eye over the ear.
They were truly magical moments and the best thing of the RCA...
Once a month in the darkness of the night, after a pint or two, students from all over the college gathered in a big room at the last floor of the Kensington campus, and sat on old sofas, chairs, rugs or the bare floor, to experience Jon’s ‘seminars’.
After a couple of months of misery without them, I contacted Jon and decided to help him organise the sound seminars beyond college walls. Why deprive the world (and myself) from such marvel?
So with the help of a small team of students, and after many meetings at Queens Park, we managed to organise the first seminar beyond RCA: The Listening Eye.
On a cold and rainy night, sumberged in pink light, around 90 people came to listen to Jon at Iklectick Art Lab (Waterloo). It was beautiful.
It was great to work on the identity of the event together with the amazing Claire Mouton, for which we developed a logo based on the idea of sound waves, a flyer and social media posts.
A lockdown soundseminar is soon to come to your ears through the magic waves of the radio... And this time, in colour!