Muttering Hats

Some people are simply so inscrutable that you want to grab them by the skull, shake them until their eyes roll bovine white, then press their ear against your own. If they are idiots, all you'll hear is the sea. If they aren't, you'll hear nothing.

Muttering Hats, a project by Kate Hartman at NYU, is trying to change all that. Kate has designed a couple of poofy ear muffs that can be pulled away from the fleecy hat so a friend can listen to your internal murmurings, which sound just like Gilliam cartoons talking.

Kate's statement on her Muttering Hats:

Our head, as part of the body, is very self-contained (self-centered?) and closed off (closed-minded?). It seems so seldom that we that we get to "think" physically. This is something that, in my work in general, I'm trying to approach from a variety of angles. But this project is, in a way, me taking the thought process, and the conversational nature of it, and trying to physically pull it out of the head. It's absurd, but sometimes effective, and a way to engage people in thinking about thought.

If I had a pair of these, I'd upload an mp3 of Stan Bush's seminal rock classic, 'You Got The Touch' into the ear pieces, because it's the song that most accurately encapsulates my own inner musings.

The Muttering Hats [Artist's Site] (via WWMNA)