Four flute playing cabinets for Landtonen

11/03/2010    Art, Design 3D, Furniture

In Okkenbroek you’ll find four hiking trails with a length ranging from half an hour to one and a half hour. They’ll take you to some of the most beautiful spots of Salland. With the input of Landtonen your walk gets even better.

Several artists, writers and composers were commissioned by Landtonen to make a poetic impression of these walks. View the impression, read the text, enjoy the images invoked. And then follow the same trail. You’ll see things through different eyes, hear with different ears and smell with a new nose. These poetic impressions were made in a limited edition. They are for sale in Noaberhuus Okkenbroek and in Kunstenlab Deventer.

But… because Noaberhuus is closed on Sundays (which are excellent hiking days ofcourse), I was commissioned to design some kind of device to distribute the poetic impressions (including a map) in another way. Could have been a very simple assignment I guess, but I decided it was more fun to distribute them with sound. Partly because Landtonen roughly translates as ‘showing land’ but also as ‘land tones’. And partly because of my earlier involvement in Landtonen.

So I took the assignment a step further and came up with four cabinets that play the flute when you open them. All four cabinets are playing a different tone. So when you combine them, you actually have a very basic musical instrument to play with! The construction is completely mechanical and works with bellows, no electricity needed.

As you can see there’s a red, blue, yellow and green cabinet which corresponds with – you guessed it – the red, blue, yellow and green trail. The outer casing is made of beechwood. Since Okkenbroek is a small village located in a rural area where decency (and social control) is still common good, you pay for your poetic impression by putting the right amount of money in one of the canisters on top. This system is used by farmers throughout the area. The same decency should also prevent extreme vandalism. This is why the cabinets are sturdy, but not vandalism proof.