Description
HEAR & LISTEN is a work from Steit’s ongoing Senses Project, a conceptual series initiated during his studies at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam in the early 1990s and continuously developed since. The project takes the primary human senses — sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and learning — as both its subject and its structural principle, using language not as caption or title but as the work itself.
In this piece, Steit turns to sound and its reception. Two words that are commonly treated as synonyms are brought into close physical contact, their letterforms interlocked into a single typographic mass and rendered in 3D-printed form with internal LED illumination. The result is an object that must be read before it can be understood, and reconsidered once it has been.
The distinction the work draws is precise. Hearing is passive and automatic — the ear receives what the environment provides. Listening is deliberate, an act of concentration that transforms raw sound into meaning. By merging the two into one inseparable structure, the work asks where one ends and the other begins, and whether, in the conditions of contemporary life, the transition between them can any longer be assumed.
Light plays a functional rather than decorative role. The diffuse halo that extends beyond the letterforms into the surrounding wall produces an immediate visual claim on the viewer’s attention — presence before readability. In this sense the object enacts its own argument: we perceive before we interpret, we hear before we listen.
Consistent with Steit’s broader practice, the work prioritises idea over spectacle. It does not illustrate its subject so much as embody it, presenting the viewer with a question that is simple to read and less simple to answer. HEAR & LISTEN is, like all works in the Senses Project, a conversation the artist initiates and the viewer must complete.
Original artwork specifications
- 3D Printed PETG
- 24v LED Lighting + power supply
- Black Lettering and translucent honeycomb white surfaces
- Text: 81 x 30 x 7cm – Power: 20 x 6 x 3 cm
- Unique artwork