How do you architect the acoustic space surrounding someone's skull?

Pull a translucent paper cone over your head. Attach small speakers to its outer surface. Step into a personal acoustic chamber. Your breath and voice resonate within the enclosed space while external sounds filter through the paper membrane, creating layered, intimate soundscapes impossible with conventional headphones.

This is pliable architecture compressed to its most intimate scale. What happens when responsive membranes, environmental attunement, and spatial choreography fold into the zone around a single head?

Constructed from basic materials (paper, tape, scissors), the headmask explores how the lessons of collective architectural experience might translate to personal, portable formats. Drawing on decades of research into inflatable structures and immersive spatial experiences Inflatable Ancestors, this scaled-down adaptation of Sphaerae An inflatable, voluminous structure comprising interconnected domes, Sphaerae made its buoyant presence known at major festivals like Linz’s Ars Electronica and the AxS Festival in Pasadena, California, where it provided a venue for immersive visual and auditory artworks. emerged during COVID-19 lockdowns as a response to sudden spatial constraints.

When social distancing collapsed public gathering spaces, how could Sphaerae's communal breathing space survive? The headmask became a micro-Sphaerae that preserved the acoustic intimacy of collective space within individual constraints, adapted to both pandemic conditions Isolation Training, Hygienically Sealed and the material requirements of the Anarchive.

Concept by Cocky Eek and Theun Karelse. Design by Cocky Eek, Peter Barens and Theun Karelse. Prototyping by Yara Buttner, Lieve Jousma and Peter Barens.

🜛