You Are Not Alone
Posted on December 18, 2010 | posted by:
Shortly after getting a divorce, Bernd Klosterfelde felt alone and overwhelmed by the absence of sounds in his home. This could have been just another divorce story but Bernd decided to intervene on his loneliness. He invited a friend’s girlfriend over to his house, and proceeded to record her doing everyday domestic tasks. The disc, he says “can be used to make one feel less lonely, or to remind one of how annoying a partner can be.” Ine Mehr Allein (Alone No More) became an instant cult hit.
Alone No More’s track list:
1. The fridge is full again at last
2. Cappuccino break
3. Reading the paper
4. Time to do the washing up
5. A shirt is quickly ironed
6. Baking a cake for the beloved
7. A bath is just the thing
8. And straight onto the sun-bed
9. Getting out the hairdryer
10. Nature calls
11. Forgot to do the vacuuming
12. Just typing up that letter on the computer
13. There’s nothing on TV again, at least the crisps are good
14. Better off reading and having a smoke
15. Slamming a roast into the oven
Almost a decade earlier, Michael Jackson found himself in a similar situation and he confessed to his lover – in You Are Not Alone – that at night he thought he heard her cry, asking him to come and hold her in his arms … Bernd opted for something a little different; let’s look at the track list again:
1. The fridge is full again at last
2. Cappuccino break
3. Reading the paper
4. Time to do the washing up
5. A shirt is quickly ironed
6. Baking a cake for the beloved
7. A bath is just the thing
8. And straight onto the sun-bed
9. Getting out the hairdryer
10. Nature calls
11. Forgot to do the vacuuming
12. Just typing up that letter on the computer
13. There’s nothing on TV again, at least the crisps are good
14. Better off reading and having a smoke
15. Slamming a roast into the oven
Bernd, like Michael, could have chosen to record the sounds of a partner crying, humming, talking on the phone, or snoring, instead 10 out of the 15 sounds he recorded were sounds of products – almost all the sounds being sounds of a person interacting with a designed object. To fight loneliness, Bernd recorded the noise of machines at work, this for him was the equivalent of a human presence in his life! Besides this disk being just a success story, I saw the track list as a potent statement on our modern perception of what it is to be human.
Ubuntu in South Africa is a philosophy that says “the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me.” And this is how I came to understand design, it reflects our humanity back at us. It defines us as humans.