On 28 November 1980 I performed ‘Hear/See’during the Mixage festival in two rooms of the Centrum voor Beeldende Kunst De Beyerd in Breda, the Netherlands. In a first room, visitors to the exhibition see a series of slides of industrial landscapes from Vilvoorde, my hometown. They also hear occasional loud monotone music in the room next door. The two rooms are connected by a narrow corridor with a door at the end. Johan De Smet walks among the visitors, repeatedly taking someone at random by the arm and taking him into the corridor for a short while. On the other side of the door stands Xavier Rathé, who opens the door at random moments for just a few seconds. Once the door is open, the loud music falls silent and the casual viewer sees me lying on a revolving table, which I keep moving by means of a rope between the floor and ceiling. The scene is illuminated by a bright spotlight. When the door closes again, the loud music sounds again. After a while, the door remains closed.

In 2021, I created the bonsai sculpture/model Hear/See to evoke the performance in Breda. Using various 3D software programmes, I recreated the pose on the rotating table based on the scarce photos of the performance. Also to scale, I made a Marshall speaker box and a LED spot, after the ones used during the performance. A slow-turning 12V motor makes the miniature table rotate 360° on its own axis and a stepper motor throws the door open and closed. An Arduino microcontroller controls the stepper motor, the LED spotlight and the sound to randomly alternate on and off for a few seconds.