Simple and beautiful, just a mark on the floor combining 2 steps with the form of the ears, this is the place for the Japanese artist and performer Akio Suzuki to listen deeply the soundscape around him. This very simple practice by the artist of listening deeply our environment is a interesting way to introduce people into Big History i believe. Learning about our place on earth and into the universe is a matter of being there in a new way. As New Media artist and teacher i believe that one of the keys to teach and learn our history from a cosmic perspective has to be done by the experience in the outside environment and some Art practices can be helpful.

“Otodate is a Japanese word, the ideograms which compose it, oto and date signifying respectively ‘listen’ and ‘point’, hence ‘listening point’. Tracing upon asphalt, stone or any solid support a circular sign inscribed with two specular figures which at once represent a pair of ears and two human footprints, Akio marks out the site of an experience that promises to be literally ‘exceptional’ for anyone who takes the time to pause there a moment and place their feet on the two signs within the circle: a momentary exception from how they would normally inhabit the surrounding space-time continuum that will allow them, simply by using their own eyes and ears, to perceive the world in a new way. The experience may be even more powerfully affecting if the place in question is already well known to the subject and they have a long established manner of inhabiting it which the work then overturns, letting them see and hear it as though for the first time…”
source estatic.it: http://goo.gl/gpoeqb