:the braille box: will be at Chalkhorse Gallery in Surry Hills from 7 - 23 February 2008.
This time the work is being exhibited as a sound sculpture (without video) as a show Tactile, curated by Fiona Bridger.
:the braille box: at don’t look gallery
Published October 16th, 2007 in interactivity, sensors, sight, installation, don't look gallery, exhibition and opening. 3 Comments:the braille box: will be exhibited at the fantastic Don’t Look Experimental New Media Gallery from Nov 7 -17.
Opening: Wed Nov 7, 6pm at Don’t Look Gallery, 419 New Canterbury Rd, Dulwich Hill.
:the braille box: is an interactive, audience-driven installation that uses blindness both as metaphor and as a documented experience to explore questions of cognition, meaning and perception in terms of the sensed world and the world built from language. The work uses a touch-driven Braille interface to trigger immersive audio and video to surround the gallery visitor in the contradictions and poetics inherent in the meaning of visionand its absence.
:braille: at This is Not Art Festival 07
Published September 30th, 2007 in TiNA and installation. 0 CommentsI have just exhibited a version of the :braille: installation as part of the ARTEXTART exhibition at TiNA 07. The show was made up of a variety of installations/artworks that included or used text in some way.
:braille: was installed in a heritage prison cell in the lock-up, which is the old Newcastle Police Station. The cell proved to be an extremely spooky and evocative space to build an installation. The sound was incredibly echoey and lush in that cool, dark space. I had the privilege of exhibiting next to Thomas Knox-Arnold, whose excellent sound installation occupied the cell next door.
I got quite a lot of good feedback, although it was interesting to me how many visitors were reluctant to touch the braille. The ‘do not touch art’ thing is very ingrained in most people. It was also exciting to see how ordinary people who walked in off the street perceived the work, as opposed to the art-seasoned TiNA crowd. Unfortunately most of them seemed to walk right past it. But that’s contemporary art for you…
“That black against my foot, it didn’t look like black, but rather the confused effort to imagine black by someone who had never seen black and who wouldn’t know how to stop, who would have imagined an ambiguous being beyond colours. It looked like a colour, but also . . . like a bruise or a secretion, like an oozing—and something else, an odour, for example, it melted into the odour of wet earth, warm, moist wood, into a black odour that spread like varnish over this sensitive wood, in a flavour of chewed, sweet fibre. I did not simply see this black: sight is an abstract invention, a simplified idea, one of man’s ideas. That black, amorphous, weakly presence, far surpassed sight, smell and taste. But this richness was lost in confusion and finally was no more because it was too much.”
-Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea
refreshing perception
Published August 1st, 2007 in quotes, interactivity, space, perception, baudrillard and bachelard. 0 Comments
Frank Popper’s book, From Technological to Virtual Art, contains this great passage about the aims of artist Char Davies:
“[Char] Davies envisions virtual reality as a means of undoing habitual assumptions about our being-in-the-world. She approaches the medium as a visual/aural spatial/temporal arena for perceptually “changing space” in the sense meant by the French philosopher and essayist Gaston Bachelard: By changing space, by leaving the space of one’s usual sensibilities, one enters into communication with a space that is physically innovating…For we do not change place, we change our Nature. In short, Davies’s goal is to use virtual reality as a means of temporarily collapsing boundaries between subject and object, interior and exterior, self and world- in order to facilitate a refreshing of perception, thereby potentially resensitizing participants to the extraordinariness of being alive, sentient, and embodied, here now, among all this, briefly immersed in the flow of life through space and time.”
Popper, 2007, p.195.
The notion of ‘refreshing perception’ is something I find very interesting and is quite related to an interesting Baudrillard quote I also came across this morning. Baudrillard says:
“Art as adventure, Art with its power of illusion, its capacity for negating reality, for setting up an ‘other scene’ in opposition to reality, where things obey a higher set of rules, a transcendent figure in which beings, like the line and colour on a canvas, are apt to lose their meaning, to extend themselves beyond their own raison d’etre, and, in an urgent process of seduction, to rediscover their ideal form (even though this form may be that of their own destruction) - in this sense, Art is gone. Art has disappeared as a symbolic pact, as something thus clearly distinct from that pure and simple production of aesthetic values, that proliferation of signs ad infinitum, that recycling of past and present forms, which we call ‘culture’. There are no fundamental rules, no more criteria of judgement or of pleasure. In the aesthetic realm of today there is no longer any God to recognize his own.”
Baudrillard, Jean, 1993, The Transparency Of Evil: Essays On Extreme Phenomena, p.14.
What is striking about this passage for me is the discrepancy between the affirmation of the potential power of art with the cynicism about ‘the aesthetic realm of today’. In one paragraph Baudrillard succinctly describes the potency of art and then brutally and unequivocally denies its existence.
I believe that it is this potential to ‘refresh perception’ that Popper talks about that unequivocally proves art is not gone.
sensing sensors
Published July 31st, 2007 in pictures, quotes, gear, interactivity and sensors. 0 Comments“What is percieved by the senses & what makes sense are split asunder”-Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes
I have just invested in a sensor kit for the Braille installation. I will be using motion sensors to pick up on the movement of audience members’ hands as they move their fingers over the Braille.
It’s been extremely exciting beginning to program the video to the motion sensors (pictured above)- I got such a kick the first time I moved my hand- theramin style- over the sensor and saw it trigger to sound & video. There is something extremely satisfying and intense about the physical relationship with the material/technology that interactive art brings about.
light & shadows
Published July 12th, 2007 in quotes, thinking out loud, derrida and plato. 0 Comments“A conversation will free them from the phenomenal prison of the visible world.”
Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p.15
to disrupt the ease of association
Published July 3rd, 2007 in quotes, thinking out loud and flusser. 0 CommentsToday I read a good article, ‘On the Philosopher Vilém Flusser‘, by Elizabeth Wilson & Andreas Ströhl. It has some excepts of his writing as well, which is great because there is not that much of it translated to english.
I can already see Flusser’s theories beginning to play a role in my mental formulating of the braille project.
My desire to create work that breaks the line of affiliation, disrupts the ease of association and questions the continuity of perception is definitely something that has echoes in Flusser’s writing.
This excerpt where Flusser imagines the future of writing has resonances about Braille to it- the idea of codes of transmission and how information is produced and received is at the heart of the braille project.
‘Writing, in the sense of the lining-up of letters and other writing signs, seems to have no future or almost none. In the meantime, there are codes that transmit information better than writing signs. What has been written until now can be better transferred on tapes, records, films, videotapes, picture discs, or diskettes. And much of what could not be written until now can be recorded in these new codes. The information that is coded thus is more convenient to produce, to transport, to receive, and to store than written texts. In the future, with the help of the new codes, we will be better able to correspond, make science, talk about politics, write poetry, and philosophize than we are in the alphabet or in Arab figures. It seems as if the codes of writing, like the Egyptian hieroglyphs, or the Indian knots, would be put aside. In the future, only historians and other specialists will have to learn how to write and read”.
-Flusser, “Writing”
Of course, I hope Flusser is wrong in this prediction, but it is interesting to think about…
Derrida addresses blindness in his book, Memoirs of the blind, which is an extended version of the notes he penned for an exhibition of drawings that he curated at the Louvre Museum in 1991. Derrida deals with blindness both conceptually and experientially. This even-handedness of approach can perhaps be attributed to the fact that, due to a strange virus that affected the muscles in his face, Derrida was temporarily blinded whilst undertaking the curatorship at the Louvre. In the book he recounts the way the idea struck him to compile a series of drawings of the blind, which range from Rembrandt’s Tobias Healing his Father’s Blindness to Jacques-Louis David’s Homer Singing his Poems. In the preface of the book the translator sums up Derrida’s themes as comprising:
“Blindness, disappropriation, and the interruption of a lineage or filiation: the cancellation of what makes representation possible, the difference between the body proper and the supplement, the living body and the scarecrow, and the ruination and death of all foresight, all representation, and all legacies” (Derrida, 1993, p.ix)
This idea of the ‘cancellation of what makes representation possible’ is a notion that ethically haunts me whilst producing this work. The question of whether it is ethically correct to film blind people; to confront them with a medium of representation that they cannot fathom, let alone access, is something I am extensively considering. I feel that by using visual material in a provocative way I can make a more complex work than by not using it at all. Perhaps by obscuring the visuals through blurring, darkening and layering them upon each other I will trigger a sighted audience member to re-asses their own vision, to question what Derrida calls the “lineage of filiation” that we invest in vision. Hopefully this will encourage viewers to reassess their vision in the same way that making the project caused me to reassess my own.
And then, of course, the greater challenge for a visula artist of making a work that moves beyond vision and addresses the other senses…
