Day 4 featured a challenge by Georgia Krantz to consider inclusive experiences for audiences with low or no vision. Here’s a round up summary:
HI FI / LO FI:
- HiFi: parabolic speakers – something they could own and then share
- LoFi:
- secret exhibition at any museum – available to anyone on the audio track to the museum, an already engaged audience
- key component – seed it in the unsighted community; guerrilla marketing – not specifically for unsighted people specifically
- creating an experience – you walk through an artist’s studio, access to the process – touch/smell/other sense – behind the scenes access
- could turn into a performance
- have the studio of Van Gogh recreated, include the historical gossip – walking through the whole process of how the art was created
- tactile – scan the texture and recreate it in the scale of a 2.5 landscape for a room
- secret exhibition at any museum – available to anyone on the audio track to the museum, an already engaged audience
- Feedback:
- process is hugely important and interesting to people
- Robert Morris, Box with the sound of its own making
ON THE GO:
- The idea of knowing as opposed to seeing – A Knowing Tour
- Part of seeing means that you’re knowing – know your environment, etc.
- Knowing Tour in a museum:
- Developed by unsighted art historians and collaborators
- 3D models of famous paintings
- People who do see, things that they still don’t really get – just seeing doesn’t mean you’re knowing
- A costume: put it on, move around in it and try different
- Walk around in an environment, when you get close to the figure it triggers audio; curated by unsighted people
- Knowing Tour in Central Park:
- two people, two minutes one who is sighted and one who is not sighted
- narrate their experience, from each person’s perspective
- live streaming video, you can follow them
- Feedback:
- Frank Loyd Wright Guggenheim tour – indoor and outdoor, took people through the park
- Would people want to listen in on conversations?
- Could mix a real-time experience with pre-recorded
- One-on-one conversation great
SMALL FRY:
- Art History Live
- Las Meninas: portrait of a family, so lively – what would it feel like for someone unsighted to have a sense of being insight the painting
- Want to know the voices from the paintings
- Recreate a painting in 3 dimensions and someone could go through to each character and touch them and there would be sounds associated
- could be a person, a robot, or a mannequin
- real room to scale, surrounded by the sound of the era, the temperature of the room
- sensors on the characters would emit the smells of the people – every person in the painting has something special to communicate to you
- build a brain image of the actual painting
- a way for children to be able to imagine of what the world of that time period was like
- Art History Live Feedback:
- kids love learning about the stories as well as the tactile stuff
- kids love mystery – within the context of teaching you could enhance the mystery out of each painting into the learning experience – maybe different parts of the story get revealed throughout the experience
- evoke the experiences of a blind child
- Synethesia – translating/magical room:
- You arrive at the room and you’re asked to make something that expresses happiness
- “see with their imagination” – in the end they’re asked to put together a story based on what they chose – because everyone sees/experiences sensory things differently
- “Your Brain’s Best Guest” – Sensorial
- in a hallway or set up as a pop up installation
- two walls, and various inputs are matched to various outputs
- inputs: co2, movement, proximity, touch, density
- outputs: sounds (instruments, rhythm, harmony), fans (temperature)
- moving through the physical environment it triggers sound
- sensorial experience where no two experiences are the same, an exercise in understanding feedback
- you just have :30-:60 to attract a kid before they’ll move on and go away
- could be recorded, remixed or relived – people could get it on the
- whatever your brain creates works for you
2 OR MORE
- Our favorite experiences with vision
- The presentations that they give tonight would be need to be accessible to people who are unsighted
- Pop-up venue:
- Theramin-derived venue: Leon Theremin – people move into a space and create movement and their bodies trigger sensors – amorphous sound installation; trace motion that translates into sound
- goals: accessible for all; collaborative experience
- sounds could be anything
- Feedback to pop-up venue:
- challenge is people having to be close to the kinect; like the fact that the walls are reactive
- could be cacophonous – could lose the connection to a cohesive experience
- great idea to have it be structured or not, to keep it open
- Touch multi-user experience:
- movement or dance led by a blind person
- a puzzle, there’s different textures – people have to work together to make the puzzle work
- scenario: walking by astor place, is attracted visually or aurally to a structure, call to action – “bring 3 or more friends and transform me”,
- a cube that people move around and can unlock
- once it is unlocked it makes an unlock sound
- could be part of a series of interesting puzzles around the city
- collaborative and inclusive
- universal design
- Feedback:
- things that are public are inviting bc you don’t have to go into a museum but have to overcome the intimidation factor they may feel
- shapes, texture, the simplest of materials – art-making – keying in on somebody making something that can be finished and collaborative is huge
- but also finishing it