Peculiar mesilla de noche reciclada.

Como ya os dijimos una de las líneas de trabajo de esta web es ayudaros a crear objetos a partir de otros que estaban en desuso, o hemos reciclado. En este caso, hemos recogido una silla de la calle, y la hemos  barnizado para desprender de ella la sensación de despojo. Además, a partir de una botella de cristal y de una luz rota hemos creado una moderna lámpara de aspecto actual y contemporáneo.  Por último, para sofisticar la instalación y darle un aspecto hogareño la hemos decorado con flores y objetos que hemos encontrado en los trasfondos de nuestras casas. Esta última parte, es totalmente libre y cada uno puede decorar su mesita de noche como más le guste.

Como veis, lo que os dijimos es cierto; ¡el diseño está al abasto de todos!

Sensory tourism experiences in the city

Guenyus from Marina Castan on Vimeo.

Authors: Mireia Murciano, Bentagai Pérez, Ibai Velilla (founders of: Guenyos, design studio experiences and students from 3^rd course)

Sensory tourism programs, are the development of tourist routes across the city of Barcelona, using all the senses except sight. Imagine yourself explaining the holiday trip to your relatives and friends, without showing a picture, how would you do it?

People are not blind; we are predisposed to the visual world around us, to the point where we construct reality through images and to the detriment of the other four senses. So much information wasted!!!

The aim with this project is, firstly, to remove the potential to enrich people’s sensory perception in relation to the environment. That is, anyone can sit on the couch at home and enjoy a wonderful view of the Sagrada Familia, the end of the day, it only takes a photo.

What a difference it would have walked among its pillars and a conscious, feel touch the ground on his feet, smells, sounds, in short, any information that is only possible through our sensory experiences that are not summarized in an image.

On the other hand, the second objective is to go against mass tourism, and scheduled. We propose the concept of “slow tourism”, tourism that takes time to know those details that make it unique to a city, away from the willingness of the guidebooks.

Finally and ultimate goal is to make an integrated effort among blind people, their organizations and the local population. In this project there are no differences between disabled and “normal” and there is much less with tourists, since the latter also come to know the local population.

Exponsenses - Virtual Tour

Exposenses is a project developed by a group of 1st course students for "The Touch Project" within
"Project fundamentals" subject, coordinated by professor Carlos Jimenez.

TOUCH in Copenhagen - the LAB concept & prototype development

CONCEPT

The aim of TOUCH LAB is to increase affective understanding and sensitivity. Through this aim, we want to make it possible at once for blind and sight-impaired people and for sighted people to get a sensory, affective, reflective, and creative experience of the relation between art and senses.

TOUCH LAB is a spatial-performatory installation that invites blind/sight impaired audience or others that are voluntarily blindfolded, to take part in experiencing the relation between art-making and blindness/sight.

TOUCH LAB as an installation investigates in and experiments with how we can experience visual art from a blind/sight impaired perspective, through reception, intuition, and creation. The lab exercises focus on tactility in various forms, and on all five senses and intuition working together to allow for blind and tactile creation of art.

The lab will make it possible to work through the senses that are directly available to blind/sight impaired people: touch, taste, smell, hearing, and movement. The last ingredient in the lab is intuition, serving as the necessary guide through all of the above senses and their translation into artistic expression.

The cochlear construction of the lab

As can be seen in the illustration, the lab is physically constructed as a labyrinth or cochlea. The participant is guided by the architecture of the installation to move from one room to the next, ending in the centre of the cochlea. The separate rooms function as a series of sense-experiences:

• The audio experience consists of a series of short audio recordings from different parts of the world and of very different character (we have tested a.o. street sounds, birds, music, talk, children, city noises, traffic), without any further explanation than the audio file itself; the experience of the sounds is disconcerting due to their differences and the need to link them to one another without guidelines

• The tactile experience includes a number of very different objects that can be touched (such as small statues, matchboxes, kitchen utensils, an old phone, tools, a branch, a flower, a stuffed animal, fruit); the participant is asked to recall and reconstruct the experience of each particular object through the emotional or cognitive images that it arouses

• The smell & taste exercise places the participant in the middle of a number of sources of smell, that together from the impression of a meal, a kitchen, or building on the well known from cooking, leading eventually to tasting random objects and mixing the impressions of the smell with the taste to create a re-doubling of the “madeleine” image from Proust

• The mobility experience is a silent walk through a corridor with sensory experiences placed in the walls and floor for the participants to walk on, walk into and experience with hands, feet or cheeks – the experience is a combination thus of movement in itself and tactile experiences; this experience is part of each of the other experiences and is repeated at the end by itself, without releasing into one of the other experiences (see drawing 1)

A certain aspect of collective experience is also present, but in the muted form of being able to vaguely sense the presence of the others going through the lab. But the main experience form is solitary, to increase the sense experience.

At end of the journey to the centre, the participant is invited to express his/her affective and intuitive response on a small 20x20 canvas, with paint and other available materials. After the session, the canvas is exhibited on the outer wall of the snail, so that all the pictures can eventually form a wall of expression of the blind-senses-art encounter. This can also be folded into a web site, which may be more compatible with smaller sessions, where the lab is part of a more local workshop.

It is important to highlight, however, that the main focus of the installation lies in the movements and experiences, rather than on the final works created by non-seeing participants. The essential part is not as much the creation of more or less tactile art, but the relation between reception, reflection and intuition that we seek to create through the experiences.

The reason for the canvas at the end is that it highlights the dependency on intuition and openness, as the participant, whether blind or not, can not see what he/she creates. Some of it can be felt/touched, but other parts of it are only visible to observers.

The full experience is expected to last about 40 minutes per participants. In an exhibition setting, this will allow for a flow of participants going through, so that around 20-30 participants can go through it in a 6-hour day.

We have been working since the beginning of the year on the development of the concept for this 'mobile laboratory'. In the second workshop in Copenhagen, this process was guided and took place in dialogue with the guide. We suggest that we keep the guide in the final version of the lab, mainly to secure a comfortable and pleasant experience for the participants. But the guide will be instructed not to speak, as the dialogue replaces force with digested meaning and weakens the final work with the canvas.

This way, the participant may feel a bit uneasy, but only enough to make them rely on intuition, openness, expressive force and trust. There will be a dialogue going on constantly, between the participant and the sense-exercises, the participant and the canvas, and the participant and the imagined viewer. The experience will of course also invite the participants to discuss it with each other, as soon as they have finished the canvas. This points towards carrying out the lab in a place that has a café or similar reflection space or to build it into workshops or working days e.g. in organizations.

We are confident that the lab would be able to add to meeting the aims of the project, by on the one hand opening up for new experiences and reflections for blind and sight impaired people regarding not only receiving, but also creating art. And on the other, by allowing for the general public to experience the relation between blindness / sight impairment and art and hopefully challenge some of the common prejudices. Both of these achievements would add, in our eyes, to the many elements that are needed to enhance the resilience and cultural sustainability of our cultures.

TOUCH Experiences in Copenhagen - I: the workshops

Workshop 1 – digging into blindness and art

The first workshop took place in April 2011, at the Institute for the Blind and sight impaired (IBOS) just outside of Copenhagen. Apart from our 3 recruited participants, there were also 3 participants that were taking part in an art class at the institute. Visual artist Nikolai Troest, project leader Oleg Koefoed, and project co-worker Kajsa Paludan were also present from Cultura21. The workshop lasted for about 3 hours.

The agenda for this workshop was to get a deeper understanding of the pros and cons of working with visual and tactile art with blind and sight impaired people. Before the workshop, we had conversations both with some of the people working at the institute, especially those working either with art or with communication, as well as with a psychologist with many years of experience with working with blind and sight impaired people. Our ambition was to let the conversation be guided by the artistic approach of a visual artist, Nikolai, and the approach to art, visual or other, of blind people with experience with art, but not working as professional artists.

Our participants had a very varied degree of experience with art – one of them was even a visual artist herself (techically blind=less than 6/60 vision, but with ”tunnel sight” allowing her to see the colours that she uses). Another participant expressed strong feelings, but mostly of inhibition and fear related to both the use and the creation of art that somehow challenges her (lost) vision (she lost her sight at the age of 12 and is 27 today).

The observations from the workshop were the following: all participants had a quite strong sense of spatial intuition, but only some of them use this in other aspects of contact with materials; for instance when working with what they understand as art, our participants tended to rely much more on their direct material experience – making it hard to use imagination or intuition as the base for creative exercises (we decided to test this further to see how big the problem would be); all participants enjoyed art of varying kinds, from music to literature, sculpture, and some quantity of visually expressed art (but of course this was what motivated them to be present); the experience of art was important for all of them to feel the more aesthetic qualities of life, and gave them ways of sensing and sharing with friends, family of even readers (a participant had written a novel and is working on the second one) – but only one participant was actually creating art for herself; the participants in the art class expressed very austere relations to their work – they saw it more as a way to make objects, than as an aesthetic experience with its own qualities (they did not relate at all to the aesthetic qualities of the cloth when they were weaving, for instance, although they did refer to an ability to feel the difference between different cloth colours); all participants seemed open to going through a more direct challenge in terms of feeling and creating works of art (or something artistically inspired); for the visual artist, learning about the way the blind / sight impaired led especially to a strong reaction towards their spatial abilites when moving through a room, and how this was done based on a strong degree of intuition.

Workshop 2 – testing the concept

For the second workshop at the end of April in Copenhagen, we invited 5 blind / highly sight impaired participants to come to the Project House on Enghavevej for a 4-hour workshop, to test the ideas we wanted to use for the lab.

The 5 participants were a mix of male and female, young and older (27 to 62), and experienced in working with art to nto at all experienced. All participants were asked to go through a series of exercises based on sense experiences: smell, hearing, movement, touching of objects – and to express their thoughts and emotions on a canvas between every one of the 4 exercises. This part of the workshop lasted for about 2 1⁄2 hours, followed by a discussion over a light meal. We observed the participants closely and also asked them about how they saw the workshop and its effect upon them.

The experience was clearly very different for the different participants, and their ability to express themselves was also of very varied quality. Mainly, it became clear that the exercises relied very much on openness in the receptive part of the session, and intuition in the creative part (or on intuition going through from reception to creation). Thus, the more inhibited participants with less self-confidence found it very hard to accept the associative parts of the exercise, and equally hard to express their feelings in the painting part. We had deliberately chosen not to let them work with other tactililty-based expressive tools than colours on canvas, as we wanted to test this idea. Being pretty confident that other tactile tools such as clay, sculptural paint (oil rather than acryllic paint), wood, etc, would work out for blind/sight impaired, we tested the concept to the limit. And the conclusion that we have drawn is that the approach is simply too selective or exclusive. So we suggest using a combination of colours and other materials, still on canvas, but in a way that makes it possible to a larger extent for the participant to feel/touch the work that they create. For instance, they will be able to make ”lines” across the canvas with wood or clay, and then fill out the spaces with colours if they feel confident enough about it. The conclusion from this workshop is that the idea behind the lab is feasible, but must be carried out with great sensitivity.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to IBOS, Institut for Blinde og Svagtseende for help with developing the workshops, with communication and for hosting the first workshop. Thank you to Dansk Blinde Samfund for help with recruiting participants and proomting the project. Thank you to Mogens Bang, retired professor in psychology, for discussions and assistance regarding the haptic sense and the workshops. Thank you of course to all the participants, who make it possible for us to gain an insight into the world of the blind, and for accepting to play our strange games with us. And thank you to the team, which consisted of the following people:

Oleg Koefoed – Project and workshop leader // Nikolai Troest – visual artist //Kajsa Li Paludan – Project and workshop co-worker // Helle Ansholm Rasmussen – Project and workshop co-worker

// Karsten Tadie – Project and workshop co-worker //Mette Skau Smølz – Workshop co-worker