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.