My studio progress has been admittedly slow the past few weeks. After receiving news of a rejected grant application, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time applying for other grants to try to get the funds I need to keep creating new work.
In addition to this heavy administrative work, I’ve been reading more of The Agency of Access and researching other DIY synthesizer projects with Pure Data coding. Many YouTube tutorials and programmer blogs later, I still feel out of my element and am finding it hard to grasp the process and to understand how it will all come together. I did find Artis Lab, an experimental and interactive sound designer that has assembled and built a laser cut synthesizer coded with Pure Data that can also be manipulated with an app on an iPhone. I’ve attached a short video of one of Artis Lab’s synths that illustrates the direction of my project. Once I get a better handle on the coding part, I think the assembly and design of it will hopefully fall into place.
In my latest reading session of The Agency of Access, Amanda Cachia elaborates on the Fluxus movement, the history of visual authority as “visual culture”, and examples of descriptions, captions, alt text, Braille and sign language that possess vast creative possibilities as potential works of art in and of themselves, especially when involving multiple senses. Cachia gives many great examples of disability arts activists, but two examples struck me – Christine Sun Kim’s “[Closer Captions]” and Alison O’Daniel’s The Tuba Thieves videos, both of which share a creative deaf perspective and heightened awareness of sounds that hearing audiences would typically take for granted. I was intrigued that both artists translated sound into visual forms, colours, movement, and materials, using synesthesia as an open door to unique interpretations. I liked what Cachia says about O’Daniel’s work, “Rather than perceiving this strategy as a compensation for what is ‘lost’, the idea is to focus on what is gained, in line with the rhetoric of deaf gain. …deaf gain focuses on the creative and intellectual benefits of deafness and turns around pejorative ideas of lack regarding the state of deafness” (pg 91). This idea of disability as gain over what is typically considered a loss is something I want to highlight in my work and how I communicate with my audience in order to build confidence in myself and become a stronger advocate for the Blind and low vision community.
Before reading this book, my latest body of work has been exploring multi-sensory language and the translations that form from the audience’s experience while simultaneously disrupting the ocularcentric culture and behavioural etiquette of gallery visitation. It is affirming to see this idea is a common thread within access aesthetics. I am hopeful and inspired by what I’ve learned so far from Cachia’s observations.
