Chris Downey - Designing With the Blind in Mind
Though incredibly important to an architect, touch is not a sense that we have always appreciated. In fact, a criticism often levelled at our profession is that we have become so visually orientated.
With all the screens we now work with, sight is easy and quick – it gives us the ability to see at a distance and we don’t even have to be there in person. But in reality, the end product is not on a screen, it’s not a representation; it’s a real thing in space and time. And a big part of that is the full range of sensations that you get only by physically experiencing a building.
With sight, the reaction is, ‘Oh, that looks good,’ as opposed to, ‘That feels good.’ Touch is something subtler, as it might not come to mind as quickly. For most people, 80 per cent of the environmental sensory experience is visual, leaving just 20 per cent for everything else.
Notes based on the BBC Radio 4 Show 'Hearing Architecture' are below:
The vOICe software
The vOICe vision technology for the totally blind offers the experience of live camera views through image-to-sound renderings. Images are converted into sound by scanning them from left to right while associating elevation with pitch and brightness with loudness. In theory this could lead to synthetic vision with truly visual sensations ("qualia"), by exploiting the neural plasticity of the human brain through training.
The vOICe also acts as a research vehicle for the cognitive sciences to learn more about the dynamics of large-scale adaptive processes in the human brain. Neuroscience research has already shown that the visual cortex of even adult blind people can become responsive to sound, and sound-induced illusory flashes can be evoked in most sighted people. The vOICe technology may now build on this with live video from unobtrusive smart glasses encoded in sound. The extent to which cortical plasticity allows for functionally relevant rewiring or unmasking of neural pathways in the human brain remains under investigation. Apart from functional relevance, inducing visual sensations through sound (like artificial synesthesia) could also prove of great psychological value. Any potential clinical uses of The vOICe technology will be investigated only through qualified research partners in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.
Sound as Sculpture - Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon was born in 1982 in Long Beach, California. Gordon was completed academic stints at San Francisco Art Institute and Stanford University, where she studied the history of communication technologies, acoustics, and computer music. After an encounter with the minimalist composer La Monte Young’s Dream House in 2002, Gordon began connecting her penchant for movement with what she was hearing. Following this tack, she threw herself into the work of Merce Cunningham and John Cage and the creative methodology of Anna Halprin as a way of reckoning with the potential for collaboration between dance and other genres, such as music and sound.
Gordon cultivates this hybrid tutelage through sound installation, sculpture, and performance that together aim at reconfiguring the traditional hierarchies between audience, performer, and architecture. This blurring of engagement begins with Gordon's materials, which also double as her subject: speakers, soundproofing curtains, and even performers are both the architecture of the work and its source of inquiry. The specter of dance and sound looms over this material back-and-forth, with Gordon regularly considering the choreographic potential of acoustic experience—from pop music to deep listening—in challenging existing modes of engagement with art.
Notes based on the Gordon's exhibition for the SFMOMA 'Inside You are Me' are below:
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