Réculer pour mieux sauter, it’s called in our house: stepping back in order to jump farther. And that’s what I’m doing, resting after the viewfindering so to speak, breathing in, breathing out. I have a deep suspicion that I need to go slowly, that I need to rest in photographing for a bit, gather my thoughts. I’ve felt a shift in how I perceive photographing. Before, I was photographing lack, absence: although I’ve left behind being a “sightless seeing person” to some extent, I was trying to “sightlessly see” in my photographs. Sonification has changed that: what I do is now most definitely not seeing. Ordinarily, photographing is a closed loop, from ocular perception to the print, and the idea is to have every step of that workflow geared towards the final output, the print. With digital photography this is already different, as the print is often lacking from the workflow, and we’re content to show each other proofs online. Still, there is always a closed loop of visual feedback somewhere in the process. Perhaps my “reviewing” is a fiction, but I feel I now have closed the loop again, where once there were sections of the process not making contact. This, then, necessitates thinking about subject matter and motif and about gesture in a different way than before. That’s where the stepping back comes in. It’s as if I’m on the threshold and this is far too exciting a prospect: it needs to be savored sip by sip, step by step. I’ve been thinking about that MiT proposal, and I’ve been thinking about books and workshops.
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I like your concept of workflow, of open and closed loops. As you know, I’ve been working on my house for the past month. My son thankfully has taken on most of the painting, but I’m doing the prep and carpentry repair. THe work begins and ends with a laying on of hands. So far, I’ve touched nearly every square inch of the front wall, from the eaves to the stone foundation. I’ve read it like a braille text. I have a pretty good idea what’s going on with the window frames, the glazing, the cedar shingles. As soon as the paint dries, I touch that, too. Closing the loop, as you say. I need that confirmation of work completed. Can’t get enough of it. Some folks think I’m crazy for doing the work myself, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. It’s all sweet work when it flows.
The year after my father’s death, my mother and I decided to go on a long walk, so we walked a substantial part of the Cornish Coastal Path, from Bude to Padstow and then cutting through to Fowey. To this day, I remember that stretch of coast very well, because I have walked it. And so I own it. What you describe is similar to what touch has become/is becoming for me: I own it when I have touched it. Yes, closing the loop. Thanks for adding that perspective.
Yesterday we had a long discussion about the differences between touch and hearing, during R.’s exam. She did an excellent job and I was impressed with her personal, pragmatic, idiosyncratic (maybe ‘nomadic’) approach. A preliminary site is up at http://www.shootit.nl/.
R. found in her research that the blind people who used her braille mouse to feel the photographs had quite a learning curve, and I showed her your self portrait in the iMac using vOICe.
I was wondering about some underlying assumptions about “blindness”, and I was taken by surprise by the fact that her work concentrated on reception of images and not production. There’s a range of studies on reception vs production of images by blind people and I wondered whether she had taken that on board. There’s also a lot of work on tactile mapping already been done, and I wondered if that too had been part of the thought process. Cool stuff though and I’ve written R. an email to congratulate her. On a side note, I’ve been wondering whether a wiimote might not be a very good tactile pointing device. It’s got bluetooth so it can be hooked up to any computer, and it’s got force feedback. Another example is: http://home.novint.com/
“After I peeled my jaw off the floor, I realilzed that this product (the Novint Falcon) was going to change the way we all live in a fundamental and beautiful way…once you touch a virtual object and feel it’s physical contours, you’ll never quite think about virtual reality the same way again.” Millions of Us – The Second Half of Second Life: Haptics
Not all of the research done was taken on board that is a point of critique, but not her focus. This was on participatory design, thus developing a concept in collaboration with a small user group.
Yes, of course. How did the user group appreciate that design process? It’s something the site gives a bit of tantalizing information about, so I was really getting curious.
I had some great buttertea-making footage, but oh well. I got to shoot my teabowl