Ways of Seeing

For the past three months I’ve been working on the Ways Of Seeing project. Collaborating with a group of visually impaired people from Milton Keynes. I was commissioned to develop video art works with the group that represent the access issues they face within retail environments. The final pieces are now exhibited inside Midsummer Shopping Centre, the same place where the work was produced. Making the work very much site specific.











We made a piece called Surface Tension based on the ever changing floor surfaces, decorative patterns and moving surfaces that all present hurdles for the visually impaired. The piece shows video loops of textures moving around in the same way an old school square picture puzzle would work. With one square blank the images keep moving position, yet never meet up or make any sense. The viewer when focused on one image will find themselves disorientated and hopefully uneasy on their feet.



Another piece we made came from the phrase "Noise is A Blind Mans Fog". As the shopping centre hosts many different sounds and noises, its space creates a reverb of these sounds producing something of a cacophony. This can be intimidating and overwhelming for the visually impaired, making the space more difficult to navigate. To illustrate this we decided to shoot the space late at night when empty, then in post create a foggy smoke that fills the space in the same way the array of sounds form an aural fog. 







To show the video works off we built a cube housing projectors and speakers, then rear projected onto the projection material stretched around the cubes frame. More images of the install can be found on my flickr page.







The Panasonic shop located within Midsummer Place were kind enough to let us use some of there window display TV’s for showcasing the video works. A good way of getting the work across to the audience of shoppers.

Friday 21 Sep 2007

Inspiration

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