International seminar on blindness and deafness in music and art
21.-25.März 2024
https://www.chavarria-aldrete.com/darknessandsilence
Conferences, Concerts, Film screenings and Exhibition

Lund University
Inter Arts Center, Malmö

Invited guests: Adam Ockelford (UK), Carla Perez de Arce (SE), Colin Roche (FR), Frederikke Jul Vedelsby (DK), Gertrud Fischbacher (AT), Jan Eric Olsén (SE) and Naoko Hirata (JP)

Artistic Director: Bertrand Chavarria-Aldrete

Exhibition: Icelandic Contact ©2024
Fischbacher|Gupfinger|Schebella

Filmscreening: “mind your step” ©2021 “tangible embodied interface”©2021
Fischbacher|Schebella

The brief description of the fabrics texture allows us to notice that the versatility of the texture is doubled by the multiplicity of the senses that concur in its apprehension. Sensing the texture is not an unequivocal fact. Vision, hearing, and touch tie into one another and communicate to each other. But more than in any other art and design forms, textiles are perceived by touch. Touch is one of our primary senses and it is one of the most sophisticated. Like smell and taste it is an ephemeral stimuli and it tends to occur alongside synesthetic configurations. By touching, we are evaluating the consistency of the things, their state, their temperature. Touching is approaching, stopping over, raising feelings of affection; it is a form of perception and appropriation that involves both the intimate contact and the transformative relationship. It is precisely this transformative relationship that places touch in the proximity of gesture. If touching reveals sensing, the gesture reveals doing and acting. And this proximity and ambivalence makes of haptics an imprecise and ambiguous sense.

The intuitive interface enables multi-sensory experimentation with fish leather and directs our sonic perception to vibrations. Through tactile exploration with the hands and supported by a microscope camera, the structure of the fish leather can be explored both haptically and visually. Similarly, these interactions and additional audio recordings of the fish leather are analysed for their vibroacoustic potential and made perceptible via a haptic feedback board.

Fish leather, contact microphones, microscope camera, structure-borne sound transducer, real-time sound and video processing