PART 1

Through a two-stage visualisation process, participants were asked to imagine a space of learning that was important to them.  By following a series of verbal prompts, that space was gradually transformed in mind into a spatialised arrangement of words. Those words were then translated onto a tactile paper surface as an arrangement of graphic lines. 

The video included here serves as a means of animating the drawings, diagramming the process of thinking-in-action supported by the workshop.

PART 2

In dialogue with a sighted interlocutor the blindfolded explorer would then set out into the garden with their drawing. Rather than lead or guide the explorer, the interlocutor’s role was to support the emergence of the explorer’s blindfolded world in language in relation to both the visualisation and the newly encountered forms of the garden. As the exploration developed and the relationship between the garden and the visualisation began to get increasingly complex, new words were added onto the drawing by the blindfolded explorer. 

These new words served to both affirm the presence of the visualised space in the embodied space of the garden – windows merging with trees, tables with bushes, etc – whilst at the same time reminding both explorer and interlocutor of the mediating function of language and its role in defining experience.

PART 3

Following the workshop, I developed the workshop text into a digital booklet (available below as a PDF). This text and its re-presentation in this booklet format is a response to the way that my understanding of the workshop developed through its facilitation. The grey text is the workshop text prepared for Convocation II; the highlighted text was written during the workshop in response to the activity; whilst the redacted text was prepared for the workshop but remained unarticulated. The images that accompany the words have been generated from the tactile grid that participants used to make their drawings. As participants explored the grid blindfolded, that structure’s temporal qualities came to the fore, enabling it to relinquish its modernist associations and blend with the garden. This blending was expressed by the participants in dialogue and through their drawings. It is represented here through the deconstruction of the grid’s formal elements in line with the participant’s discoveries.

This workshop and its ephemera are an extension of my own blindfolded explorations of space. They are intended both as a way of making the work public and of enabling others to practice and extend the processes I have developed through my research. As much as these events (workshop/workshop text) are about engaging tactics for blindfolded exploration, they are also about developing an embodied critique of the relationship between language and vision through deep listening and dialogic intra-action.

WALKING BETWEEN WOR[L]DS WITH LINES 

was a participatory workshop delivered at Convocation II, a gathering of the Language-Based Artistic Research Group, hosted by Zentrum Fokus Forschung, University of Applied Arts Vienna, from 3-6 October 2023.  

The workshop explored the potential of embodied blindfolded sense-making as a reflective writing orientation. To do this, it employed 'cartographic word drawings' (like the one that forms the background to this page), as a spatiotemporal framework for object intra-action. Holding these cartographies both in mind (as a psychic image) and in the hands (as a drawing) participants took it in turn to move through the embodied space of the garden, blindfolded, in dialogue with a sighted interlocutor.

As the pair moved in space, the cartographic word drawing provided both the impetus for movement and the lexicon for a relational graphemic scaffold, against which new objects could be mapped. This lexicon also provided the materials for further dialogic exchange, enabling the exploration of the body and, crucially, the wor[l]d building process to be lead by the blindfolded explorer.

The results of this process were attended to through blindfolded writing activities, conducted in the act of moving. This enabled additional letter and word forms to be added to the cartographic word drawing in relation to the body's movement through that space as it blended with the garden. These marks productively and generatively blurred the textual with the textural, feeding a developing psychic ecology of wordforms knitted into the space and time of the garden's sociomaterial world.  

VIDEO OF THE ANIMATED CARTOGRAPHIC WORD DRAWINGS

THANKS

The workshop was offered as a way of testing the visualisation process with a large group of people, and I would like to thank everyone that engaged. In arranging this page in the way that I have, I have sought to retain some of the complexity and richness of the expereince. A significant absence therefore is the dialogue between the participants that enabled the development of the drawings through the process of navigation. I am in the process of developing that material for future work.

Thanks to all of the participants: Gretel Acosta, Beverly Carruthers, Delphine Chapius Schmitz, Cordula Daus, Sara Gómez, Sabina Holzer, Linnea Langfjord Kristensen, Barb Macek, Ines Marita Schärer, Elke Mark, Lena Séraphin, Erika Tsimbrovsky, Litó Walkey, and Kai Ziegner;

thanks to Louise Adkins for supporting;

and finally, thanks to the event organisers: Alexander Damianisch, Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus, and Lena Séraphin.