by Anna Gioia, researcher and teacher of art and scenography
I am standing in line, blindfolded, with my right hand on the shoulder of the person in front of me. A voice gently guides me on what to do, it reassures me, I am in a protected place with expert people I can trust. I am in a museum and I am about to live a deeply enriching experience: the immersion in an unknown world for me, but where blind people are immersed every day. A world where a myriad of sensations, like hearing the voices of passers-by, the noise of traffic, the smell of freshly baked bread describe the characteristics of places providing a well-defined physiognomy to blind people.
Feeling the beauty of art by touch, perceiving the shape, the toughness, every small variation of matter, enjoying, in the silence of the room, the sound of my fingers touching them; being guided in the exploration of the works makes concrete the emptiness that surrounds me. Those sensations make you reflect about the perception of the world by those who are forced to manage reality through different methods. This is an “exhibition in the dark” organized by the Museo Tattile Statale Omero of Ancona and it is exactly from these small anxieties that the idea and the desire of investigating, deepening the theme of tactile perception, and not only in relation to visual disability, guided the design of the multisensory object I talk about in this article.
The multisensory experimentation object identified with the name “Verso l’alto tra tocco e suono” (Upward between touch and sound) is the end of a journey passing through different stations. Investigating visual impairment, declining it towards the world of art allowed me to think outside the box and to design in a creative way but with “method”, as said by Bruno Munari a multifaceted artist very attentive to the educational power of art.
A “small” challenge around the concept that if painting is art, art is culture and culture can be taught to everyone, then painting or at least its aesthetic pleasure can be taught to people with visual impairment. How? Through a multisensory project that borrows a work by Vasilij Kandinskij, entitled “Verso l’alto” (upward), and its poetics that he meticulously describes in his essay “on the spiritual in art”.
Between Touch and Sound: on the Spiritual in Art
For Kandinskij (1866 – 1944), art is meant to make our soul resonate, to elevate the spirit of the observer and, for the artist, this is also his social function. In fact, in his essay “On the spiritual in art”, he states art is born from the “principle of an inner necessity” or rather it is intimately necessary.
Kandinskij’s vision wanted to generate an evocative art, capable of moving away from the observation of reality, approaching the understanding of states of mind. For him in fact, colors are like musical notes that the artist arranges on the canvas/sheet music for moving the soul of who is in front of the artwork. In this way, painting approaches music and colors approache sounds.
For Kandinskij, art is similar to music and his paintings are a “symphony of colors” where he tries to capture the “inner sound” of the elements, that emotional and spiritual dimension that cannot be expressed in words, because it is not tangible. In a concert in January 1911, the meeting with the music of the Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg was the decisive moment when his art changed and his thoughts took shape. He decided to represent his impressions in a painting destined to become one of his most famous masterpieces: “Impression III: Concerto”. This title further underlines how close the bond between art and music was for the artist. Furthermore, struck by Schönberg’s “dissonant” compositions, free from pre-established rules, Kandinskij began to write to him giving life to an interesting epistolary relationship.
The relationship between the visible and the invisible
His works are a transmission of forces, a triumph of colors taking on the freest and most varied forms; they are vibrant, abstract and fluidly geometric compositions that try to capture the symphonic experience of his senses. In fact, to understand the interior universe that he wanted to represent, it is necessary, as with music, to get into total perceptive contact with all the senses. It is an all-encompassing art that connects the “visible” pictorial art with the “invisible” sound.
Through Kandinskij’s poetics, I tried to translate one of his works to make it accessible to blind people. The intent is not to associate a sound with color in a universal way, this would be impossible, but to tell through the other senses what Kandinskij saw.
Going beyond simple tactile exploration, a didactic operation of knowledge, for approaching the most sensitive side of his art. We are lucky enough to be able to know his poetics thanks to his writings, to investigate his thought transformed into painting, and so we can try to make tactilely audible what is not visible to everyone. I am talking about the creation of a multisensory object with the aim of involving not only the sense of touch but also hearing, so that every point of Kandinskij’s work could be three-dimensionally translated and could release a sound reflecting its soul at the simple touch. The aim is not only to return the image of the painting, which could be done with a precise verbalization, but to push those who explore to resonate with it, to tell and produce an experience respecting the artist’s poetics.
After a careful analysis of his works and some of his writings, my attention was focused on the work “Verso l’alto” (upward), made in 1929, belonging to a series of paintings of abstract faces. However, only a vague structural allusion remains of the face, characterized by primary forms, such as curves and semicircles combined with horizontal and vertical elements, which is why his choice, for this experiment, was not accidental.
In this work, Kandinskij wants to obtain an energy that propagates upward by hooking the shapes together and balancing them on both sides of a continuous vertical line. In fact, the two constituent parts are in perfect balance on the vertical of the painting. It is the result of simple geometric shapes that compose themselves in a more complex structure, suspended on a vibrant green background, inside a non-existent three-dimensional space. The upper part is composed of a semicircular shape on the left side with orange tones that, sliding along the vertical diameter, exceeds the larger semicircle placed on the right side invading the space above. The larger semicircle is further divided into two parts: the upper part recalls the tones of blue with a blue dot in the center, the lower part recalls the tones of light and cold red. These shapes, combined with black and red horizontal straight lines, represent a face in profile that delicately rests on the tip of the geometric shapes placed below representing a body with sloping shoulders. The black shape cuts out at the base of the central motif, itis a probable allusion to the initial of Empor, the original title of the painting.
The geometric synthesis of this work can be translated into three dimensions almost immediately. It has well-described geometric shapes that I was able to create through the “Tinkercad” software, designed by Autodesck, and 3D printing and that gave rise to the experimentation of “Verso l’alto tra tocco e suono” (Upward between touch and sound).
The design of this multisensory object involved various aspects, including sounds. In fact, after having created the various elements of the 3D image, I chose the sounds with the instruments that would have to reflect Kandinskij’s poetics. Seven instruments for seven colors, as he describes in his aforementioned essay. Seven instruments chosen in the lyrical-symphonic area because with this artist we enter in in the field of lyrical abstraction where green has the sound of the violin, orange of the bell, blue of the flute, cold red of the cello, warm red of the tuba, yellow of the trumpet, purple of the English horn.
At this point, we had to combine the tactile part with the sound part, for this reason the surfaces, originally plastic made, were coated with a conductive material for emitting a sound. The difficulty consisted of finding the right material which could be manipulated manually as the project required. The choice fell on copper sheets with a thickness of 0.5 mm cut with the use of special scissors and finished with iron files and sandpaper to obtain rounded edges and a more opaque surface.
When I had the three-dimensional object, the necessary copper elements and the sounds, I found a way to make them communicate using a very simple technology: the Makey Makey, a kit for creating electrical circuits and the Scratch software for programming.
Then, the whole thing was mounted on a black wooden box measuring 30×20 cm and 3 cm deep, with a hollow interior for hiding the circuit. The choice of the size of the total object was not random, it is an A4 size: in this way, the construction of the mental image can be facilitated by a limited spatial exploration. Furthermore, the activation of the sounds occurs only if the circuit is closed by touching with one hand a copper plate positioned specifically on one side while the other hand is exploring, so a first exploration can also take place without audio.
Currently, the device requires the a laptop, but also a Raspberry could be used, i.e. a small compact computer with speakers connected for the sound, compatible with the Scratch and Makey Makey applications, in order to make the whole thing easier to handle.
Highlighting individual differences for a total communication – even at school
“Verso l’alto tra tocco e suono” (“Upward between touch and sound”) is a multisensory object built for blind people, but also for those who want to approach art in an alternative way, putting their sensitivity and sensoriality into play with the aim of paving the way for a broader perception of art. It also tries to respond to an inclusive teaching path in the search for a “diversified” itinerary, “for everyone and each”. Its creation by an entire school class could be an opportunity to acquire transversal skills for everyone, responding to the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which invite teaching curricula towards a multiplicity of means of representing educational contents, for expressing the achieved knowledge and for involving students in learning processes.
This is an object that could be created by a class of a secondary school for a blind student of a first or second level school. The creation and use of this product become a stimulus of knowledge, involving everyone in a virtuous path in search of accessible solutions. The blind student, with his perceptive sensitivity, moreover, could become a fundamental resource for his classmates teaching the importance of the development of the other senses, demonstrating that the world is not only made of light and colors, but also of sounds, tactilely perceptible shapes, smells, flavors. Proximity, contacts, positive attributions, belonging, sharing of paths would be created through mutual knowledge and recognition and with expectations of development. Therefore, not only the multisensory object itself becomes important, but it’s important also the path to arrive at its concrete creation.
Understanding the power and use of other vicarious senses, dormant in a society where sight is the main channel of communication, is what we should push forward for building a space for dialogue between the principle of normality and speciality, defined by Ianes as “special normality”. Kandinskij with his works, and above all with his poetics, provides us with the concrete possibility of making it and, with his teachings, the school can become a place where diversities meet, correct and contaminate each other, enhancing their value for the development of an inclusive education.
Knowing diversity, speaking openly about individual differences, would provide us more tools for understanding and communication, tearing down the barriers of prejudice, broadening horizons, building plural educational contexts and solid and fair social belonging, because asking ourselves what kind of education we want to activate also means asking ourselves what kind of society we want to build. Therefore, creativity and art can be a mean to valorize the differences, the many ways of being and expressing oneself, making dialogue, creating opportunities for personal development and democratic participation with the aim of transforming the school, and consequently the society, into a much more inclusive place.