[Art_beyond_sight_learning_tools] articles
Lisa Yayla
fnugg at online.no
Wed Dec 22 04:33:24 CST 2004
Hi,
Sending a mix-match of links to articles. One with
Smith-Kettlewell research center in the news,one a short
blurb which I thought was particularly intriguing about an
animation for kids where Sharon Stone will be the voice for
an art teacher who is blind, one about Sanjay Leela
Bhansali, a Indian movie director making a movie loosely
based on Helen Kellers life (not a whole lot about the movie
in the article), BlindArt's exhibition March 2005, part of
Sense and Sensibility, and a excerpt about an Icelandic
artist and a short blurb about his father who was blind and
how he described images to him. And one link to a Slashdot -
a lot about accessibility, but talking about games so
thought someone might be interested.
Some of these articles are not filled with information, but
have short blurbs in them that sort of get one thinking- or
so I think.
Have included the text after the links.
Regards and happy holidays!
Lisa
http://www.lilliputnorthamerica.com/book.html
Smith-Kettlewell in the news
http://currents.ucsc.edu/04-05/12-13/laser.asp
http://icbirmingham.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100localnews/tm_objectid=14996993&method=full&siteid=50002&headline=artists-drawn-in-final-of-blind-art-contest-name_page.html
http://www.contactmusic.com/new/xmlfeed.nsf/mndwebpages/stone%20and%20heche%20get%20animated
http://www.nyartsmagazine.com/articles.php?aid=841
http://ww1.mid-day.com/hitlist/2004/december/99760.htm
December 13, 2004
Engineers develop assistive technologies
for the blind
By Tim Stephens
UCSC researchers are developing
new assistive technologies for the
blind based on advances in computer vision that
have emerged from research in
robotics. A "virtual white cane"
is one of several prototype tools
for the visually impaired
developed by Roberto Manduchi, an assistant professor of
computer engineering, and his
students.
The traditional white cane is still the most
common mobility device for the
blind. It is a
simple and effective tool that enables users to
extend their sense of touch and "preview" the
area ahead of them as they walk. But the long,
rigid cane is not
well-suited to all
situations or all users.
Manduchi's high-tech alternative is a laser-based
range-sensing device about the size of a flashlight. A
laser, much like the one in an ordinary laser pointer, is
combined with a digital camera and a computer processor that
analyzes and integrates spatial information as the user
moves the device back and forth over a scene. The user
receives feedback about the scene in the form of audio
signals, and an additional tactile interface is being
developed for future prototypes.
"In the audio signal, the pitch corresponds to distance,
and there are also special sounds to indicate features such
as a curb, step, or drop-off," Manduchi said.
Dan Yuan, a graduate student working with Manduchi on the
virtual white cane project, built the initial prototype. The
UCSC researchers are collaborating with the
Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, a nonprofit
research institute in San Francisco, on the virtual white
cane and other projects.
"The people at Smith-Kettlewell are helping us to understand
the real needs of the blind, and they have blind engineers
who test the systems we develop," Manduchi said. In another
project, for example, Manduchi is working with
Smith-Kettlewell scientist James Coughlan on a system that
uses a compact device with a camera to detect and gather
information from small labels or tags placed in key
locations. For example, the tags might help a blind person
locate a doctor's office in a medical building. The device
would only work where tags have been placed in the
environment, but the tags--small colored labels with bar
codes on them--are very inexpensive and require no
maintenance.
"A blind person staying at a hotel
could put a sticker on their
door so they could easily find
their way back to the room,"
Manduchi said. "Or I could put
tags here in the Engineering 2
Building to help a blind visitor
find my office."
The tags could be detected by a
handheld computer with a
simple camera, or even a camera
phone, he said. Michi
Mutsuzaki, a UCSC undergraduate
working in Manduchi's lab,
used a small handheld computer
with a camera to develop a
protoype device that can detect
the colored targets.
A third collaboration with
Smith-Kettlewell is a project Manduchi
refers to as "MapQuest for the
blind," in reference to the
Internet map site MapQuest.com.
"The problem is how to enable a
blind person to explore a
map," Manduchi said. "The current
devices are braille maps,
but those require a special
printer. We want to create a
feedback environment to enable a
blind person to explore a
map on the computer."
The feedback would be provided by
a "force-feedback
mouse," which vibrates to produce
a variety of physical
sensations the user can feel as
the pointer moves across
features on a computer screen.
These devices are readily
available, so the project involves
creating software that will
enable the blind to use a
force-feedback mouse to "feel" their
way through a map.
Michele Clarke, an undergraduate
at St. Mary's University of
Minnesota, began working with
Manduchi on this project last
summer as a participant in UCSC's
Summer Undergraduate
Research Fellowship in Information
Technology (SURF-IT)
program, funded by the National
Science Foundation. She is
continuing to work on the project
at St. Mary's during the
current academic year.
Before coming to UC Santa Cruz in
2001, Manduchi worked for
several years at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, applying
computer vision technology to
autonomous robotic systems.
"It is a natural evolution from
helping a robot drive around to
helping a blind person navigate
their environment," he said.
Artists drawn in final of blind-art contest
Dec 20 2004
Birmingham Post
Two artists from the West Midlands have
been chosen in the
final of a national competition to
create works of art for visually
impaired and blind people, as well as
those with sight.
Natasha Wymer, from Handsworth Wood,
and Ruth Spaak from
Stratford upon Avon, will have their
work displayed at the
Royal College of Art, in London, in
March 2005 as part of Sense
and Sensibility, BlindArt's
contemporary art exhibition. The
exhibits can be touched and experienced
with all the senses,
not just sight.
The winner of the competition will be
announced in March and
a prize of £5,000 will be awarded by
Arts Minister Estelle Morris
(Lab, Yardley).
Natasha Wymer said: "I have worked in
actions where paint is
squeezed straight from the tube onto
the canvas in a quite
intuitive and random way. I have
enjoyed developing an
energetic and a fresh approach to mark
making. My paintings
have an extremely tactile presence
which arousean
overwhelming compulsion for them to be
touched.
"This intimate seduction between my
work and its audience
has become vital to its enjoyment."
STONE AND HECHE GET ANIMATED
SHARON STONE and ANNE HECHE are collaborating for a
family-friendly project - an animated TV show for
pre-school children.
The actresses will guest star in HIGGLYTOWN HEROES, which
will air early next year (05) with Stone playing a blind art
teacher, who helps children use all their senses when
creating art. Heche will portray a waitress who helps the
Higgly gang.
When the duo last collaborated, Stone
acted in a segment of the lesbian drama IF WALLS COULD TALK
2, which was written and directed by Heche.
07/12/2004 09:43
In the beginning
Though many of the Icelandic scripts were decorated by
craftsmen centuries ago we can safely say that Icelandic
visual art does not really begin until the year 1900 with
the exhibition of landscape paintings by Thorarinn B.
Thorláksson, the first Icelander ever to exhibit
works in his homeland. For the next 40 years or so there was
an average of 3-4 exhibitions a year, mostly in the capital,
Reykjavík, and dominated by landscape painting.
It was not until after WW2 when a new era began in Icelandic
visual art. Turning towards post war abstraction and
exhibiting with the Cobra group, Svavar Gudnasson became the
first Icelandic artist who was actually in tune with
international movements of his time. Many Icelandic artists
turned towards abstraction, but were still inspired by
landscape. Abstract art, mainly painting, then dominated the
Icelandic art scene until the late 60´s, when yet a new
era emerged and a group of artists formed the
minimal/conceptual movement SÚM. Conceptual art
overthrew all artistic values known to the public since
early modernist movements, including Dada and Surrealism,
which had been neglected by the Icelandic artists of the
past. SÚM presented performance art and sculpture and
photography and took over from painting as the leading media
for artmaking. The spirit of SÚM has since then
hovered over the art scene, along with the tradition of
landscape painting and is visible in the works of many
contemporary artists in Iceland, especially from the early
postmodernist generation. Ragna Róbertsdóttir,
for instance, has taken a SÚM-like minimal approach
to the tradition of landscape painting with quite effective
results. She collects gravel from mountains, pounds them
down to bits like coarse pigment and glues them straight on
the wall as a monochrome. Birgir Andrésson, another
artist from the early postmodern generation, writes texts on
colored plates which he defines as "Icelandic"
colors, and describes landscapes or natural phenomenon, like
earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The artist who was
raised by a blind father used to describe images to him the
same way he now does in his text paintings, projecting
images of Iceland.
Interview with Sanjay Leela Bhansali
By: Meenal Baghel
December 19, 2004
The first thing Sanjay
Leela Bhansali does as he
walks in for the
interview is take off his watch; for
the next hour or so he
toys with it ceaselessly.
It’s the same
relentlessness with which he
chews gum, elaichi or
whatever, during his rare
public appearances.
Today, it’s the watch —
a simple, steel strap
affair — that he kneads restlessly on the
table, flicking non-existent dust
from the dial, his hands constantly
worrying the strap, as if he might get
unmoored if he let it go; float away like a
helium balloon.
But such leisure is not permissible, not
now when he has to promote his
new film, give it the meticulous finishing
touch that has already become
legendary in the Mumbai film industry.
For two years, amidst great secrecy, on
strictly off-limit sets, Bhansali has
been crafting his most audacious film: It
has no songs, none of the colours
associated with him, has only two
protagonists and at 1 hour 55 minutes
remains one of the shortest Hindi films
ever.
Black, loosely inspired by Helen Keller’s
life, starring Amitabh Bachchan
and Rani Mukherjee as mentor and his
deaf-blind student, is also said to
be both actors’ finest work.
Two stories filter out from the film’s
sets, setting off this speculation: At the
end of a particularly gruelling shoot one
day, Bachchan requested a
play-back of what had been shot. He was so
overwhelmed after watching
his own work on screen that he quietly
walked to a corner of the set and
broke down.
The second one, even more fantastic, is
about how he offered to pay lakhs
from his own pocket to keep a set standing
for three weeks in Mumbai till
the unit returned from an outdoor shoot
because he felt he could better
himself in some portions of the film that
had already been canned.
In a terse email the actor confirms both
events. “Half the battle is won if the
casting is right,” Bhansali explains away
his image as the director who
makes actors of stars. (Think Manisha
Koirala, Salman Khan, Aishwarya
Rai, Shah Rukh Khan, Ajay Devgan).
“I never enact a scene for an actor,
because then they end up imitating. I
give them the script, I explain the mood of
the scene and I let them fly,” he
says with the confidence of a hawk-trainer
who knows his bird will return to
roost.
Such consideration is at odds with his
reputation for head-lopping, manic
tantrums — he’s known to abuse, fling
phones and projectiles at those
slow-on-the-uptake, reducing assistants to
nervous wrecks — for getting
into slanging matches with his senior team,
and an obsessive pursuit of
the perfect frame to the exclusion of all
else.
Evidently, there are two Bhansalis: The mad
executor on the sets and the
eloquent man sitting across the table,
connecting his fascination for the
deaf and mute — after Khamoshi, Black will
be his second film on the
disabled — to his own inability to
communicate with the world.
It stems from his past, of which, not much
is known. He alludes, skipping
details, to a bruised childhood and lonely
youth. His father was a producer
who made B-grade genre films like Jahaazi
Lootera and Paak Daaman,
and ended up as an alcoholic. But he
bestowed upon his son a life-giving
love for the movies and a somewhat Freudian
introduction to sex.
“My first impression of what the movies
were all about was when I was
three years old and my father took me to a
studio. He had to go and meet
some friends, so he made me sit in on a
shooting and said, ‘don’t move till
I come back,’” Bhansali recalls with a half
laugh.
“So there I was, all of three, watching a
cabaret being shot and I can never
forget that skimpily-clad girl who had two
horns, she’d bite into an apple
and then jump upon a semi-clad man, throw
the apple at him, he would
then fall down and they would roll
together. I couldn’t understand what was
happening and more than that why they were
doing it again and again.
” He attributes his fascination for
shooting in studios to that earliest
memory. “Even at that age I felt a sense of
belonging there.”
Later, stranger things happened. He began
to hear strains of music
everywhere.
“In class, I never heard the teachers,
instead I’d see people singing,
dancing, or floating, I’d meet these
strange characters in my head. So, at
any point there would be three or four
sounds clashing in my head and that
created a difference. You can’t have normal
relationships with people
because you’re not there,” he struggles to
explain his social ineptitude.
“People feel that you’re arrogant, you’re
bored, you’re not interested, you’re
too full of yourself, but it’s not that,
it’s just that I am in another zone and I
enjoy it.”
But this also led to his isolation, to
years of virtual silence. “I was almost
as inexpressive as the world perceives the
deaf and mute to be and I
began to ask myself whether communication
could go beyond words. To
be deaf and blind, I then realised, is the
most traumatising disability.''
''How do you create a life in that vacuum?
While researching Black I met
some of the most beautiful, endearing
people — they are so full of life.
Their communication is far more honest than
we could ever achieve with
words. Such people should be part of the
mainstream. It’s a chance
through art form to understand another life
and I know how to make a
sensitive subject and take it to a large
audience,” he says with the
authority of two mega-hits behind him.
Earlier in the interview, he’d said that
the first thing that comes to his head
that kick-starts a movie was sound. “It’s
always a strain of music and from
thereon the characters and the story
develop and since music is abstract, I
can never make real films like a Garam Hawa
or a Khamosh Pani because
the moment music enters, characters lose
all connections with reality.”
And yet, there isn’t a single song in
Black? So what did he first hear?
“The sound of fist against palm when the
deaf communicate in sign
language, and the incoherent, guttural
eruptions when they try to speak.”
It is this sensitivity, says Manisha
Koirala who acted in his first film
Khamoshi, that sets Bhansali apart from his
contemporaries in Bollywood.
So, through the heroic husband in Hum Dil
De Chuke Sanam, the
unrequited lover in Devdas, Bhansali maps
love, longing and loss.
Like Guru Dutt (far more garishly though),
he is sometimes maudlin,
sometimes self-indulgently elegant but
almost always moving. On more
than one occasion through the interview, he
speaks of wanting to live his
life “correctly”. “It’s so difficult to be
good, to be honest, to be simple.” He
seeks redemption, he says, by making his
characters perfect.
“Real life can be so messy so I make my
characters live beautiful, perfect,
heroic and dignified lives.” And it is
through those characters, through his
work that he wants to conduct his life. “I
am ENTIRELY my work, and I
cannot bear any flaws there,” he says
trying to justify his reputation as the
temperamental maestro.
“Of all the mediums, cinema is one where
you have to work with a hundred
and fifty people. So you carry not just
your limitations, but their limitations
as well. To overcome that requires
tremendous energy. So when people
work with me, they are wary of thrusting
their limitations upon me because
they know I can throw a tantrum.”
And in the same breath, he concedes that
his attention to detailing and
perfection is “like a sickness”. “I cannot
bear to be in rooms that are not
clean, the glasses on the table have to be
kept right,” he goes quiet,
meticulously arranging and rearranging his
watch before bursting out. “For
instance, your dictaphone is not kept
straight and it has really been
bothering me.”
It’s a good thing the interview ends soon
after.
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