[Art_beyond_sight_learning_tools] Photography, India, GPS,Darwin

[Lisa Yayla]

Hi,
Very mixed batch of articles. Have included a link to Darwin online. Off 
subject, but thought of interest- is a site with all of Darwins work 
digitilized. Includes Mp3 of text. Illustrations also- so thought could 
be thought as a resource for making tactiles of them.
Otherwise blind photographer Pedro Hidalgo, artists in India, photo 
exhibit in Italy, GPS sensors, George Mendoza

Regards,
Lisa

links
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/287993_navigating09.html
http://www.hudsonreporter.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=17314126&BRD=1291&PAG=461&dept_id=523592&rfi=6

Darwin online
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v443/n7113/edsumm/e061019-03.html
http://darwin-online.org.uk

car ralley- navigation
http://www.columbian.com/news/localNews/10192006news68748.cfm

http://arts.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_1212136.php/Art_exhibit_for_the_blind_opens_in_Italy

idol excerpt
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1929585.cms

http://www.denverpost.com/coloradosunday/ci_4453746
Pedro Hidalgo
http://www.proyectovision.net/english/success/bam.html
http://www.lighthouse-sf.org/activities/insights/TheLightHousePedroHidalgo.php
http://www.lighthouse-sf.org/activities/insights/TheLightHousePedroHidalgoSelf.php




News Feature
A life online
This week the complete works of Charles Darwin go live — for free — on 
http://darwin-online.org.uk. This landmark has been achieved before for 
other scientific luminaries of the past. We ask how it has influenced 
their scientific reputations, and whether we will see similar resources 
devoted to the enormous amounts of material generated by modernday 
scientists.
Darwin is the latest eminent scientist to get an online archive. How do 
these undertakings change our understanding of history, asks Henry Nicholls.

excerpt
Wearable sensors, computers could spell 'revolution for blind people'
Monday, October 9, 2006
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
ATLANTA -- Satellite-based navigation gadgets can guide motorists from 
high above, saving bumbling drivers countless hours and extra trips to 
the gas station. But directing people on a much smaller scale -- such as 
inside an office -- is a much greater challenge.

Locator equipment based on Global Positioning System satellites is 
accurate to about 10 feet -- fine for drivers searching for the next 
right turn but not for pedestrians seeking a front door. And the range 
of GPS is limited indoors, and it can't on its own differentiate between 
a path and a wall.

Georgia Tech researchers are trying to pick up where GPS leaves off. Its 
System for Wearable Audio Navigation, or SWAN, consists of a wearable 
computer connected to a headband packed with sensors that help 
sight-impaired users know where they are and how to get where they're going.

Besides a pendant-sized wireless GPS tracker, there are light sensors 
and thermometers that help distinguish between indoors and outdoors. 
Cameras gauge how far away objects and obstacles are. A compass 
establishes direction. And an inertia detector tracks the roll, pitch 
and yaw of the user's head.

All the data are crunched by a computer in a backpack, which relays 
high-pitched sonarlike signals that direct users to their destinations. 
It also works with a database of maps and floor plans to help pinpoint 
each sidewalk, door, hall and stairwell.


excerpt

There are many other private studios open on the day of the tour, plus 
group exhibits at select locations throughout the city. A few of the 
larger exhibits will be held at: City Hall, The Neumann Leather 
Building, The Hoboken Historical Museum, DeBaun Auditorium, and the 
Monroe Center for the Arts.

City Hall will host 23 artists in the historic public building, 
including the exhibit by hob'art, "In Touch with Art," which features 
multi-dimensional work that was primarily designed to enable the 
visually impaired to experience art through touch.


article

FLORENCE, Italy (UPI) -- In the first exhibit of its kind, a Florence, 
Italy, art museum will put on a photography show catered specially to 
the blind and visually impaired.

The Ansa news agency reported the innovative show would inaugurate the 
new Alinari National Museum of Photography Wednesday.

Exhibit organizers selected 20 shots from the catalogue of Italian photo 
pioneers, the Alinari brothers. They transformed the works into 3-D 
releifs, so the blind could touch them to get a feel and sense of the 
images, Ansa said. The pieces will also be flanked with Braille 
descriptions, so visitors can find out more about the works.

'We blind people need three dimensions to be able to touch the reliefs 
with our hands and reconstruct the images in our minds,' said Carlo 
Monti, the president of the Italian Blind Union.

The Alinari brothers pioneered photography in Italy in the 1850s.

Ansa reported that people with normal sight can opt to be led around 
blindfolded by museum guides to get a feel for the exhibit.


excerpt
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/life/2006/08/25/stories/2006082500240300.htm

Manohar is near-blind, and cannot see things even a foot away from him. 
But he sketches with amazing accuracy, and his intricate sketches of 
monuments like the Meenakshi Temple in Madurai have evoked critical 
acclaim from senior artists.

excerpt

BALANGIR: Come festival season and it is bonanza time for him as people 
line up at his little workshop in Balangir district of Orissa to buy 
idols. It is in these four months of festivities, beginning with Ganesh 
Puja, that he is busy giving final touches to the idols of gods that 
sell like hot cakes. Meet Bhagaban Behera, a blind artist who, despite 
his disability, has carved a niche for himself in the art of idol-making.

excerpt 
http://www.sptimes.com/2006/10/05/Floridian/A_plea_for_those_who_.shtml
mezzo-soprano Laurie Rubin

"The one thing I'd love to see more blind people doing is acting on TV. 
Why not have a blind person on a show like Sex and the City? Why not 
have a main character who just happens to walk in with her guide dog or 
cane? It would be no big deal. That's what I'm pulling for."

LOVELAND MUSEUM/GALLERY

503 N. Lincoln Ave., Loveland | 970-962-2410 
ci.loveland.co.us/museum/museum.htm

What's there: The Denver Art Museum has an elegant, if slightly creepy, 
Louise Bourgeois bronze spider guarding the entrance. Robert Mangold's 
soaring red sculpture "Point Traveling Through Space at an Erratic 
Speed," stands sentinel at the funky Loveland Museum/Gallery. The place 
does a great job of balancing art and history, displaying many of its 
30,000 historical objects in spaces adjacent to changing art exhibits, 
which lately have focused on the work of outside artists. "Vision of the 
Soul," a collection of paintings by blind New Mexico artist George 
Mendoza, is up through Oct. 15. "Memory Land," a small show of landscape 
paintings by Oscar Leonardus Ulvang, who began his artistic life at the 
age of 80 when he moved to Fort Collins, hangs through Oct. 22.



article

Humor & Art: Blind Photographer Building Career Off Laughs

A recent exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM) entitled "Blind at the 
Museum" compelled visitors to reexamine their ideas of blindness and 
vision. The exhibit is a collection of work by artists who are visually 
impaired and/or blind. One Latino artist was featured - a photographer 
from Cuba - whose work is witty and quintessentially Latino.

Pedro Hidalgo came to the attention of the co-curators of the exhibit 
through his participation in the annual Insights art exhibit. Insights 
is co-sponsored by the Rose Resnik Lighthouse for the Blind and the San 
Francisco Arts Commission and displayed in the basement of San Francisco 
City Hall. Katherine Sherwood, a painter and UC Berkeley Art Department 
Faculty member was also a participant at Insights. She and Beth Dungan, 
the other co-curator of the BAM exhibit, invited him to participate in 
their project. The genesis of "Blind at the Museum" was born of the 
personal experience of Georgina Kleege, an adjunct English professor at 
UC Berkeley. Klegge went to a conference on blindness in the arts at 
which there were no blind or vision impaired people but her. So she 
brought the idea to her contacts at the Berkeley campus and this exhibit 
is the result.

A two-day conference was held at the BAM around the questions of how we 
perceive art, and how art can be made more accessible to disabled 
people. There were panels featuring artists, museum professionals and 
art critics. Pedro talked about how honored he felt to be included with 
other artists he admired and respected so much.

The artist as a young man

Pedro has a day job as a social worker for the City and County of San 
Francisco conducting workshops in job readiness skills. His preparation 
for his photography avocation began with the gift from his father of a 
Brownie camera when he was seven years old. His family came to the 
United States from Cuba when he was 11 to consult with a famed Spanish 
Ophthalmologist in New York City. He has myopia and macular degeneration.

They stayed and he attended the New York Institute for Education of the 
Blind. Pedro feels it was an excellent school. He continued his 
education at Syracuse University intending to become an actor. He 
performs in plays and in television soap operas (All My Children). His 
love of theatre is apparent in his photography where he sets scenes and 
stages situations to shoot. The pieces that illustrate this article are 
examples of this aspect of his art. At Syracuse, he majored in Latin 
American Studies, but his most influential course may have been Art 
Appreciation. His professor took the class to the New York Museum of 
Modern Art which exposed Pedro to the works of Picasso, Chagall and 
Rodin, much of it in the basement of New York Museum of Modern Art. He 
feels fortunate that, at that time, Picasso's body of work was on 
display in New York. Franco was a dictator in Picasso's home country of 
Spain and for political reasons Picasso would not allow his work to go 
home until after Franco's death.

Pedro's affinity for his Latino heritage was fed by travels throughout 
Latin America, including a recent trip to Cuba.

Exploring tactile dimensions

Pedro is currently preparing work for a show that will feature his 
interest in religious symbolism, and socio-political features of Latino 
culture. He is exploring how to make his work more tactile. One of the 
artists at the BAM exhibit used caulking to outline figures in his work, 
which seemed to give it another dimension. We were allowed to touch it, 
a novel experience in an art museum. Pedro says other artists at the 
panel discussion he participated in were also talking about their 
interest in making similar efforts.

A tour of the "Blind at the Museum" exhibit introduced Pedro's work as a 
"Reappropriation of Blind Jokes". Notice the scene-setting in both "Who 
the Hell Wrote This Anyway?" and "Right or Left?" Beth Dungan was most 
amused by the reversal of expectations in the colorful Oaxacan cane and 
bleached-out white car of Right or Left? Other artists at this show 
range from those who have recently become blind to those who have been 
blind since birth.
Pedro said photography lets him "stop the world" so he can see, at his 
leisure, what he might have missed looking at things through naked eyes. 
It gave me hope that what I miss when I travel with my daughters and 
grandkids, I can recapture later through pictures. Of course, that means 
I'll have to start taking them.