Blind Perception Project due Thursday, Sept. 22nd

Blind Meditation Project

Those things that nature denied to human sight

she revealed to the eyes of the soul.
                   Ovid

Please email me at justin@oursanctuary.org 

 your artistic component of your project by Wed, Sept 21st midnight so that I can post to our blog.

Components: 1. Blindness Experiment, 2. Creative Blindness Expression, 3. 3-Page Paper

Purpose:  This project is an experiment which aims to defamiliarize the student to the experience of sight in order to understand better its question-ability. In this experiment, you must blindfold yourself, ask yourself certain questions about the experience, relate it to topics discussed in class, and express its meaning to you in some creative fashion.

What is it like, to see? What is the experience like? What is the difference between your sense of place, location, and spatial layout when you can see as opposed to when you are blind? 

How do your non-visual senses change when you cannot see?

This experience raises many interesting philosophical, psychological questions!

Instructions: 1. Blindfold yourself for a min. 4 hours. The longer, the better response you’ll get. 6-8 hours is ideal. Locate your self in an environment that is very visually familiar to you, some place like your dorm room or living space that you know very well. If you work with a partner, then you can walk around and do some exploring.

2. Spend the first three hours of the experiment just trying to be receptive to your new condition. Think about the ways your other sense experiences change when you cannot see. Try to get into the strangeness of it.

3. After at least 3 hours, while still in a state of artificial blindness, you must perform a specific set of memory observations. You must record as many details about the visual look and contents of the space you are familiar with as you can remember. Try to think of everything you remember about what you can ordinary see and notice about the space, such as for example: photographs or images you have on the wall, the colors of surfaces, objects, odd visual details you customarily notice. Make a list of observations.

4. After the time is up, take off your blindfold. Now look over your list and check it with what you can now see. Record any differences, distortions or omissions.

5. Create a visual or non-visual artwork which explores/expresses some aspect of the experience of blindness or sensory deprivation or reorganization.

6. Your paper (3 pages min.) should do three things: 1) It should focus on one main question, 2) It should draw from your own personal experience, using whatever interesting things you experienced as data-points for what you say, and 3) It should bring in at least two references to ideas or arguments or questions we discussed in class.