Accessibility Symposium - Dr. john kennedy - Pictures in vision and touch

Dr. John Kennedy: While it's loading up I would like to show you this board. Um, it's kind of soft board on this side and a stiff on this side, and then I put a plastic sheet around it. Actualy, any plastic sheet will do. And you can buy a board for, I don't know, it varies. I think $10 some places, $40 other places. Lasts a life time. Plastic sheets. Any plastic sheet will do. These ones probably cost, maybe a quarter or something. Take an ordinary ball-point pen and then you drag this across the surface. Ball point pen across the surface. And curiously enough, the line comes up. Isn't that strange? Press is on and the line comes up. Well, I'm a psychologist, so as far as I'm concerned, this is a miracle. (laughing) I don't have to explain it. If you're a physicist or a chemist, you probably can. But I'm going to pass this around and everybody can have a try. Drag it and the line comes up. Push in and you'll probably cut the sheet. But the great thing about this is, a blind person can make a drawing or even write a letter and feel exactly what they have done as they do it. So 50,000 years ago, cave artists discovered that if you took some mucky thing from the ground and went like that on the wall, you'd left a graphic act and you could see it right away. Fascinating. and 50,000 years ago, the idea of pictures was invented. Basically for sighted people probably at the time. And for 50,000 years we've thought that pictures are for vision. But now we can ask blind people to draw and we've discovered curiously enough pictures are also for touch and for blind people. So, can I invite you to try this and then pass it around. So, thanks very much all, for inviting me. Especially Johanna. I have been working cheerfully with Johanna for a couple of months, and I'm having a great time. My goal today is just to provide ideas for educators and exhibit designers on how to reach a visually handicapped audience with this particular system. That by the way is from Swedan. There is another one from the States, but the one from the States is actually clumsy and more expensive. The one from Swedan is elegant and simple and easy to use. Um, I'm going to show you that these things can be used by the blind. I'll show you that blind people asked to draw, draw the shapes of objects. I will show you that when they make drawings there are different levels of sophistication. So if you were to make a picture for a blind person you might want to bear that in mind. Is this a blind person with a lot of experience of pictures, or a child who is just beginning to draw? So I've shown you those. Here are some drawings by a woman from Toronto, I call her TT, just to make it a sort of anonymity. I asked her to draw an insect, a dog and a person. And I think its transparently clear to everybody here that the insect is the one that is top left, the dog is middle right, and the person is on the bottom. And that those look very much like simple drawings by sighted children. And you'll notice that the insect is drawn from above. And the dog is drawn from the side. And the person is drawn from in front. And what that means is that the blind person has a fairly good sense of the vantage point. What we would call the point of view if we were sighted. Getting the sense of the vantage point. The point from which you reach out, much like a sighted person looks out from that point. And that means that they have the beginnings of perspective. Right there. So I'm not the only person who discovered that blind people can make drawings. Here is Heike Hamann working recently in the Bode/Gemaldegalerie in Berlin. And she holds lots of programs for blind people about art and the history of art and periods in art. And blind adults come to it and as part of the program she asks the blind people that usually comes to the class and make drawings. And here's two drawings of a head by a blind man. And the one on the left looks very much like, you know, a cubist drawing of a head. Quite a good little cubist drawing too. And the one on the right looks like a Greek profile. One is pretty much in front and the one's pretty much from the side view. And so again, you get vantage point. And you get really quite clear use of the line. And this is really charming, this is now from a blind woman, also from Heike Hamann in Berlin from the Bode/Gemaldegalerie. And interestingly, she does life classes for the blind. Where there is somebody posed, and you get to feel them...and their nude. (laughing) And then you go back and draw them. These drawings look a little Matisse like, don't they? Of two seated figures. Really charmed drawings. Though, outline stands for surface edges in cave art, in the Renaissance. We have perspective formally added, they are clever tactics added in the 1800s. Vision and touch, the evidence I will show you comes from Esref from Ankara, Eriko who's from Japan & Gaia who is from Rome. Gaia is a child. And so, one person once questioned me after a talk in Berlin, and said "John, you are so despicably European. Euro-centric," she said. And I said, that's puzzling because these guys are from Turkey and Japan, I think that you uh, missed the boat. Oh well, she thought that the emphasis on the uh, Renaissance and Italy was misplaced. That I should study her period which was the year of 800...in Europe. (chuckles) Curious. So I'm going to show you Gaia's pictures. Something of development drawings. Eriko's shows metaphors and represent thoughts. Really opened her mind to the possibilities. And Esref, well he will show perspective and I'll concentrate on him. Esref by the way, was born totally blind, no eyes. And the other guys, lost their vision in the first year or so of life. Here is Chauvet cave, 30,000 years ago. And as you will notice that there is a line used for here, a crack that's the mouth, and a tale here, which is sort of the opposite of the crack. There's a nice background on both sides and foreground on both sides. And here we have the back of the horse and so we have foreground and background. These are all surfaces, surfaces are things that structure the length of our eye. So that we can see, but surfaces are also what we touch. So blind people should be able to draw what we see, because they're on surfaces and lines stand for surface edges in the drawings. Here is Lascaux aurochs in line, a bunch of them. And you will notice here that there are two lines used when the horn is thick, and it becomes one line when the horn is thin. Surface edge, surface edge, if you bring them close together, one line is used. That's the way sighted artist draw and that's the way, I'll show you, blind people draw. Now lines cannot show purely visual borders. Let me convince you. They are for the very things that we can touch. Surface edges. Because here is a person - and lots of shadow borders are on this person's face. As soon as we draw it an outline it becomes incomprehensible. You just can't see the mouth, and nose convincingly in line. Where as you can in line here, you can if you add shadows. Purely visual in shadows in colours, you can't show in line drawings. Colours don't appear, shadows don't appear. If you draw surface edges, the surface edges appear in vision and they do in touch too. So here's Gaia, a blind girl, first tested at age 11 and again at age 12. I asked her to draw all kind of things. Here is a drawing of a cube. Curious, isn't it. Well this is a fold out drawing of a cube, so lots of the sides of the cube are shown all attached. It's folded out. Then she thought of a better way to draw it, which would be to show one surface and another surface around it and then connected with all the lines that would stand for the corners of the cube preceding the depth. Clever, but interestingly, the small square stands for the front surface of the cube. And the big square stands for the rear surface of the cube. So this is actually a cube in "inverse" perspective, where things are drawn bigger as they get further away. Rather than smaller as in linear perspective. Inverse perspective was invented or used widely in the Italian Renaissance. Go to any, almost any of the churches that still have early Renaissance pictures and you'll see this. And here's this blind girl, who just invents it right in front of me. And, far as I know, it might be the first time she drew cube folded out because her mother and her teacher were terribly shocked when they saw that drawing. They were quite puzzled that she had drawn that. So they didn't think of it. And then she went on. I asked her to draw a table, then I said could you draw a table from up above. And she drew a table as a square. That's a table from up above. View from this vantage point. Then she drew a table where the front edge of the table is small and the rear edge of the table is going to be the long line. That's because it's an inverse perspective. So she invents the point of view and then applies it to a table. And by the way, this is a table from underneath. (laughing) So we got the four ends of the legs are shown as little squares and then the table top is shown as the big square. And that's called parallel perspective. So if you showed drawings to blind children, to illustrate something say from the Mayans, you might want to bear in mind what's the system they're likely to use. And if you know something by drawing development, in the sight and the mind, that can help you. And by the way, here are people drawn by Gaia standing, walking and lying down. So she used inverse and parallel perspectives. I think those are common in sighted eight to ten year olds. She was first tested at eleven, so a little bit behind what might be true for sighted children, but not much. A metaphor: if I say Conrad`s jailors have hearts of stone. You might know who I'm talking about and you might also understand that when I say the jailors are unyielding to pressure. They don't literally have hearts of stones. Metaphors combine two things and suggest sometimes literally false. But there is a common feature that is wise and appropriate and significant. So let's see Eriko using metaphors. She is totally blind, early in life. She was told not to draw by her teachers and then later in her 30's, a teacher says try drawing, I know 2 blind kids, they like drawing. Blind kids in my class like to draw. They go to the hospital, they come back and what do they do? They draw their experiences in the hospitals. For some reason they spend all day drawing those experiences just like sighted kids. After a tough experience. So here is Eriko, she went to Mexico, sent her a little drawing board. This is only a few months after she started drawing in her thirties. So she goes there, and comes back from Mexico with a suite of a drawings, "My impressions of Mexico" Like famous artists would have done. You know? A grand tour of Europe. So she wants to draw tequila. So she draws a tall thin glass, the straws, the levels of liquid but it's not just any old liquid. This is tequila so she draws a lot of wavy lines coming out from the glass. And she says, "That is the effect of tequila." (laughing) Okay then she goes swimming off Isla de la mujeres, and she draws it. The water is wonderful, full of joy, she's with a man, who later becomes her husband. Wonderful man, Michael. And um, she draws herself. You can see her head, her hair, the back of her swimming costume, her legs and her arms. Long wavy lines for the water, she is swimming in and there is a whole lot of spider-webs coming from her hands and toes. I go on. And then she says, "That's the feeling of the water, streaming through my fingers." And then she said, "You know what, those lines might be metaphoric for the sighted, but they're perfectly literal for the blind." Because you could feel the edge of those streams of water, but you can't see them in the water. Very clever. And then she goes to Australia and she draws desert, which has tall pentacles. So the big pentacles close are drawn big. Pentacles further away are drawn small. Dots for sand and little scraggily things for bushes. Tiny little twig like figures for trees, and the occasional little line, cutting between objects is an occasional wind. An occasional little breeze. It's a wonderful drawing, it's good perspective. Isn't that clever. Very nice drawing. Then she is sitting in Germany with Michael, she needs a job. She's Japanese, she's educated for her librarianship in Canada. Now she's living in Germany with this wonderful man that she married. She needs to get a job, she wants to make friends. She's living in a small town. It's hard to crack into German society. It's hard to get a job in Germany. And it's hard to get a job as a librarian. Libraries in Germany are like prisons for books. (laughing) They are not widely accessible to all kind. No. There's all kinds of things and you have to be told to "SHHH!" It's remarkable. The experience you get in German libraries. And she's blind. There is at least one very famous Nobel prize winning blind librarian. But on average, it's hard to get a job as a librarian if you're blind. So she is sitting on her balcony, she has her cup of coffee and she draws her cup of coffee. She's thinking about her coffee. All around the cup she draws a lot of wavy circular lines. Those are her thoughts about her problems, going around and around and never coming to a solution. And there are also a few zig-zag lines, because every now and then, "hah." She sighed. And that day, she never solved her problems. Fascinating. Wonderful stuff. There's Eriko and there's Michael. Perspective: Sienna is a city with wonderful architecture. Notice how everything is convergent when you look up. Here it is again, convergent Powerful architecture. But in the early Renaissance, if you asked these guys to draw a table. You notice the top has a smaller edge for the near side, and a longer line, longer edge for the far side. That's inverse perspective. They get it all wrong. If you asked Esref to draw a table, he draws it in good perspective. In linear perspective, that is long line for the near edge of the table, and short line for the far edge of the table. And as for the table and the chairs. He drew them all, chairs, suitably complete or hidden behind the edge of the table. This is a very good drawing. Many sighted people could not draw it. Don't you think? Then I asked for two cars, one further down the road than the other. The second car is smaller than the sides of the roads converge. Converge in one direction. That's called one-point perspective. I asked for cups on a table. Six cups, in two rows of three. The far cups are smaller, closer together. And they have more eliptical tops. It's excellent perspective. I asked for cubes, I asked him for a cube directly in front. He drew a square. He drew a cube balanced on a point. It's an excellent drawing. Many sighted people couldn't do that. I asked for a cube moved to the side. So he now draws two surfaces and he makes one out of converging lines because that is the proceding side. And then the cube moved to the side and then down. So it's now below you. And he now draws three faces that would confront. I asked for a house. The corner close to you and two sides receding from you. He drew that. It gave him a little model house. And then he said "Oh, I have a better way of drawing it." Because the first time he drew all the sides as parallel lines and the second time he made the sides converge, the lines converged so the preceding sides. That's called two-point perspective. Where it is converging in two directions. Space only has three directions. So if you can draw in three-point conversions, you can draw anything in the universe. He is that close. Here is TT from Toronto, I asked her for a house from in front. And got a rectangular roof, then she drew converging sides, one point perspective. Then I said, draw it from up above. And then she drew the two rectangles with sides converging up for one side of the roof and down for the other side of the roof. Because you're directly above the roof. And that's two point perspective. Now three point perspective is hard to do for sighted people. And this is actually correct three point perspective but it looks weird to sighted people. I asked for a cube directly in front Everybody gets that. Oh yeah, it's a nice drawing. Cube looking from the side. "Why is it tilted?" People say. Cube moved further to the side, "Why is it tilted and one face gotten really tiny in the drawing?" Well the answer is: This is three cubes below you. Now imagine you were Spiderman, swinging above the Empire State Building and you had your camera with you. And you tilt it to take a picture because you want to publish something in the Daily Bugle and make money. So, what happens when the Empire State Building's converging, down, down, down to the sidewalk. Isn't it? But that means that any building on the side, is also leaning in your picture. And converging down to the same point. As if they were railway tracks. They all have to converge that way. Why do you lose a lot of the side? Well, anything that moves to the side, any cube like this shows you two faces. Well if one face is becoming more and more the only one you can see, the other one is now getting more and more hidden. So that's correct. And the Italian Renaissance artists realized this. And then, they said, some of those drawings look weird And Leonardo DaVinci's contribution to the study of perspective was this, he said, Don't show those weird looking ones. (laughing) Only show the ones that look directly in front of you and then the person will value the picture. And he will eat. (laughing) So, I asked Esref to draw me three cubes. And look he did it, and he did it in good perspective - three-point perspective. These cubes are converging up the page, they're converging down and angled down the page. And they are also getting smaller as they are going left so that's convergence in the third dimension. He could do it. All. He's brilliant. There isn`t anymore. So, Discovery Channel and I took him to the baptistry, where perspective was invented. There's two sides of this baptistry that go off in an angle, at 45 degrees, so they both have to converge left and right. And I asked him to draw it. He would feel a corner and the walls and stuff. Then I sat him down and gave him a model of the building. I think the most important thing that I said to him was, Can you show that the roof is high above you. And when I asked him to do that, he made some drawings and this was the final product of that. And that looks brilliant. Sighted people generally can't do this. He shows the left and right sides converging, top comes down, lines come down. For the bottom edge of the building the lines come up. It's good convergence, left and right. And on the way to doing that, he actually made a sketch working on principles of it. And then he also had to converge up, three ways of converging, left, right and up. Wonderful. You know, I asked a guy in Israel, Ben a blind musician, to draw glass in front of him, a glass tilted back and in front of him, and last, with the base of the glass facing him. And what did he do? He got a nice "v" for the sides of the glass when it's right in front. Then there is a shorter view, he's shortening, when the glass is tilted back. And now the base is drawn a little bit of a lip. And then when the glass is tilted fully back and there's only the base towards you, he draws a circle and just a little squiggle to show that there is a surface. So that you can see it is quite narrow. He has for-shortened enormously. So blind people have good sense of the directions of objects. And if you ask them to make drawings and to show those things, often they do it. So, conclusion. Let's provide art access to the visually handicapped. Lots of places are doing this now, not just the Bode gallery and the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin. But the Tate in London, the MOMA in New York and the Met in New York and a lot of these are actually showed lots of places. Oh, by the way, the Louvre was doing them too. Programs are now available, they are on art. The history of art. There's a group called Art Education for the Blind. New York. They produce twenty volume set, with great photos in it. Art history for the blind. Cave art to the present. It's spectacular. A lot of people are getting hehind this evidence. This is not a practice or a fashion, this is evidence that this stuff works. And when you build a practice, a program on top of that to suit whatever needs you have. Why do this? Well the evidence shows, raised line pictures can be used by the blind. When they are drawing objects they show the shapes of objects. The very thing you see. And they have different levels of sophistication in their drawings. Especially if they have only recently gone blind. A child and an adult. And I think Eriko and Esref's perspective and metaphor drawings are kind of "firsts" in art history. We had no idea, 20 years ago that any of this was possible. And it's just spectacular that it is possible. Thank you very much. (clapping) Constance: So we have time for a few questions for Dr. Kennedy. Does anybody have anything they would like to actually comment on, based on what he said, or questions for him? Anything you would like for clarification, possibility for your museum. Speak loudly, if you don`t mind. I'll ask you to say your name, your organization and then ask your question. And if you could stand up. Thank you. Just because for accessibility, auditory accessibility as well. Diane: Diane Gallinger, and I'm a independent museum specialist and my question is for some people who are um, who have.... visual issues, they are not necessarily trained in using or working with tactile diagrams, now that I know at the Louvre, they have a program where they actually bring them in for workshops and work with let's say models of figure of models so that they get used to the feeling the full three-dimensional model and then they work to getting used to the feel of that so how that would translate into the feel of a two dimensional tactile diagram. But if you were just working, say in a small community in Ontario, which is where I am at right now, you have people who are coming in and doing programs and working with tactile diagrams but they may not necessarily have a background in using tactile diagrams and yet they may be, if you don't have the opportunity to do ongoing workshops with them to sensitize them or give them more experience in using a tactile diagram. What would you recommend for someone like myself, who is doing that program to enable someone who is new at working with this, to be able to comprehend the feeling of your hands. And I do do,. visual descriptions and do work with models that they can relate to the diagram as well, so it's not, you know, not being used just in on its own to use the two depiction but it's just how do you get over that hump apart from maybe using something like visual description or a tactile model, so how do you help them to use a two dimensional tactile diagram? Dr. Kennedy: Um, great question. I'll tell you two stories. One of them is, imagine a blind woman I was doing a test in Ottawa and she said, uh, You know, I'm no good with space and I can't do this kind of thing. Uh I have no experience with pictures, I can't draw. And I basically said to her, take up thy pen and draw. And she started, and her first drawing was a scribble. Drawing on a raised page line drawing. I said, well Kit, and her first drawing was a scribble. And then she looks upset . I should draw this box, that I was offering to her, this way, and then the next drawing, within minutes, had some scribbles but also a clear face of the box. And I actually, that's like a change from say a two to three year old to a three or four year old sighted kid. That takes a year. And she went from that in less than five minutes and then she said, "Oh, no, no, " Her next drawing had two faces attached side by side like a fold out drawing, which is typical of a seven year old sighted child. So then, in fifteen minutes she had gone through three or four years of drawing ability on her own. I had never taught anybody. I just want to know what they can do when they think about what they are doing. And how they think they might improve, and then what I see is that gradually themselves getting better because the drawing development sequence that unfolds in a sighted child, also unfolds in the blind. And they push themselves because they themselves. Okay, second story, is Esref herself. So she was encouraged to draw, so she said "Okay, I'm going to draw an advent wreath." If you don't know what that is. It's a in German or Northern Germany where there is a wreath of greenery and then typically four candles set in a square fashion around this circular wreath. And it would sit on the table. And so she wanted to make them go sideways, she was drawing a fold out drawing of the wreath and its four candles as her first drawing. Um, as an adult. So my suggestion to you is, don't think that it is necessary to start at some peculiar place which they must have, like three-dimensional objects, then move to representations of those, like a sculpture, then slip away another dimension and go to . Then slip away another dimension and go to two dimensions. No - just drop them in the deep end and say please draw. And you'll find they will do lines for surface edges without asking you what can a line stand for. and . And they will start learning shapes that are relevant and they will start using spacial systems that are like sighted children, and then they will themselves mature as they themselves evaluate their own drawings. By the way, the box that I was asking her to draw was exactly a matte the box that you could fold up and put in my pocket, complicated enough that it would be a challenge for anybody and so it was a nice sort of task: draw a cube, draw a table, draw a glass, draw a hand, draw box. These are examples of things that you can offer people as targets and they will draw them and they will criticize their own drawings and be satisfied with some parts and then drive themselves into more sophisticated drawings. Okay, is that enough? Constance: Okay, I know that there is other questions. Dr. Kennedy: I am happy to stay, love talking about this, love to know your experiences. Constance: Clearly, again another very passionate person with lots of information. So Dr. Kennedy will be at the back and thank you Dr. Kennedy: My pleasure. (clapping)