Day 19: The Unseen

Thursday, May 31, 2012 

We've spent the last few days carving our forms for blue printing and testing them with watercolors. We made both a pattern block and a signature block (backwards, of course).

My pattern is based on the sidewalk tiles and manhole covers in Prague.

Having finished the forms, we got sheets of cloth today and got to actually print with them.

Blue printing turns out to be a surprisingly strenuous process. All you have to do is take your form (ours are blocks carved out of foam, not the wooden ones that can last for centuries), press it into the pap, and then stamp the design onto the cloth… But when your design is a small and precise one that you want to stamp onto your cloth over 100 times, this becomes slightly more challenging. The process required me to spread more pap into the cushioned tray with a brush, press the form carefully into it, carry it across the small room to the table that held the cloth, bend over this while getting the form into precisely the right position to make a seamless pattern (or my best attempt at one, anyway), and then press it down hard enough to print the design clearly on all sides. This still might not sound like all that much, but when you consider that I had to do all these steps for each of the over 100 copies of the design… Well, I was rather sore by the end. I think I'm mostly satisfied with the result. 

I won't know for certain, though, until all the patterns get dyed. The white sections will then become blue, and the green will stay white (after being washed in acid to remove the pap).

This is one thing that printing, baking, and several of the other more patient arts have in common. No matter how much work you put into them, there's no way to be sure of your results until the very end. Whether it's a dye vat or an oven, nothing's finished until it comes out for the last time. 

We shall see. 

Several of the other students were going to an unusual tour/exhibition this afternoon, and they invited me along. It sounded interesting, so I accepted. It was called Neviditelná Výstava ("The Invisible Exhibition"). The website is here, if you want to take a look. 

The tour took place entirely inside a series of rooms in a building on a street somewhere. (We got lost several times trying to find it.) All of the rooms are completely dark - no light of any kind. Tour groups are led through them to get some idea of what it would be like to be blind. Our guide was blind himself, so he knew what he was doing and patiently led our slow, fumbling group through the tour. 

The first few rooms were set up like rooms in a house - kitchen, bathroom, living room, and so on - with furniture, appliances, and various other objects that we tried to identify. Later rooms included a cabin, a forest with a bridge over a stream, and a city street. All of these had sounds playing to make the illusion more convincing. The street was actually rather intimidating - we could hear the traffic going by, but we couldn't see it. We stayed pressed against the rough wall by the sidewalk and groped our way from windowsill to windowsill. Another room was set up as an art gallery, with sculptures that we tried to identify by feel. (One of these was Michelangelo's David, which made for a rather awkward moment about halfway down.) 

It was interesting to find how easy it was to get a picture of small objects just by feel - and how difficult it was to navigate through larger spaces. I could get a fairly good mental picture of everything within arm's reach, but beyond that, the world was a complete blank. It was a strong reminder of exactly how much I rely on my sense of sight. Without it, I could only tell what was nearby with my sense of direction (I don't have one), my sense of hearing (half the sounds around me were recordings), and my sense of touch (range: about two and a half feet). It was a surprisingly disorienting experience. 

At the end, we stopped at the "blind bar" (also pitch black) and ordered drinks. Fortunately, Czech coins are all different sizes, and half of them are thirteen-sided instead of circular, so it was possible to pay in the correct amounts. (Czech bills are different lengths, depending on denomination, and there are tools for quickly measuring them if you're blind. I'm curious now about what people do in the US, where the bills are all the same size.) 

At the bar, our guide stopped for perhaps half an hour and just let us ask him questions. We had quite a lot by then. Some of the main points he emphasized are that you should ask a blind person if they need help before trying to give it to them (many don't need or want it), that you should let them hold your arm (instead of vice versa) if they want to be led somewhere, and that only one person should provide help at a time. These all seemed fairly obvious to me, but apparently, not enough people are aware of them.

He said that he's actually trained his sense of hearing so well that he can get a feeling for the space around him - where there are buildings, where there are vehicles and how fast they're moving, where there are people, even what they're doing with their hands - just by sound. To learn the entire course of the tour he gave us today, he only had to walk through the rooms once. 

He's likely to be one of the most all-around competent people I've ever met. He speaks three languages, plays eight instruments, competes in a sport designed for blind players (it involves a ball filled with bells, caught with what sounds like a rather terrifying amount of full-body tackles), and thinks that guide dogs and assistants make things too easy. He said that there's really nothing that should be impossible for blind people - except perhaps driving.