Articles/Reviews
Canadian Journal of Disability Studies
Published by the Canadian Disability Studies Association Association canadienne d’études sur le handicap
Hosted by The University of Waterloo
www.cjds.uwaterloo.ca
David Bobier
Founder and Director of VibraFusionLab [email protected]
Kim Sawchuk
Professor of Communication Studies Concordia University [email protected]
Samuel Thulin Artist and Researcher
[email protected]
VibraFusionLab founder and director, David Bobier talks about the genesis of his explorations of vibration and accessibility in art-making, his current collaborations, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on vibrotactile artwork and issues of access, and the future of VibraFusionLab. He was interviewed by special issue editors Kim Sawchuk and Samuel Thulin on 23 November 2020.
Bobier was co-curator of, and participating artist in, the Vibrations exhibition in Montreal, which launched in parallel with the VIBE symposium.
RésuméFondateur et directeur de VibraFusionLab, David Bobier parle de la genèse de ses explorations de la vibration et de l’accessibilité dans la création artistique, de ses collaborations actuelles, des effets de la pandémie de COVID-19 sur les œuvres d’art vibrotactiles et les problèmes d’accès ainsi que de l’avenir de VibraFusionLab. Il a été interviewé par les éditeur·es de ce numéro spécial, Kim Sawchuk et Samuel Thulin, le 23 novembre 2020. David Bobier a été
coprogrammateur et artiste à l’exposition Vibrations à Montréal, lancée en parallèle du symposium VIBE.
Key Words: Access, Technology, Accessible Art-Making, Vibrotactile, Deafhood, Disability
KIM: What is the story behind VibraFusionLab and the vibrotactile work that you've been doing?
DAVID: VibraFusionLab started at the time that we adopted our two kids, both Deaf. That whole experience of raising them and experiencing life to some extent through their senses made me acutely aware of tactile experience and how they responded to things that vibrated, particularly sound. In my work I've always been interested in finding ways of experiencing things in life in a slightly different way, or emphasizing aspects that are perhaps not as evident. We're so visually-aware that that tends to overtake the other senses, at least in my experience. For most of my creative practice exploring things through sound has been integral.
I think the next major event was learning about the research that was happening at Ryerson University 8 or 10 years ago in what's called the Inclusive Media Design Center (IMDC). They were working on a project called the Emoti-Chair, which was essentially a redesigned chair for the Deaf to experience cinema, with an emphasis on vibration. My first experience was a concert at a bar in Toronto, where they had a number of bands playing and they'd set up some of their chairs. I took the kids to the event and had the chance to meet some people that were involved in the research. I reached out to them.
As an artist, I was interested in exploring elements of vibration in my work and to consider the possibilities of taking the research the IMDC were doing out into the community and hosting workshops with Deaf artists. They were very accommodating and eventually invited me into the project. We started doing workshops outside the academic environment, reaching out to members of the Deaf and disabled arts community. The researchers involved in the Emoti-Chair project applied for a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) grant in collaboration with VibraFusionLab to set up a research space in London, Ontario under the name of VibraFusionLab.
The funding allowed the lab to operate for three years in a public space, a sort of open studio space in London. During that period, we hosted weeklong residencies and invited artists to explore the technology. A lot of relationships developed out of that. A lot of invention around vibration took place. We started to see the potential of developing the lab and the potential of the technology having much broader applications.
KIM: Who did the Emoti-Chair in Toronto?
DAVID: Predominantly Dr. Deb Fels, who is the director of the lab there, Carmen Branje, who was doing his PhD at the time on the Emoti-Chair, Maria Karam, who did her PhD on the project – she'd done a lot of the original research and she's now running the Redwood, which is a theater space in Toronto, where she has a lot of the technology there. Dr. Frank Russo, director of the SMART Lab, was also instrumental in this research. As for the Emoti-Chairs themselves, a number of them came to VibraFusionLab, and then from there we started other applications.
One of the things I found when we started working with the chairs much more directly with people from the Deaf and disabled communities was that the chairs were not necessarily the solution for many of them. In particular, for someone using a wheelchair, that was not a suitable option. So we started other kinds of systems and prototypes that were more appropriate for those individuals – for example, pillows that they could hold or hug, systems that we could put at their backs, ones that they could hold in their hands, those sorts of things. We've done experimentation with ramped vibrotactile floors. They work quite well with wheelchair users, who are able to get onto the floor and feel the vibration up through their wheelchairs.
KIM: Before we go further, can you describe what vibrotactile technology is, what happens when you use this technology, what it's intended to do, and how it works a little bit?
DAVID: Right. Vibrotactile is simply exploring the vibrational frequencies or qualities of sound. On our body we can experience vibrations that tend to be in the lower frequency range quite distinctively. Percussive bass frequencies translate really well into vibration. It does reach up into the voice range, as well, although there are some limitations with the technology. One thing that we're hoping to explore is how we can actually build systems that will integrate higher frequencies. The hardware is what's called the transducers or voice coils or exciters. Essentially they are like the core of a speaker – the centre part that visually when you look you see it move, it vibrates. Transducers are designed to enhance the vibration even more. They’re designed as vibrotactile elements as opposed to audio elements. The transducers are connected to an amp – and that's typical of any audio system. Audio is sent into the amp and the amp feeds the frequencies into the transducers that produce the vibrations. And of course, this all has to be plugged into an electrical outlet. So in terms of freedom of movement, they can be a little bit challenging to carry around. Having cords and cables is a bit of a distraction and difficult to manage. It's not impossible, but it can be cumbersome.
That's why the wireless system we hope to develop is so important. Typically vibrotactile systems can be experienced in various parts of the body depending on the preferences of the individual and their sensitivity and capabilities to experience tactility. Hands and fingertips are the most sensitive part of the body and bottoms of the feet are also highly sensitive. What we do
with an individual is we explore, with them, what's most comfortable and responsive. In a nutshell, the transducer can be attached to anything or encased in anything that will then charge that object with the vibration. They're interesting because you can attach them to a table or a window or any kind of hard surface and that surface will become a speaker. So there's lots of ways of experimenting and creating that can happen around using the transducers.
SAM: Could you talk a bit more about where VibraFusionLab is today? What work are you doing now and how did you get to this point?
DAVID: Yeah, so the initial funding of course ran out. I've been able to receive arts funding to support the lab and the research. But typical of grant funded projects, they run out in terms of funding. So I had to start looking at another model. We became more of a mobile project. And the funding started to come in to travel to locations or to organizations or to individuals that were interested in what we were doing. So we became this project that moved around. That's one of the things that's happened and is still happening. All of it has grown organically.
People have been reaching out to us. The driver behind VibraFusionLab now is other people coming in, other organizations contacting us. The work we are involved in is morphing increasingly toward the needs and requests of those we are working with. Acting on these requests and connections, we then work closely with the individual or community to adapt existing systems or develop a new device that fits their needs and the specific situations they are involved in. This may be something that assists them in the creation of a work of their own or in ways that make their work more accessible and inclusive for their audience to experience.
The technology has changed a lot. As I mentioned, we're currently working on developing a wireless system that frees up any individual that's working with it, giving freedom of movement. We feel that's really important, especially in thinking about dance and theatre and performance artists. And that's being driven in response to requests from outside. So we've become something of a resource. People are reaching out to us now from all over the place.
SAM: That transition you've talked about from a more physical space to a more mobile project shows that there is this really intense interest in the work that you're doing. I'm interested in how people heard about it and started contacting you.
DAVID: I'll give a couple of examples. I got this email from a woman who was studying at MIT who said, “I want to come to the lab.” And within a couple of days she arrived. Her visit resulted in a long-term friendship. Her name's Adi Hollander. She lives in Amsterdam. She hosted a symposium there called The Other Abilities that I attended in 2019. Our collaboration has developed into a new project, funding dependent, to create a fully immersive architectural space emphasizing the vibrotactility of sound and movement and considering all areas of this space including walls, floors, ceilings, and objects within this space. If successful this would bring in specialists in Deaf and disability arts, sound art, tactility, architecture, movement, etc. from Israel, Netherlands, Canada and MIT in Boston and would take place at Centre[3] for Artistic and Social Practice and LIVELab, McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
The ultimate aim of this project is to develop into a second phase of creating models or prototypes for providing greater accessibility to art gallery and museum exhibitions and collections.
Recently an audiologist sent me an email. He lives in Owen Sound and he works for the school board there and has a student, a young woman, who is autistic and Deaf. In working with her he came to recognize that music was really important to her. But with COVID and isolation she's been cut off from accessing any musical activities at the school. So he's very concerned about her situation. He started looking outside of the practice of audiology and to find other ways that she could have access to music, which led him to VibraFusionLab. Once it’s possible to travel, we’ll go there and work with her with some of our systems and develop whatever’s necessary to enhance the possibilities around her love of music through vibration.
Two months ago I got an email from Noah Fields, Events and Logistic Assistant for the Chicago Poetry Foundation. They were looking at ways of increasing access to their programming post-
COVID, of course. They have a gallery space and a library and performance space, so that's something we'll pick up once it’s possible to travel. We can hopefully add to their capabilities around access.
So those are some examples of people reaching out and what we're experiencing right now in terms of interest in VibraFusionLab.
KIM: Following up on that, David, you mentioned that the pandemic has affected your vibrotactile practice and collaborations. Can you talk a little bit about what that's both closed off and opened up for you?
DAVID: Many of the other systems that I talked about earlier, like pillows and handheld objects are not usable during the pandemic under the health protocols. So we have had to rethink our new prototypes. I have started working closely with Jim Ruxton, who is an electronics engineer and media artist in Hamilton, who ran Subtle Technologies for many years in Toronto, a
symposium on arts and technology. He’s been working with me on small handheld objects with all of the technology built-in. So what you would get is something that you would hold in your hand and that would then connect to an audio source. We're hoping to develop these as inexpensively as possible so that we can provide them if you have an art exhibition and you want to access a piece that has sound. We would provide these handheld systems, then the audience would actually take them home. Then they could be used at home, plugged into your TV or your radio or your iPhone: any audio source. They would become your own personal vibrotactile system. We've got prototypes right now. I'm working with another artist at the University of Windsor, Professor Rod Strickland, who does a lot of design and printing. We're working on
what that object’s shape would be. We have to consider different hand shapes, different hand movements, different hand abilities, also texture and tactile sensitivity. Once we're able to get back into working with the community we'll be able to further develop these systems.
SAM: That's really exciting because of the possibilities for networked collaborations when you have several people who have these devices and who can connect somehow and work on things through them. Are there some other significant artist collaborations you've had in your experience with VibraFusionLab that you'd like to share?
DAVID: One of the more enjoyable and successful would be the VIBE project in Montreal that came out of the exchange program that we had with Together! 2012 in London, UK. The symposium was one of the most enjoyable experiences that I have had in people-gathering because it really felt like an extended family. It really made me feel like I belonged to a community. And as an artist, all my life I probably never have felt that close to a community.
And that feeling continues today. In such a community, we don't have to start at ground zero and explain everything. It's about common knowledge and common practice and common experience and from that things grow very quickly.
Another collaboration is a project called Scored in Silence, which we've been working towards for about six years with a Deaf dancer and performance artist from London, UK, Chisato Minamimura – a Japanese born artist. Scored in Silence is a project based on the Deaf survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the performance actually has some interviews with survivors.
It's essentially Chisato telling the story in sign, performance, projected animation, sound and vibration. It was featured at the Edinburgh Festival over a year ago, last August. And it is planned to come to Canada, again post COVID, and will be presented in Hamilton, Toronto and Montreal. From the perspective of VibraFusionLab our contribution was to design a wearable system for Chisato. Jim Ruxton built a wireless vibrotactile system that was embedded in the
back of Minamimura’s gown to enhance the tactility of the sound on her body and to help provide cues for her movement and her performance in British Sign Language. The audio production is experienced as vibration and sound for the audience members through individualized vibrotactile systems called Woojer straps. We are able to accommodate a maximum audience of 50. What we found in the various presentations held in the UK is that we would have an audience where roughly half the people were Deaf and were disabled. So we were able to diversify the audience.
We have also worked on several projects with other prominent Deaf Canadian artists/performers such as Jenelle Rouse, Gaitrie Persaud and Tamyka Bullen in workshops and performances in collaboration with Centre[3] for Artistic and Social Practice, Hamilton; Toronto Creative Music Lab; Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto.
Another project that has been ongoing, and which is really exciting: we’ve been working with an integrated dance group in Ottawa called Propeller Dance. Their core dancers represent a number of disabilities including autism and wheelchair users and I have already presented a week-long workshop with them demonstrating some of our vibrotactile technology and exploring ways for them to incorporate the technology into their choreography. They are reimagining their direction and wanting to have much more digital content in their future programming and performance building. So we're going to be working with them and various other professionals in dance and sound. That would result in some new productions and obviously much more accessible and inclusive performances.
To pick up on just one more project called Blurring the Boundaries, I have linked up with two disabled artists now living in Montreal. Charles Matthews is a neurodiverse musician and sound engineer, and Gift Tshuma is a disabled musician and composer and a disability advocate. This project was funded by British Council Canada, Farnham Maltings, and the High Commission of Canada in the UK, and was first launched as a workshop and presentation at the Drake Music Lab in London, UK, one of our collaborators along with Propeller Dance. This project brings the emerging practice of rapid accessible instrument creation to integrated dance: blurring the boundaries between musicians, dancers, and technologists/makers and aiming to re-imagine accessibility in an integrated dance context using digital technology.
So that gives you an idea of a few of the projects we have undertaken in working with the Deaf
and disabled arts communities and in building audiences from these communities.
KIM: Could you talk a little bit about your piece for VIBE? I have very fond memories of it – seeing this kind of device that felt like it was from another century, but using this very modern technology, and also having a player piano component in it. It was something that you really did want to touch. It was a very beautiful piece aesthetically and visually had the warmth of old technology embedded in it.
DAVID: I appreciate that I was able to put some of that across. You're absolutely right. I come from an analog age and also one that is curious about how things work. So typically I take something that creates sound or has action or something, and I take it apart. And typically I can't put it back together, but I put it together in other ways. I think the marriage between analog and
digital gives it a sort of timelessness that you can't really place. I really enjoy disrupting the common understanding of something. So that piece has what's called a programmable music box with a crank. You mentioned player piano. It's very similar to the idea of a player piano – there are strips of hardened paper that you can punch out a score or a pattern of holes, that when you pass it through the music box, it creates sound. Each hole creates a different sound.
That sound is translated to vibration using transducers on the fingertips of wooden hands that you can place your fingertips on. What is specific to that piece is that – not being a musician, I don’t know how to write music – I was going to have to create my own score, so to speak.
Centred on the idea of communication again, and the exchange of ideas and forms of communication, I typically work from phrases or experiences of people from the Deaf and disability community. I will take a phrase and translate it into braille. Then that braille is sort of a coding system for the score. The idea is that braille, which is a tactile language experience, becomes sound and then that score – the paper – passes in front of a projector light and is projected onto the wall so the braille becomes a visual language.
Then it passes back through to the tech on the hand as a tactile finger tips experience. So there's a sort of system of language and communication that gets altered as you interact with the piece.
The audience is invited to activate the music box. Those kinds of things are still really important to me. Where I'm going right now is working with water as both a medium and as a source of sound. I'm recording underwater sounds. I have small metal vessels or bowls filled with water with the transducers and an amp attached to the base of them. Underwater recordings are passed through the amp to the transducers, which then activate the water in the vessel as a visualization of the sound that's been recorded underwater. You get all these lovely visual patterns and sounds happening that way.
KIM: Can you talk a bit more about what a transducer is and the process of transduction?
DAVID: Yeah. What does it mean? It means to kind of transport something, a medium or in this case sound from one source to another. So in the case of the water, for instance, the underwater recording, that's the sound source. And then the vibration on the surface of the water becomes the transduction of that sound but in a visual format.
KIM: Adding amplification to the process of transduction helps to render visible or audible what is imperceptible: the vibrational moments that are in communication.
DAVID: I think what happens too, if we think about sound taken from under the water, but then is passed through water as a medium, well that medium changes the sound. That sound coming out of the transducer would be different than the one that's coming out of the water vessel.
Digitally we can do so much with sound, right? I mean, you can raise frequencies, lower frequencies, do all sorts of guitar pedal stuff, do all kinds of stuff with computers. It's certainly a medium that people are exploring as sound artists in infinite directions.
SAM: I think your work brings up the energetic aspect of transduction too, and the impact it has on people. There's a kind of energy and there is a force to it and the way it circulates and
changes. There’s a power that it has as it does that.
DAVID: It is a force. In terms of science, everything vibrates so we're made up of millions of little vibrating parts. So it's understandable that vibration would have an impact on people in some sort of elemental way.
SAM: What is the potential that you see in these practices, in terms of thinking about how they could be taken up in other communities, and thinking of what they could mean for the future of art?
DAVID: I see endless possibilities. That would be a simple answer. I think the more we explore it the more possibilities we realize there are. I think one possibility outside of the realm of art, is in the area of health and wellness. People are using vibration as healing. I've had various conversations with people in the medical community, talking about vibration for rehabilitating or re-growing skin cells or alleviating phantom limb pain. There are possibilities there that I'm not even going to attempt to talk about because that's not my background and that's not where we're going, but I think there's enormous potential in that area.
I do think there's potential in developing – maybe we could call them – alternative languages, emotional languages. We're such aural, visual people that our other senses, mentally speaking, we're not even aware of them. And often when we're looking, we're not aware that we're hearing. It's kind of re-examining the importance of the senses. I think that's part of the future. I think it's also necessary, as a result of COVID and the pandemic and the virus and the isolation, that we explore other ways of enhancing our lives. I see the possibility of having inner body experiences on the outer body. There’s research in EEG (electroencephalogram) brainwave technology where they're able to create a visual interpretation of brain patterns and then sound interpretations of
brain patterns. It’s interesting to think about how that can become a vibrotactile experience back on the external body – so that you're actually feeling your thought pattern and perhaps controlling thought patterns in terms of emotions. Like what does anger feel like on your external body? How can you alter it? What ways do we have for affecting emotion? Obviously I'm
talking in positive ways. For every positive there's a negative, but we're emphasizing the positive here.
One of the current international projects that we're working on, that I mentioned earlier, is to look at developing more immersive experiences of art. It involves Adi Hollander – an Amersterdam media artist, whom I have been working with – and a couple of people from Israel who are part of the Woojer company that designs vibrotactile systems for gaming as well as four or five people from the Netherlands, two people from MIT, McMaster University's LIVELab and is in partnership with Centre[3] - for Artistic + Social Practice in Hamilton Lab. Our idea is for galleries and museums to start thinking beyond “normal”, typical experiences, and begin increasing access and increasing inclusive experiences for and with Deaf and disabled people. To go back to my first statement, the possibilities are infinite in my mind, and gratefully I'm seeing it happen. People are realizing this much, much more and my experience is that galleries and theatres are really realizing that the status quo is not part of the future. So it's about change.
KIM: What do you wish for the legacy of VibraFusionLab?
DAVID: I've been thinking about that a lot. In the later part of my life it’s been a really astonishing experience where VibraFusionLab has gone, where it's taken us. And I do think VibraFusionLab now is an entity on its own. I still drive it. I still care for it. I take care of it. But it has become something beyond the space that it started out in. And so in that sense, I think that there's a legacy. I would imagine that some people that I’ve worked with could potentially continue its purpose.
But on the other hand, I think that there is such an interest in the movement and in accessibility and the awareness around accessibility. Maybe at some point VibraFusionLab does not have to exist. The vibration, the ripple effect will continue. Just having this conversation and knowing that with both of you and with many other people in Montreal and elsewhere, we're still having this conversation and how important it is to keep having this conversation, and to know we've shared this together, is a joy to me. I will never forget that time in Montreal.
KIM: I have one final trick question for you, David, and don't feel like you have to answer it. I'm wondering as an artist who's been involved in collaborating with many academics and worked in the arts and the academic context, does the term research-creation get used and what does it mean to you if it does?
DAVID: I don't think that's a trick question. It’s really important. I was a member of the academic community for around 10 years both at University of Windsor and Mount Allison University and I think as an artist it's about balance. To some extent I question… and you know, there's a resistance to that kind of analysis. But at the same time, I've had numerous projects inherently connected to research-creation and they have been nothing but supportive and integral to the development of VibraFusionLab. In particular, Ryerson gave me access to all that technology and the opportunity to take that technology out of the academic community and into the public. To me if we can go back and forth in that exchange, that's where the excitement is. I could never work in an academic environment that would be closed or non-responsive to the individual and the creativity that is happening outside. One feeds the other to me.
It's really a feast of nourishment and nurturing. It nourishes you and opens up alternative thinking, looking at things from different perspectives. I still have trouble reading academic papers because of a certain resistance, but at the same time it's part of the growth and part of the sustainability of VibraFusionLab.
Bio:
David Bobier is a hard of hearing and disabled identified media artist whose creative practice is researching and developing multi-sensory and vibrotactile technology as a creative medium. This work led to his establishment of VibraFusionLab in London, Ontario, a creative multi-media, multi-sensory centre that has gained a reputation as a leader in accessibility for the Deaf and Disability Arts movement in Canada and abroad. The Lab is now situated at the artist’s studio in Thorndale, Ontario just outside of London.
As a practicing artist his exhibition career includes 18 solo and over 30 group exhibition projects across Canada, in the United States and the UK. Bobier’s independent work as an artist and as Director of VibraFusionLab has received funding from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Ontario Centres of Excellence, Grand NCE (National Centres of Excellence), Province of Quebec and British Council Canada.
Bobier has served in advisory roles in developing Deaf and Disability Arts Equity programs for both Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council and was an invited participant, more recently, in the Canada Council for the Arts – The Arts in a Digital World Summit and a panel presenter at the Global Disability Summit in London, UK. Bobier has twice received Canada Council for the Arts funding to do ongoing research of the Deaf and Disability Arts movement in the United Kingdom.
VibraFusionLab: Bridging Practices in Accessibility, Art, and Communication 2024-25
'Haptic Voices' Exhibition Essay
Eliza Chandler
InterAccess, Toronto; Centre3 for Artistic and Social Practice, Hamilton; Tangled Art Gallery, Toronto; NAISA (New Adventure In Sound Art), South River; White Water Gallery, North Bay.
As an artist, curator, and lover of the arts, I have always been captured by the particular way that art can bring us into an understanding or perspective of the world that is different than those gleaned from our own experiences. I don’t think art necessarily translates experiences directly, giving us an exact approximation of what its like to live in another(‘s) body or a different world; rather, I think art invites us to consider that there are different ways of living in and experiencing the world. Art gives us a sense of pluralities and alterities and a sense of the possibilities that lie within them. For example, when disability artist and self-described ‘not visual learner’ Carmen Papalia invites people to be led by him throughout an urban landscape in his performance Blind Shuttle, he is teaching them about the possibilities, rather than the limitations, of navigating a cityscape using senses other than sight. And through participating in this performance, they do not gain and understanding of what it is like to be blind; rather, they are opened up to a different way of experiencing the world through a creative act. In other words, art may not teach us what it feels like to be different that ourselves, but it can teach us that there are differences in the world and this might compel us to contribute to the collective project of building a world that welcomes and desires these differences. And for me, this is why art is so aligned with projects of social justice.
For decades, the disability rights movement have been working hard to advance the idea that disability rights are human rights and should be protected as such. Disability studies have contributed to this fight through offering the social model of disability, that is, the idea that the problem of disability doesn’t lie in the person, but rather in the social, specifically in inaccessible built environments. By locating the problem in the social rather than the individual, the social model offers different solutions; instead of rehabilitation and cure, we can seek out accessibility and accommodation. According to the social model, if a wheelchair-user is trying to get into a building that is only accessible by a set of stairs, or if a d/Deaf person trying to communicate with a non-Deaf person without the aid of an interpreter, the problem does not lie in the wheelchair-user or the d/Deaf person, the problem lies in the staircase and the absence of an interpreter (or the absence of widespread ASL education in schools).
Deaf and disabled people have benefited greatly from the achievements of the disability rights movement; indeed many have been at the forefront of this activism. However, we also know that access, accommodation, and the recognition of disability rights does not lead to disability liberation for all. As disability justice, a movement led by queer, disabled, Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, teaches us, justice will not be achieved for people for whom inaccessible environments do not create barriers, people for whom oppression emerges through a mixture of ableism, audism, sanism, racism, sexism, classism, queer and transphobia, settler colonialism, environmental racism, and boarder control through the eradications of inaccessible environments alone. To truly live a fulfilled life, Deaf and disabled people need more than access to basic human rights. We also need access to full participation in creating and experiencing arts and culture, and this requires more than basic access and accommodation. Deaf and disability arts are necessary to the achievement of Deaf and disability liberation for its capacity to broaden understandings of the multiplicity of Deaf and disability experiences, different ways of experiencing the world. Moreover, Deaf and disability arts are integral to the achievement of disability liberation for the ways that this sector, and the cultivation of this sector through funding, professional development, mentorship, and exhibition opportunities, also allows Deaf and disabled people access to the richness of our culture.
Deaf and disabled people have been making art for years and, thusly, Deaf and disability arts contribution the advancement of disability rights and justice is longstanding. Canadian artist Persimmon Blackbridge, for example, has been calling herself a disability artist since the early 1970s. As movements such as Outsider Art/Art Brut[1] have shown us, Deaf and disabled people have been making art, largely in institutions such as mental asylums, residential schools, sheltered workshops, hospitals, and prisons for decades. We are currently witnessing a moment in Deaf and disability arts in Canada, thanks in large part to the formative activism and creative practices of these early Deaf and disabled artists. All of a sudden, or so it seems for someone whose entry into this art sector was relatively recent, art councils are dedicating funding, artists are producing, galleries and arts organizations are exhibiting, and people are reviewing, writing, and talking about Deaf and disability art. Our culture is abuzz. We can’t be sure what, exactly, Deaf and disability arts is: Is it only art made by a Deaf or disabled person? Is it only art that represents or engages the histories, experiences, cultures, politics, and/or communities of Deaf and disabled people? Does it require both? One thing that I am almost certain about is that Deaf and disabled art needs to be made accessible to Deaf and disabled audiences. More than this, my interactions with Deaf and disability art over the past few years have taught me that when you make art accessible, particularly when you consider accessibility early on in the creation process, you are actually contributing to the aesthetics of the work, allowing for new and exciting ways that audiences can interact with art, and propel the capacity of art to give way to new understandings of people and the world. For all of these reasons, when you make art accessible, a key feature of Deaf and disability art, you raise the artistic excellence of the artwork. VibraFusionLab has been leading the way in innovating new and exciting ways to make art accessible that are integral to the aesthetics and the way we experience art, charting new terrain in the art world, as this exhibition, VibraFusionLab: Bridging Practices in Accessibility, Art, and Communication, demonstrates.
In 2014, media artist David Bobier opened VibraFusionLab in London, Ontario in collaboration with the Inclusive Media and Design Centre at Ryerson University. VibraFusionLab, run by Bobier and populated by various multi-media and multi-disciplinary artists from around the world, is an interactive, multi-disciplinary, multi-sensory, multi-modal creative studio—and ideation space— that serves as a hub for research, creation, collaboration, mentorship and exhibition opportunities. All of the energies and activities at VibraFusionLab are focused on the creation of new accessible art forms through inclusive technologies, including vibrotactile technology (turning sound into motion), as a creative medium that expand art-making practices and extend art-engaging experiences. I can confidently guess that there are no other collaborative research and creation spaces like VibraFusionLab in the world. The genius and sheer innovation of this collaboration is the way that it brings together artists and scientists to make emerging inclusive or adaptive technology accessible to artists of all disciplines and of all abilities. In doing so, VibraFusionLab contributes not only to the requirement to make artwork accessible, but also to the abundant creative and innovative opportunity that comes with this requirement. In short, VibraFusionLab and the technologies, ideas, and instruction that it offers has dramatically changed the way we make and experience art.
I remember visiting VibraFusionLab early on in my tenure as Artistic Director at Tangled Art + Disability, an arts organization and gallery dedicated to cultivating Deaf and disability art, located in downtown Toronto. I walked into a seemingly magical space filled with computers, amps, vibrating lawn chairs, people, different languages, sign language interpreters, and excited conversation. On this particular day, a Deaf choreographer from the UK, Chisato Minamimura, one of Bobier’s long time collaborators, was there work-shopping possibilities for a vibrating stage that would allow her dancers and audiences to experience her choreographed pieces in the same way she did. I remember putting on noise-cancelling headphones and a vibrating vest attached to a set of speakers playing David Bowie’s Space Oddity and, to my astonishment, recognizing the song through its vibrations. I remember the excitement we all seemed to feel about being invited to play with vibrotactile technology, exploring its creative, and even linguistic possibilities in art-making. Bobier and his collection of artists and scientists were not only inviting us to think about how to make our art accessible, but to think about how to embed this technology in the creation of our work for its aesthetic and accessibility possibilities. I was feeling the kind of excitement you might only feel when a whole new way of approaching, creating, and experiencing art is being opened up to you.
As you can see/hear, Deaf and disability arts cannot be pinned down by a definition, however, I am always attempting to find one. And I think that the work VibraFusionLab does can lead us to a new and generative understanding. Take this exhibition as an example. Not all of artists included in this show identify as Deaf or disabled (though some do), but all of the works are made accessible through collaboration with VibraFusionLab. The extensions of these works as offered through vibratactile technology do not simply offer a translation. They do not merely translate sound into motion or an auditory experience into a tactical one, and they certainly do not offer a direct translation of experiences. The experience of the work in this exhibition does not approximate the lived experience that is being represented in the work. Because of the artists’ collaboration with VibraFusionLab, our experience of the work is multisensory; our interaction with this work allows us to change the art as the art changes us; and we likely experience this work on another, or a deeper, level then we have ever experienced art before. And, of course, this collaboration has allowed for the artwork to be accessible to d/Deaf, non-Deaf, disabled, and non-disabled people alike in a way that is integral to the aesthetics and experience of the art; in this exhibition, accessibility is not an afterthought. As the works in this exhibition demonstrate, VibraFusionLab’s artistic collaborations are not aimed at translating experiences, a translation which would always be incomplete, but are instead aimed at approaching differences—different abilities, different sensorial experience, different lived experiences, different ways of experiencing art—as offering a tremendous opportunity to create something new. Indeed, VibraFusionLab considers the experience of disability and Deafhood not as a problem to be solved or overcome, but as a creative opportunity in line with how disability communities might think about desiring disability or Deaf communities might think about Deaf gain.
VibraFusionLab is mobilizing experiences of Deafhood and disability as exciting opportunities to think about how we create and experience art in a way that is building both new practices in the art world and new understandings of embodied difference as generative, innovative, and full of possibility. VibraFusionLab is moving beyond the project of making the world more inclusive and is instead working to create a different kind of world altogether. In doing so, VibraFusionLab and its artists are foregrounding the emancipatory possibilities of art and inciting the project of Deaf and disability liberation.
[1] Historically, art made by Deaf and disabled people have been classified as ‘Outsider Art’ or ‘Art Brut.’ Many Deaf and disabled artists reject this classification because of its implications that are art lacks skill, development, artistic intention, and political motivation. For more on Deaf and disability arts’ relationship with Outsider Art/Art Brut, please see Rachel Gorman’s Whose Disability Culture, 2005.
BODIES IN TRANSLATION: Activist Art, Technology and Access to Life
Interview with David Bobier
Posted on March 29, 2018 by bit-admin in BIT Projects
We were thrilled to interview David Bobier, co-lead of Bodies in Translation: Accessing the Arts via email.
David Bobier is a hard-of-hearing media artist and the parent of two deaf children. David conducts research into employing vibrotactile technology as a creative medium at VibraFusionLab in London, Ontario. He also is founder and co-chair of Inclusive Arts London and has been conducting research and collaborative initiatives with the Deaf and Disability Arts communities in the UK.
The following is the full interview with David Bobier, which took place via email. Thank you,David, for your insights.
David Bobier is a hard-of-hearing media artist and the parent of two deaf children. He is a collaborator on Bodies in Translation (BIT) and co-leads the “Accessing the Arts” stream. David conducts research into employing vibrotactile technology as a creative medium at VibraFusionLab in London, Ontario. He also is founder and co-chair of Inclusive Arts London and has been conducting research and collaborative initiatives with the Deaf and Disability Arts communities in the UK. BIT is proud to have both VibraFusionLab and David Bobier as partners on the project.
What drew you to Bodies in Translation?
I think I first became aware of the Bodies In Translation project through Eliza Chandler. It was still in it’s early development stages and Eliza encouraged me to consider being part of it. She also introduced me to Carla Rice then as well. I remember having the loveliest Skype chat with Carla and between the two of them and their incredible spirit and energy I was hooked. As I became more familiar with the project in it’s evolution and created a stronger connection with Carla and Eliza, I think I would have pleaded to be part of it. That, however, wasn’t necessary, as they kindly welcomed me and VibraFusionLab into the family, so to speak! I believe ‘like minds’ quickly recognize each other and get right into the commonly-shared intentions.
Once that bond was made I was drawn to the comprehensive scope and vision of BIT. I was pretty much in awe of the amount of time and energy that was committed to the formation of such a project and to the gathering of such an elite group of researchers, academics, artists, elders, etc. It was also the affinity that I felt for the ambitious embrace of the project through its activism, its desire for change and its passion for nurturing a more inclusive society that hooked me. In the life work that we do around justice, accessibility and creative practices it can often be a solitary path. Through VibraFusionLab we have tried to carve a small ‘space’ for change. I saw Bodies In Translation as an exciting and humbling opportunity to join the incredible diversity of people and energies that make up the project and that will prove to be an instrumental force and a legacy in redefining the art of activism and the access to a creative life, in all its manner, for everyone.
Oh, and just an added comment – anytime I am given an opportunity to consider the role of inclusive technologies in the arts, let alone the opportunity to practice it, you pretty much have my attention!
In what ways does VibraFusion’s work push the boundaries of accessible artistic practices for creators and audiences?
With increased awareness through the Deaf and Disability Rights movements, the aging of the Boomer population and increased funding for research and development in Deaf and Disability Arts in Canada, the interest in sensory-based technologies in the arts is increasing. Through the creation of VibraFusionLab I have been able to provide access to some of these technologies to many artists from both the disabled and non-disabled communities. There is an evolving investigative interest in diversifying artistic practice to incorporate other-sensory or multi-sensory and other-modality or multi-modality experiences.
This project furthers my own personal desire of exploring, developing and integrating alternative sensory methods, stimulation and ‘languages’ such as the use of human biofeedback technologies, digital recording and software coding of natural phenomena. As well, the reimagining of existing inclusive technologies as alternative methods of communication and emotional connections through artistic practice will attract and accommodate a more diversified and integrated audience. I believe that other sensory technologies, while developed for very practical inclusive use and for improved and enhanced life experiences, have enormous potential in providing more accessibility to art making and to greatly improved and more immersive access to art of all disciplines. This belief and artistic focus is the framework for this project and will form the singular basis for this research and the future development of my own artistic practice.
What do you think are the most important future actions for accessible arts practice?
First and foremost, we need to provide opportunities for the voices of those who are experiencing inaccessible art practices and arts venues and to reach out into the alienated communities to identify those who desire creative opportunities and those who are struggling to access arts education, art making facilities and arts organizations to be heard.
Along with this we need to develop trusting and healthy relationships with the people behind these voices to build best practices in breaking down these barriers and allowing these voices to be heard in the broader mainstream arts communities.
We need to inform these broader communities of the emphasis on the social model of inclusionary arts.
We need to recognize and honour those before us and their ambitious and innovative spirits that pushed the boundaries in accessible arts practices in Canada and who have been instrumental in challenging us to acclaim who we are and to celebrate what we have to say as artists.
We need to allow and to encourage a political as well as the personal voice within accessible arts practices.
I believe we need to develop greater connections with mainstream arts organizations, arts professionals and arts practitioners. Through these connections we need to influence and broaden their understanding of and appreciation for alternative practices in the arts. We need to encourage their commitment to diversified arts programming that is inclusionary of all artists and arts practices and to imagining new ways of providing access to the entirety of their arts programming. Equally vital is that these potential partners need to practice ongoing accessibility training individually and for their staff and to use available accessibility guides and resources.
We need to continue to work with arts funders to assure equality in their funding models and in their individual funding programs and we need to continue to emphasize the need for ongoing evaluation of the integrity and equality of their granting guidelines and jurying practices. As the accessible arts movement grows arts funders will need to continue to respond to the voices struggling to be heard.
My final thoughts are that we need to reach out to each other, encourage each other and congratulate each other as we move forward. We need to become a unified force through partnerships and collaborations. We need to share our thoughts and aspirations. And we need to continue to build on these hard-fought strengths and achievements to continue pushing this movement forward, to build a new force and identity in the arts community and to create our own space for it to thrive.
Oh, and one final comment – technologies used for accessible arts practices are pretty darn cool too!
An online magazine where thoughtful art meets thoughtful art reviews.
Art Review by Sarah Oakley
July 21, 2024
“Vibration is the Foundation of Life”: David Bobier and Accessibility in the Arts
Recently I interviewed London, Ontario, media installation artist, David Bobier, via Zoom. At the time of the interview in late-June, Bobier was between two artistic engagements, one in Savannah, Georgia, USA, where he was in the process of completing the 4-week Residency, ON:View, at Sulfur Studios by ARTS Southeast, with partner, Leslie Putnam, and the other in Chicago, Voices Embodied: Reverberations, at the Design Museum of Chicago, which is a project featuring eighteen artists showcasing their work related to disability and the importance of societal inclusivity. These are just two events that have made up Bobier’s busy exhibition and presentation schedule over the past few years, which to date have recently included exhibitions and workshops across Canada, the United States and in various countries in Europe.
In my interview with Bobier, he talked candidly about his intentions and artistic practice that strongly centre around increasing accessibility in the arts within the Deaf and Disability community. We hear how Bobier, through innovative uses of multi-sensory, vibrotactile technologies, pushes beyond the limitations of the normal gallery experience as he encouraging us to focus on the language of vibration that he understands as “the foundation of life”. Our conversation explores such topics as the necessity for accessibility in the art world, Bobier’s current work outside of his role as Director at VibraFusionLab, and his thoughts on the Disability Arts Movement currently happening in Canada. In this movement, Bobier is a formative player as he continues to effect change in the way disability is viewed and represented, acknowledging the diverse lived experiences of artists and viewers that confound elitist perceptions of artistic works and spaces.
VibraFusionLab is a centre that Bobier started in London, Ontario 12 years ago, and is “an innovative centre for arts-based vibrotactile research and creative practices,” which promotes and encourages the creation of accessible art forms and inclusive technologies for the deaf, blind, disabled and hearing communities, and for a more inclusive experience of those audiences.
Interview between Sarah Oakley (SO) and David Bobier (DB)
SO: So, looking back at your early work, your formal education was in printmaking and lithography. Your practice now involves technological innovation, installation, and the motivation to increase accessibility within the arts, it seems that printmaking has been abandoned. Your first major exhibition, ‘Signing On: Adopting a Cultural Perspective’, in 1995, represents a point in your career when your direction toward producing installation works related to Deafness and disability became established. Can you talk about that transition in your practice and artistic intentions, and have you integrated printmaking into what you do now in any way?
DB: I had no insight into the direction that I was going to go with my work, but I think it was a slow process from working on flat surfaces and becoming frustrated with [that]. I mean, printmaking is a very tactile process, so I really enjoyed that. But, I think it was the fact that I needed to work spatially and it wasn’t allowing me to do that. It was really when I was doing my graduate work at Windsor that I started to break free of, what I felt, were restrictions within printmaking. I think, too, there had been influences from some of the other students and professors that I was working with at Windsor.
Also, I think the fact that Windsor is a very industrial centre. There was an abundance of materials to work with. I was kind of hungry to have an interactive involvement with my work and interested in the role that the audience could play in the activation of the work, rather than being bystanders, or the way the work could allow the audience or participant to play some role in the end experience. So, I was creating works that people could move and change control, beyond my control.
It was really about extending the work and the possibilities of the work, beyond my own limitations, or the kinds of limitations I put on the work at the time. I do think that work in the graphic arts certainly has influenced the way that my sculptural works evolved. I think there’s still a very strong formal graphic quality to them, or at least I see that. So, I think that played a part in a lot of the work that I do now and]the way it’s presented. I think that there is a precision to printmaking that I bring to a lot of my own work that I do now.
SO: There have been some recent projects that you’ve been a part of, for example, ‘Je ne dais pas inonder la mer’ at the MAI Theatre in Montreal (2024), and the international production, ‘Scored in Silence’, brought to Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto (2022). Did that connection between movement/performance art and the technology of sound transduction come naturally; or, was that sort of an intentional decision and path to take?
DB: So, I guess to answer that I have to go back to the formation of VibraFusionLab, which started 12 years or so, ago. In a lot of ways, it’s really hard to separate me from VibraFusionLab. We’re sort of one of the same. To get into the areas of dance and theatre performance was, I guess, to some extent, a kind of natural progression of VibraFusionLab. It was not intentional. I think it came about from others in those fields reaching out to to us at VibraFusionaLb to explore ways of expanding their practice – and accessibility has become a much more familiar intention. I think people are realizing that it is a necessity in the arts now. It’s been pretty much ignored because of the kind of elitist aspects of the arts, until more recently, with the justice and disability voices coming to the forefront and there’s actually an opportunity for them to have this stage.
It’s been an evolution in terms of the projects that we get involved in. But, I think if I look back at VibraFusionLab, it sort of was founded on two principles: one was to provide opportunities for artists from the Deaf and Disabled community; and, the other to support them in being creative through whatever sort of technological means we have; but also to think about audience and greater accessibility to the arts through, again, technology.
In both cases, artists or audience, I pose a question, “Who’s missing?”, and it’s very evident who’s missing. We try to address those questions by finding ways of resolving and providing access.
There are more and more theatres with artists from the Deaf and Disabled community who are working in performance – we’ve been working in burlesque and circus art, so it’s really expanded our reach and our capacity in responding to the needs of those people we’re working with. There’s no generic solution or generic device or system. Every project, every individual we work with, challenges us to find ways of supporting them and their own particular ways of working, addressing their limitations, and reinforcing their capabilities.
More recently, the last year or so, I’ve been working with the condition of synaesthesia. One project I was working on in Montreal was with an artist with multiple synaesthesia. Someone explains a word and they see a colour. I can appreciate there’s obviously a brain function going on that I don’t understand. But this synesthetic artist went on to describe multiple synaesthesia, and his whole world is sort of made up of these synesthetic conditions. We’re going to probably be working with him more. aside from the project in Montreal. In his work, in that particular project, he was employing a lot of projection, different kinds of light projections – colour, text, a range of visible qualities in projection. He’s interested in, somehow or other, experiencing some of those conditions as vibration. It’s kind of like what VibraFusionLab does in terms of experimenting with sound and as sound being something other than just sound, as vibration, or as something that’s visual – we do a lot of work in what’s called sound visualization and that’s trying to interpret sound through a visual. But for him, it’s taking some of these experiences that he has and shifting them into another sensory experience. To me, that sounds quite remarkable and challenging, but challenging in the sense of exciting. You never know when you’re starting out, how this is going to turn out and what the end result is going to be. I find the whole process so interesting.
We started working with a tap dancer, Travis Knights. He is originally from Montreal, but is in the Toronto area now. We did work with him on a show in Montreal: ephemeral artefacts: travis knights. He wants to work further with us.. Of course, when you think about tap dance, it’s all about percussion. Any kind of percussive sound translates amazingly well as vibration. You really get to feel that. It’s almost being like the board that he taps on; you’re feeling that, and when you translate that onto your body, it’s quite an amazing experience.
You’re moving your body and you are feeling the vibration when you’re the one tap dancing, so if the audience could also experience that, you’re much more integrated into the actual performance. I think a physical experience, in some ways, is more profound than a visual experience for an auditory experience. It becomes, somehow or other, more internalized.
SO: Have instances of collaboration beyond working with practicing artists, such as educational opportunities, been a part in your practice?
DB: Yes, we tested some of our vibratactile pillows for students from a school board in the Bruce Peninsula in their special education program and we’re still in a process of finding the best solution and adapting the technology to the classroom. This context sets up other challenges in terms of the movement of students within the classroom, like people who may have somewhat unpredictable movements. One of the things with technology, and particularly working with audio equipment as we do at VibraFusion, is that the basis of the vibratactile is all the wiring and tabling that goes along with that.
We have a prototype now of a wireless pillow which we’re hoping we can start producing later this fall, and that would then free up a student’s movement. For instance, they could move around the classroom freely without limitations of the cabling. So, I think that’s going to be a real exciting solution for those kinds of situations.
But also, we’ve got people waiting now in performance and theatre for the wireless pillows to come out. With these wireless systems, we could actually have a multitude of the pillows in a theatre, or even with the performers on stage moving around with the pillows and without the sort of limitations of tabling [Figure 2]. We see this as being a real step – actually, a fairly huge step – in terms of the development of this technology. There are other vibratactile systems available commercially, but they tend to be designed for the gaming industry, and people who game like really strong sound and vibration. These models are designed for pushing the low frequency of the sound production in the various games, though they’re not as suitable as one might think for the kind of work that VibraFusion Lab does.
.SO: Would this process of making technology like the wireless pillow available on the market be a commercialized project? Meaning, would that be something distributed through VibraFusion Lab, or is this a different group that would be established for that process?
DB: Right. Well, that’s a really good question because it comes up frequently. There is certainly a marketing possibility. VibraFusion Lab is going through a process right now – a kind of strategic planning – to look at how we can better anticipate and organize the future of VibraFusion Lab and, hopefully, alleviate some of the time and energy that I put into it. But one of the things that we’re looking at is areas of education and health.
One fellow that was testing the vibratactile pillow was an ex-student of my wife, and he works in the emergency ward of a hospital. He said, if we had these in the emergency ward when people are already in crisis and there’s all kinds of anxiety, they would be ideal for individuals laying or waiting, to be able to hold and listen to their own favourite music or whatever, and offer a calming effect.
But, also in education, there’s a multitude of possibilities in terms of the commercialization of the pillows. That’s not an area that I know or have any personal interest in getting into, but it could be something that the Lab works with a businessperson and a developer to take the route for some of the innovative commercial technology.
SO: I have read about your close partnerhip with Jim Ruxton, and how the two of you had been wanting to develop an individualized user-specific device for theatre and viewing experiences. Is that still a project that’s ongoing, or has that been implemented? Was the vision for people to be able to expect these accessible devices available in public art spaces?
DB: It hasn’t been developed any further.
I think the thing right now is that we haven’t really found anything that comes close to the experience of the vibrotactile pillows. I think we’ve shifted back to working with the pillows. Looking at the experience and exploring other things, for instance, the texture of the covering, the type of transducers, a type of hardware device that emphasizes sound. Right now, we’re using commercial transducers, but there’s also the possibility of developing our own type of vibrotactile, designed specifically for the purposes that we have. There’s many possibilities that we can explore.
We’ve also done work with vibrotactile, so, I think that’s also something that we can push further. If you think about, for instance, someone who is bedridden. There is the possibility of taking the system that we have designed for floors, and creating some kind of fibre-tactile blanket, or something that they could lie on that they can control. I can refer to the ‘Haptic Voices’ wall. The ‘Haptic Voices’ wall came out of the COVID period because everyone was experiencing isolation, but within the Deaf and Disabled communities, it was even more extreme. The idea with the ‘Haptic Voices’ wall was to connect people globally.
To explain, it’s a ten-channel wall with ten transducers that when you lean against it, it essentially covers your entire body, and it’s designed so that you can activate the transducers independently. You can move sound around the transducers. There’s a website called ‘Haptic Voices’ that you can open and it’s designed so that you can voice into your microphone in your computer and your voice would be felt on the wall. You could be anywhere in the world on your laptop and the person that would be leaning against the wall would feel your voice.
SO: Because you address disability and the social issue of inaccessibility within the arts from the position of artists and viewers excluded in conventional practices, conversations, and public spaces – how have your projects been received by museums and galleries? As you’ve acknowledged already, the industry can be described as elitist in many ways. Have there been instances where you were surprised, good or bad, by your encounters with management at the institutions you’ve been involved with?
DB: It was a way of trying to connect people through voice. But, we also commissioned a number of composers to do work for the wall and we intend to continue doing that. That 10 channel system can be enlarged to multiple systems. like eighteen, twenty-four, thirty-six channels, and you could activate a very large floor area with that.
What we found with the wall was that it’s very successful for able-bodied people. Someone in a wheelchair would not be able to access it. So, one of the next areas of research will be to condense the scale of the wall and channel system down to something that could fit, say, on the back of a wheelchair, so that you could actually activate it through a system in your wheelchair, or channel any kind of audio file into it; but it would be on your back as opposed to thinking about the whole body. It’s adapting existing ideas to be more available, more accessible.
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SO: Because you address issues of accessibility for persons with disabilities within the arts. how have your projects been received by museums and galleries?
DB: So, to go back to what we were talking about earlier, I think that the theatre community, right now is being much more proactive. I don’t know the reason why. I mean, there are certainly key theatres that are taking on a leadership role. I’ve travelled across the country from Halifax to Vancouver setting up systems in theatres. And that’s great, because then you’re actually seeing a network across the country, and, of course, once the network is there, it spreads.
I think that the other thing I should say is most of these theatres are not your high-end theatres. These are grassroots theatres. So, I think I find that really interesting – while already working, under financial challenges [they] are being creative. I really applaud these sort of grassroots theatres that are setting these kinds of precedents. I’ve had communications with Stratford and with Harbourfront and there always seems to be an excuse.
SO: Do you care to elaborate?
DB: They’re a different structure, there’s so much bureaucracy within these theatres that it seems impossible. You can speak with someone in their accessibility committee or advisory group, but it doesn’t go any further. That’s [what’s] happening.
Galleries, museums, I don’t think they know what to do. I mean, everybody knows that they have to become more inclusive and the funding is there, but I think they just don’t know where to start. I think the answer is to do a little bit of research. Find out who’s taking on these leadership roles within the Deaf and Disabled community, bring them in, make them part of the conversation, [and] give them some responsibility within the institution. It’s [about] going directly to the source, and that’s not happening on a large scale by any means. I noticed that, say, the AGO in Toronto is showing some obvious efforts – they have an exhibition there right now of women artists throughout the ages: Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400-1800, and there’s a smell factor within that exhibition. So, it is happening.
I have had conversations with curators. One larger gallery within Ontario is the Art Gallery of Windsor, I’ve been working with, AWE [Art Windsor-Essex], and they’ve integrated vibrotactile pillows into one of their previous exhibitions. We’re working, right now, with an Indigenous artist from Toronto and collaborating on an exhibition next year. I think it’s going to be a slower process with the larger institutions. But, I’m hopeful, that I will say.
I will add one other thing: right now, we work with a small organization in Hamilton, Ontario, called Centre [3]. They have a new director, Yvonne Felix, and they’re a blind, artist-director, and we’ve just put in a proposal to the Canada Council for the Arts to work on a beacon system for galleries which would be for anyone, say, blind or disabled, and they can download an app and through this beacon system, access information on the exhibition, interviews with the artist – just a whole range of information that is maybe not currently available. We’ll see where that goes. It’s a process.
SO: In a previous installation you contributed to the ‘After School Project’ in Peterborough, and in the recent collaborative exhibition at the AWE, ‘Love Language’ [Figure 4], both appear to be language-based transductions of sound. You have mentioned that you’ve observed a difference between contexts like theatre taking more leadership than say that galleries have. Do you notice a difference in the process of working with collaborators and the reception of installations by audiences and management in terms of language-centered interpretations versus performance-centered projects?
DB: That’s a very insightful question.
Well, obviously, the way I work in my own studio and the way we work in the VibraFusion Lab space is different, very different. Working in the Lab with people and in performance spaces, there are both limitations and opportunities specific to that genre or that space. Also, we’re often working from their direction. So, in that case, we’re sort of a facilitator – responding to their goals, their ideas, their dreams about what something might be – and we try to facilitate that. As for working on my own, it’s a very different process. I think, first of all, depending on whether I know where the work that I’m doing is going, if it has a certain kind of situation, or an environment that’s specific, then I might address that in the work, or it might influence the development of the work.
For me, communication is a key to what I do. It’s why I’m interested in vibration, because I think vibration carries information. To me, I refer to it as a language in itself. Language communication, in whatever format, is how I work, how I find ways of connecting with the audience. Using oral languages carries information, so, it’s easy to communicate through that format, but, say, through sound or vibration, I might have an intent, but it may not be interpreted exactly that way by the audience. I like to leave things open for interpretation and in that sense, I bring the audience into play and give them an opportunity to have some sort of interpretation from their own experiences. The audience brings something to the work, right? And, if you can somewhere connect in that space in between, on some level, that’s what’s important to me.
The other thing that I think is something that’s important to mention, is something called “Access Aesthetic”. We talk about in it the Crip Community. I don’t know if you’ve come across the word “crip” or “cripping”.
SO: Yes, I would like to hear your definition and understanding of ‘cripping.’
DB: I’ll talk about that briefly. That terminology evolved out of the UK, and the whole Deaf and Disability Arts movement there, which happened about 35 years ago, and it was a very political movement. In many ways, the UK has been at the forefront of the Deaf and Disability Arts movement. In Canada, it has occurred more recently in the last, say, 10 years. But the movement, and on an individual basis, is based on the social model of disability as opposed to the medical model. It’s really turning the whole perspective of disability upside down. And it’s about celebrating the disability. So, ‘cripple’, which was used as a derogatory term, has been chosen to take and turn it on its head. ‘Crip’ and ‘cripping’ means to celebrate.“Cripping the Arts” is about making the arts about Disability, about Deafness, about whatever those sort of characteristics are and celebrating them.
‘Access aesthetics’ is about making art accessible, whether it’s through technology or whatever means, If you’re setting out to make work that is, as much as possible, available to everyone, then the access element has to be there from the start. It’s not an add on. By it being part of the process, it actually affects the end product. The end product now becomes something that is, in a lot of ways, outside of the realm of mainstream. Right? It’s evolved as a result of the process of accessibility within the work. That’s what access aesthetics is.
And, to get back to your question, when I’m working on something, the idea of access is inherent in the development of the work. Therefore, the work is not necessarily dictated by that, but it’s influenced by that. There’s another quote that’s used from a UK artist, Yinka Shonibare, and that is, “Disability Arts can be seen as the last avant garde movement.”
SO: I want to separate you from VibraFusion Lab for a bit. I have come across how you and Leslie Putnam established “O’Honey Collective“. I was hoping that you could explain how this initiative came about, since it seems like a recent effort. It also seems very different from what you do with most of your VibraFusion and solo projects, but it connects to how you have expressed your interest in nature translated to sound.
DB: We’re here in Savannah, Georgia, on residency right now as O’ Honey, and we’ve done several projects.
O’ Honey is about studying our surroundings, the natural environment around us and integrating the human back into nature. Really thinking about nature in its truest form and deconstructing, or disassembling, some of the things that we’ve done as humans.
Probably one of the most noteworthy projects we did was for Nuit Blanche in Toronto. We made a nest made out of willow, and it was about eight or ten feet in diameter, quite a large nest, and we placed it in a room in the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. We were integrating nature into this very familiar location in Toronto. And we set up a webcam to document what was going on in the room, and we sat out in the lobby, watching a monitor that was live streaming the activities in the room.
We were sort of like documenters, we were writing down what we saw. That took place from about seven o’clock at night, until seven o’clock the next morning. There was a sound element to it, too – when you’re sitting there, you were listening to Leslie and I talking about moving furniture around, designing a room. So, people were listening to this when they were sitting in the [willow] nest. It was a take on how people put webcams by eagle’s nests and watch them – it was kind of reversing that role.
That project is probably a good example of what we do. What we’re doing here in Savannah is, we’ve got two large canvas hangings that we’re referring to as ‘site maps’. We’ve sort of layered images of contemporary and historical mappings by sewing and drawing various media onto the surface of the canvas, and we’re doing sound recordings around the community of Savannah. We’re putting locations on these maps with transducers and sound, so that through a system of touch boards, the audience can activate these different sounds and feel them on the surface of the map. So, again, it’s about, location. I mean, Savannah historically is layered with all kinds of complex issues. This was one of the major centres of slave trade, and you still see evidence of disparity now. And then, of course, there’s the whole North-South [politics], which still seems to be quite prevalent. The project is layering these mappings to give them these filters through history, and if you spend time with them, you can go through the storyline that we’ve created in these two site maps.
SO: David, I want to thank you for spending time with me. What you are doing is elaborate and outside the mainstream. I appreciate that you are able to articulate what you are doing and explain it. I have one other question. Since you are a ground breaker and kind of a leader in the field of accessibility art, I am wondering if you have witnessed any new challenges in recent years with the work of accessibility, specifically to the Disability Arts community? Or, would you say that the contributions being made by artists are expanding things for the better?
DB: Yeah, well, there’s a lot to that question, for sure.
I guess one way of answering that would be that everything in the future will be a surprise. We have no way of anticipating who we might be working with or what they might bring in the way of new ideas, new challenges, new directions, in terms of practice – so, that’s one thing.
You know, I worked as a practicing artist intensely, except for about ten years when I was very involved in raising my kids when they were much younger. And, I didn’t really feel I had a place as an artist until I started working within the Deaf and Disability Arts community. I have a hearing loss myself and I have some other invisible disabilities, as do many people, but what I found was that within this community, I could, in some respect, be more myself, and actually acknowledge that these were things that were, would, did, and do still influence the way I work. I always refer to it as finding a family, and others within the community express much the same. It’s a community that already understands and accepts who you are and what you bring. I think that in itself has been a huge factor in my development as an artist.
Generally, in terms of the Deaf and Disability Arts movement in Canada right now, we have a window of opportunity to continue to create something exciting and new. But, I’m fearful of that window closing through political agendas, which may be on the horizon, that are not necessarily supportive of people in minority. I’m fearful of that, but I think there is already a resilience within the community based on their disabilities, they’ve had to be resilient. So, I think the movement will find a way. The good thing that has happened is that through funding, there’s silos all over the place in Canada, and some of those silos and disparate areas of activity have made connections in partnerships. I think that is the more affirmative outlook for me.
In terms of my own work, I’m hoping to make more time available. I mean, I’m still processing the death of my daughter, so, I think that something around that will come out in my work. When we have a void, there is an opportunity to express yourself and I think the important thing is to find that void and a supportive community. I think that I’m really looking forward to my time in the studio going forward.
Sarah Oakley is a recent undergraduate in sociocultural anthropology from Western University. Residing in London, Ontario, writing for the local visual arts community has encouraged her to seek a career in museum and heritage work. Sarah is currently pursuing distanced post-grad studies in Cultural Resource Management at the University of Victoria while working in the heritage industry.
Art Review by Sarah Oakley
July 21, 2024
“Vibration is the Foundation of Life”: David Bobier and Accessibility in the Arts
Recently I interviewed London, Ontario, media installation artist, David Bobier, via Zoom. At the time of the interview in late-June, Bobier was between two artistic engagements, one in Savannah, Georgia, USA, where he was in the process of completing the 4-week Residency, ON:View, at Sulfur Studios by ARTS Southeast, with partner, Leslie Putnam, and the other in Chicago, Voices Embodied: Reverberations, at the Design Museum of Chicago, which is a project featuring eighteen artists showcasing their work related to disability and the importance of societal inclusivity. These are just two events that have made up Bobier’s busy exhibition and presentation schedule over the past few years, which to date have recently included exhibitions and workshops across Canada, the United States and in various countries in Europe.
In my interview with Bobier, he talked candidly about his intentions and artistic practice that strongly centre around increasing accessibility in the arts within the Deaf and Disability community. We hear how Bobier, through innovative uses of multi-sensory, vibrotactile technologies, pushes beyond the limitations of the normal gallery experience as he encouraging us to focus on the language of vibration that he understands as “the foundation of life”. Our conversation explores such topics as the necessity for accessibility in the art world, Bobier’s current work outside of his role as Director at VibraFusionLab, and his thoughts on the Disability Arts Movement currently happening in Canada. In this movement, Bobier is a formative player as he continues to effect change in the way disability is viewed and represented, acknowledging the diverse lived experiences of artists and viewers that confound elitist perceptions of artistic works and spaces.
VibraFusionLab is a centre that Bobier started in London, Ontario 12 years ago, and is “an innovative centre for arts-based vibrotactile research and creative practices,” which promotes and encourages the creation of accessible art forms and inclusive technologies for the deaf, blind, disabled and hearing communities, and for a more inclusive experience of those audiences.
Interview between Sarah Oakley (SO) and David Bobier (DB)
SO: So, looking back at your early work, your formal education was in printmaking and lithography. Your practice now involves technological innovation, installation, and the motivation to increase accessibility within the arts, it seems that printmaking has been abandoned. Your first major exhibition, ‘Signing On: Adopting a Cultural Perspective’, in 1995, represents a point in your career when your direction toward producing installation works related to Deafness and disability became established. Can you talk about that transition in your practice and artistic intentions, and have you integrated printmaking into what you do now in any way?
DB: I had no insight into the direction that I was going to go with my work, but I think it was a slow process from working on flat surfaces and becoming frustrated with [that]. I mean, printmaking is a very tactile process, so I really enjoyed that. But, I think it was the fact that I needed to work spatially and it wasn’t allowing me to do that. It was really when I was doing my graduate work at Windsor that I started to break free of, what I felt, were restrictions within printmaking. I think, too, there had been influences from some of the other students and professors that I was working with at Windsor.
Also, I think the fact that Windsor is a very industrial centre. There was an abundance of materials to work with. I was kind of hungry to have an interactive involvement with my work and interested in the role that the audience could play in the activation of the work, rather than being bystanders, or the way the work could allow the audience or participant to play some role in the end experience. So, I was creating works that people could move and change control, beyond my control.
It was really about extending the work and the possibilities of the work, beyond my own limitations, or the kinds of limitations I put on the work at the time. I do think that work in the graphic arts certainly has influenced the way that my sculptural works evolved. I think there’s still a very strong formal graphic quality to them, or at least I see that. So, I think that played a part in a lot of the work that I do now and]the way it’s presented. I think that there is a precision to printmaking that I bring to a lot of my own work that I do now.
SO: There have been some recent projects that you’ve been a part of, for example, ‘Je ne dais pas inonder la mer’ at the MAI Theatre in Montreal (2024), and the international production, ‘Scored in Silence’, brought to Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto (2022). Did that connection between movement/performance art and the technology of sound transduction come naturally; or, was that sort of an intentional decision and path to take?
DB: So, I guess to answer that I have to go back to the formation of VibraFusionLab, which started 12 years or so, ago. In a lot of ways, it’s really hard to separate me from VibraFusionLab. We’re sort of one of the same. To get into the areas of dance and theatre performance was, I guess, to some extent, a kind of natural progression of VibraFusionLab. It was not intentional. I think it came about from others in those fields reaching out to to us at VibraFusionaLb to explore ways of expanding their practice – and accessibility has become a much more familiar intention. I think people are realizing that it is a necessity in the arts now. It’s been pretty much ignored because of the kind of elitist aspects of the arts, until more recently, with the justice and disability voices coming to the forefront and there’s actually an opportunity for them to have this stage.
It’s been an evolution in terms of the projects that we get involved in. But, I think if I look back at VibraFusionLab, it sort of was founded on two principles: one was to provide opportunities for artists from the Deaf and Disabled community; and, the other to support them in being creative through whatever sort of technological means we have; but also to think about audience and greater accessibility to the arts through, again, technology.
In both cases, artists or audience, I pose a question, “Who’s missing?”, and it’s very evident who’s missing. We try to address those questions by finding ways of resolving and providing access.
There are more and more theatres with artists from the Deaf and Disabled community who are working in performance – we’ve been working in burlesque and circus art, so it’s really expanded our reach and our capacity in responding to the needs of those people we’re working with. There’s no generic solution or generic device or system. Every project, every individual we work with, challenges us to find ways of supporting them and their own particular ways of working, addressing their limitations, and reinforcing their capabilities.
More recently, the last year or so, I’ve been working with the condition of synaesthesia. One project I was working on in Montreal was with an artist with multiple synaesthesia. Someone explains a word and they see a colour. I can appreciate there’s obviously a brain function going on that I don’t understand. But this synesthetic artist went on to describe multiple synaesthesia, and his whole world is sort of made up of these synesthetic conditions. We’re going to probably be working with him more. aside from the project in Montreal. In his work, in that particular project, he was employing a lot of projection, different kinds of light projections – colour, text, a range of visible qualities in projection. He’s interested in, somehow or other, experiencing some of those conditions as vibration. It’s kind of like what VibraFusionLab does in terms of experimenting with sound and as sound being something other than just sound, as vibration, or as something that’s visual – we do a lot of work in what’s called sound visualization and that’s trying to interpret sound through a visual. But for him, it’s taking some of these experiences that he has and shifting them into another sensory experience. To me, that sounds quite remarkable and challenging, but challenging in the sense of exciting. You never know when you’re starting out, how this is going to turn out and what the end result is going to be. I find the whole process so interesting.
We started working with a tap dancer, Travis Knights. He is originally from Montreal, but is in the Toronto area now. We did work with him on a show in Montreal: ephemeral artefacts: travis knights. He wants to work further with us.. Of course, when you think about tap dance, it’s all about percussion. Any kind of percussive sound translates amazingly well as vibration. You really get to feel that. It’s almost being like the board that he taps on; you’re feeling that, and when you translate that onto your body, it’s quite an amazing experience.
You’re moving your body and you are feeling the vibration when you’re the one tap dancing, so if the audience could also experience that, you’re much more integrated into the actual performance. I think a physical experience, in some ways, is more profound than a visual experience for an auditory experience. It becomes, somehow or other, more internalized.
SO: Have instances of collaboration beyond working with practicing artists, such as educational opportunities, been a part in your practice?
DB: Yes, we tested some of our vibratactile pillows for students from a school board in the Bruce Peninsula in their special education program and we’re still in a process of finding the best solution and adapting the technology to the classroom. This context sets up other challenges in terms of the movement of students within the classroom, like people who may have somewhat unpredictable movements. One of the things with technology, and particularly working with audio equipment as we do at VibraFusion, is that the basis of the vibratactile is all the wiring and tabling that goes along with that.
We have a prototype now of a wireless pillow which we’re hoping we can start producing later this fall, and that would then free up a student’s movement. For instance, they could move around the classroom freely without limitations of the cabling. So, I think that’s going to be a real exciting solution for those kinds of situations.
But also, we’ve got people waiting now in performance and theatre for the wireless pillows to come out. With these wireless systems, we could actually have a multitude of the pillows in a theatre, or even with the performers on stage moving around with the pillows and without the sort of limitations of tabling [Figure 2]. We see this as being a real step – actually, a fairly huge step – in terms of the development of this technology. There are other vibratactile systems available commercially, but they tend to be designed for the gaming industry, and people who game like really strong sound and vibration. These models are designed for pushing the low frequency of the sound production in the various games, though they’re not as suitable as one might think for the kind of work that VibraFusion Lab does.
.SO: Would this process of making technology like the wireless pillow available on the market be a commercialized project? Meaning, would that be something distributed through VibraFusion Lab, or is this a different group that would be established for that process?
DB: Right. Well, that’s a really good question because it comes up frequently. There is certainly a marketing possibility. VibraFusion Lab is going through a process right now – a kind of strategic planning – to look at how we can better anticipate and organize the future of VibraFusion Lab and, hopefully, alleviate some of the time and energy that I put into it. But one of the things that we’re looking at is areas of education and health.
One fellow that was testing the vibratactile pillow was an ex-student of my wife, and he works in the emergency ward of a hospital. He said, if we had these in the emergency ward when people are already in crisis and there’s all kinds of anxiety, they would be ideal for individuals laying or waiting, to be able to hold and listen to their own favourite music or whatever, and offer a calming effect.
But, also in education, there’s a multitude of possibilities in terms of the commercialization of the pillows. That’s not an area that I know or have any personal interest in getting into, but it could be something that the Lab works with a businessperson and a developer to take the route for some of the innovative commercial technology.
SO: I have read about your close partnerhip with Jim Ruxton, and how the two of you had been wanting to develop an individualized user-specific device for theatre and viewing experiences. Is that still a project that’s ongoing, or has that been implemented? Was the vision for people to be able to expect these accessible devices available in public art spaces?
DB: It hasn’t been developed any further.
I think the thing right now is that we haven’t really found anything that comes close to the experience of the vibrotactile pillows. I think we’ve shifted back to working with the pillows. Looking at the experience and exploring other things, for instance, the texture of the covering, the type of transducers, a type of hardware device that emphasizes sound. Right now, we’re using commercial transducers, but there’s also the possibility of developing our own type of vibrotactile, designed specifically for the purposes that we have. There’s many possibilities that we can explore.
We’ve also done work with vibrotactile, so, I think that’s also something that we can push further. If you think about, for instance, someone who is bedridden. There is the possibility of taking the system that we have designed for floors, and creating some kind of fibre-tactile blanket, or something that they could lie on that they can control. I can refer to the ‘Haptic Voices’ wall. The ‘Haptic Voices’ wall came out of the COVID period because everyone was experiencing isolation, but within the Deaf and Disabled communities, it was even more extreme. The idea with the ‘Haptic Voices’ wall was to connect people globally.
To explain, it’s a ten-channel wall with ten transducers that when you lean against it, it essentially covers your entire body, and it’s designed so that you can activate the transducers independently. You can move sound around the transducers. There’s a website called ‘Haptic Voices’ that you can open and it’s designed so that you can voice into your microphone in your computer and your voice would be felt on the wall. You could be anywhere in the world on your laptop and the person that would be leaning against the wall would feel your voice.
SO: Because you address disability and the social issue of inaccessibility within the arts from the position of artists and viewers excluded in conventional practices, conversations, and public spaces – how have your projects been received by museums and galleries? As you’ve acknowledged already, the industry can be described as elitist in many ways. Have there been instances where you were surprised, good or bad, by your encounters with management at the institutions you’ve been involved with?
DB: It was a way of trying to connect people through voice. But, we also commissioned a number of composers to do work for the wall and we intend to continue doing that. That 10 channel system can be enlarged to multiple systems. like eighteen, twenty-four, thirty-six channels, and you could activate a very large floor area with that.
What we found with the wall was that it’s very successful for able-bodied people. Someone in a wheelchair would not be able to access it. So, one of the next areas of research will be to condense the scale of the wall and channel system down to something that could fit, say, on the back of a wheelchair, so that you could actually activate it through a system in your wheelchair, or channel any kind of audio file into it; but it would be on your back as opposed to thinking about the whole body. It’s adapting existing ideas to be more available, more accessible.
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SO: Because you address issues of accessibility for persons with disabilities within the arts. how have your projects been received by museums and galleries?
DB: So, to go back to what we were talking about earlier, I think that the theatre community, right now is being much more proactive. I don’t know the reason why. I mean, there are certainly key theatres that are taking on a leadership role. I’ve travelled across the country from Halifax to Vancouver setting up systems in theatres. And that’s great, because then you’re actually seeing a network across the country, and, of course, once the network is there, it spreads.
I think that the other thing I should say is most of these theatres are not your high-end theatres. These are grassroots theatres. So, I think I find that really interesting – while already working, under financial challenges [they] are being creative. I really applaud these sort of grassroots theatres that are setting these kinds of precedents. I’ve had communications with Stratford and with Harbourfront and there always seems to be an excuse.
SO: Do you care to elaborate?
DB: They’re a different structure, there’s so much bureaucracy within these theatres that it seems impossible. You can speak with someone in their accessibility committee or advisory group, but it doesn’t go any further. That’s [what’s] happening.
Galleries, museums, I don’t think they know what to do. I mean, everybody knows that they have to become more inclusive and the funding is there, but I think they just don’t know where to start. I think the answer is to do a little bit of research. Find out who’s taking on these leadership roles within the Deaf and Disabled community, bring them in, make them part of the conversation, [and] give them some responsibility within the institution. It’s [about] going directly to the source, and that’s not happening on a large scale by any means. I noticed that, say, the AGO in Toronto is showing some obvious efforts – they have an exhibition there right now of women artists throughout the ages: Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400-1800, and there’s a smell factor within that exhibition. So, it is happening.
I have had conversations with curators. One larger gallery within Ontario is the Art Gallery of Windsor, I’ve been working with, AWE [Art Windsor-Essex], and they’ve integrated vibrotactile pillows into one of their previous exhibitions. We’re working, right now, with an Indigenous artist from Toronto and collaborating on an exhibition next year. I think it’s going to be a slower process with the larger institutions. But, I’m hopeful, that I will say.
I will add one other thing: right now, we work with a small organization in Hamilton, Ontario, called Centre [3]. They have a new director, Yvonne Felix, and they’re a blind, artist-director, and we’ve just put in a proposal to the Canada Council for the Arts to work on a beacon system for galleries which would be for anyone, say, blind or disabled, and they can download an app and through this beacon system, access information on the exhibition, interviews with the artist – just a whole range of information that is maybe not currently available. We’ll see where that goes. It’s a process.
SO: In a previous installation you contributed to the ‘After School Project’ in Peterborough, and in the recent collaborative exhibition at the AWE, ‘Love Language’ [Figure 4], both appear to be language-based transductions of sound. You have mentioned that you’ve observed a difference between contexts like theatre taking more leadership than say that galleries have. Do you notice a difference in the process of working with collaborators and the reception of installations by audiences and management in terms of language-centered interpretations versus performance-centered projects?
DB: That’s a very insightful question.
Well, obviously, the way I work in my own studio and the way we work in the VibraFusion Lab space is different, very different. Working in the Lab with people and in performance spaces, there are both limitations and opportunities specific to that genre or that space. Also, we’re often working from their direction. So, in that case, we’re sort of a facilitator – responding to their goals, their ideas, their dreams about what something might be – and we try to facilitate that. As for working on my own, it’s a very different process. I think, first of all, depending on whether I know where the work that I’m doing is going, if it has a certain kind of situation, or an environment that’s specific, then I might address that in the work, or it might influence the development of the work.
For me, communication is a key to what I do. It’s why I’m interested in vibration, because I think vibration carries information. To me, I refer to it as a language in itself. Language communication, in whatever format, is how I work, how I find ways of connecting with the audience. Using oral languages carries information, so, it’s easy to communicate through that format, but, say, through sound or vibration, I might have an intent, but it may not be interpreted exactly that way by the audience. I like to leave things open for interpretation and in that sense, I bring the audience into play and give them an opportunity to have some sort of interpretation from their own experiences. The audience brings something to the work, right? And, if you can somewhere connect in that space in between, on some level, that’s what’s important to me.
The other thing that I think is something that’s important to mention, is something called “Access Aesthetic”. We talk about in it the Crip Community. I don’t know if you’ve come across the word “crip” or “cripping”.
SO: Yes, I would like to hear your definition and understanding of ‘cripping.’
DB: I’ll talk about that briefly. That terminology evolved out of the UK, and the whole Deaf and Disability Arts movement there, which happened about 35 years ago, and it was a very political movement. In many ways, the UK has been at the forefront of the Deaf and Disability Arts movement. In Canada, it has occurred more recently in the last, say, 10 years. But the movement, and on an individual basis, is based on the social model of disability as opposed to the medical model. It’s really turning the whole perspective of disability upside down. And it’s about celebrating the disability. So, ‘cripple’, which was used as a derogatory term, has been chosen to take and turn it on its head. ‘Crip’ and ‘cripping’ means to celebrate.“Cripping the Arts” is about making the arts about Disability, about Deafness, about whatever those sort of characteristics are and celebrating them.
‘Access aesthetics’ is about making art accessible, whether it’s through technology or whatever means, If you’re setting out to make work that is, as much as possible, available to everyone, then the access element has to be there from the start. It’s not an add on. By it being part of the process, it actually affects the end product. The end product now becomes something that is, in a lot of ways, outside of the realm of mainstream. Right? It’s evolved as a result of the process of accessibility within the work. That’s what access aesthetics is.
And, to get back to your question, when I’m working on something, the idea of access is inherent in the development of the work. Therefore, the work is not necessarily dictated by that, but it’s influenced by that. There’s another quote that’s used from a UK artist, Yinka Shonibare, and that is, “Disability Arts can be seen as the last avant garde movement.”
SO: I want to separate you from VibraFusion Lab for a bit. I have come across how you and Leslie Putnam established “O’Honey Collective“. I was hoping that you could explain how this initiative came about, since it seems like a recent effort. It also seems very different from what you do with most of your VibraFusion and solo projects, but it connects to how you have expressed your interest in nature translated to sound.
DB: We’re here in Savannah, Georgia, on residency right now as O’ Honey, and we’ve done several projects.
O’ Honey is about studying our surroundings, the natural environment around us and integrating the human back into nature. Really thinking about nature in its truest form and deconstructing, or disassembling, some of the things that we’ve done as humans.
Probably one of the most noteworthy projects we did was for Nuit Blanche in Toronto. We made a nest made out of willow, and it was about eight or ten feet in diameter, quite a large nest, and we placed it in a room in the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. We were integrating nature into this very familiar location in Toronto. And we set up a webcam to document what was going on in the room, and we sat out in the lobby, watching a monitor that was live streaming the activities in the room.
We were sort of like documenters, we were writing down what we saw. That took place from about seven o’clock at night, until seven o’clock the next morning. There was a sound element to it, too – when you’re sitting there, you were listening to Leslie and I talking about moving furniture around, designing a room. So, people were listening to this when they were sitting in the [willow] nest. It was a take on how people put webcams by eagle’s nests and watch them – it was kind of reversing that role.
That project is probably a good example of what we do. What we’re doing here in Savannah is, we’ve got two large canvas hangings that we’re referring to as ‘site maps’. We’ve sort of layered images of contemporary and historical mappings by sewing and drawing various media onto the surface of the canvas, and we’re doing sound recordings around the community of Savannah. We’re putting locations on these maps with transducers and sound, so that through a system of touch boards, the audience can activate these different sounds and feel them on the surface of the map. So, again, it’s about, location. I mean, Savannah historically is layered with all kinds of complex issues. This was one of the major centres of slave trade, and you still see evidence of disparity now. And then, of course, there’s the whole North-South [politics], which still seems to be quite prevalent. The project is layering these mappings to give them these filters through history, and if you spend time with them, you can go through the storyline that we’ve created in these two site maps.
SO: David, I want to thank you for spending time with me. What you are doing is elaborate and outside the mainstream. I appreciate that you are able to articulate what you are doing and explain it. I have one other question. Since you are a ground breaker and kind of a leader in the field of accessibility art, I am wondering if you have witnessed any new challenges in recent years with the work of accessibility, specifically to the Disability Arts community? Or, would you say that the contributions being made by artists are expanding things for the better?
DB: Yeah, well, there’s a lot to that question, for sure.
I guess one way of answering that would be that everything in the future will be a surprise. We have no way of anticipating who we might be working with or what they might bring in the way of new ideas, new challenges, new directions, in terms of practice – so, that’s one thing.
You know, I worked as a practicing artist intensely, except for about ten years when I was very involved in raising my kids when they were much younger. And, I didn’t really feel I had a place as an artist until I started working within the Deaf and Disability Arts community. I have a hearing loss myself and I have some other invisible disabilities, as do many people, but what I found was that within this community, I could, in some respect, be more myself, and actually acknowledge that these were things that were, would, did, and do still influence the way I work. I always refer to it as finding a family, and others within the community express much the same. It’s a community that already understands and accepts who you are and what you bring. I think that in itself has been a huge factor in my development as an artist.
Generally, in terms of the Deaf and Disability Arts movement in Canada right now, we have a window of opportunity to continue to create something exciting and new. But, I’m fearful of that window closing through political agendas, which may be on the horizon, that are not necessarily supportive of people in minority. I’m fearful of that, but I think there is already a resilience within the community based on their disabilities, they’ve had to be resilient. So, I think the movement will find a way. The good thing that has happened is that through funding, there’s silos all over the place in Canada, and some of those silos and disparate areas of activity have made connections in partnerships. I think that is the more affirmative outlook for me.
In terms of my own work, I’m hoping to make more time available. I mean, I’m still processing the death of my daughter, so, I think that something around that will come out in my work. When we have a void, there is an opportunity to express yourself and I think the important thing is to find that void and a supportive community. I think that I’m really looking forward to my time in the studio going forward.
Sarah Oakley is a recent undergraduate in sociocultural anthropology from Western University. Residing in London, Ontario, writing for the local visual arts community has encouraged her to seek a career in museum and heritage work. Sarah is currently pursuing distanced post-grad studies in Cultural Resource Management at the University of Victoria while working in the heritage industry.
canadianart
Circular Logics
A national survey of artists who build worlds beyond the visible
by Megan MacLaurin
David Bobier, Transcommunicator I & II (detail), 2019–20. Found objects, programmable music boxes, paper scrolls, LED lights, tripods, wireless audio system, tactile transducers, wood and steel brackets, dimensions variable. Photo: Julia Salles.
David Bobier is an artist and the founder of VibraFusionLab, a media arts centre in London, Ontario, dedicated to supporting multisensory and inclusive arts practices for Deaf, blind, disabled and hearing artists and audiences. Bobier and his lab focus largely on vibrotactile arts, a practice that uses transducers, devices that are “similar to the core of a speaker, but they’ve been modified to enhance the vibration of the frequency of the sound.” As Bobier explains, “All frequency that is within a lower frequency range can be experienced as tactile.” The artist started working with vibration in the 1990s, when he adopted two Deaf children. “I did a lot of studio work in that period exploring the disparity between hearing culture and Deaf culture.” By using vibration as both a medium and a language, Bobier creates interactive and wearable artworks that can enliven our sense of touch. He often works with other artists to add vibrotactile elements to their projects as well: “I’m big into collaboration and developing partnerships. And those partnerships tend to create networks.” Bobier sees growing support around the multisensory arts in galleries and museums today, though he feels we are still in the early days of this alternative practice. He is hopeful about what this means for Deaf and disabled artists who have historically been marginalized by art institutions. “In my own work and at VibraFusionLab, I always look at who is in the audience and who isn’t. The ones who aren’t in the audience are the ones whom we need to be talking to--giving them authority on what happens next and having them direct us on where we need to go.”
David Bobier is an artist and the founder of VibraFusionLab, a media arts centre in London, Ontario, dedicated to supporting multisensory and inclusive arts practices for Deaf, blind, disabled and hearing artists and audiences. Bobier and his lab focus largely on vibrotactile arts, a practice that uses transducers, devices that are “similar to the core of a speaker, but they’ve been modified to enhance the vibration of the frequency of the sound.” As Bobier explains, “All frequency that is within a lower frequency range can be experienced as tactile.” The artist started working with vibration in the 1990s, when he adopted two Deaf children. “I did a lot of studio work in that period exploring the disparity between hearing culture and Deaf culture.” By using vibration as both a medium and a language, Bobier creates interactive and wearable artworks that can enliven our sense of touch. He often works with other artists to add vibrotactile elements to their projects as well: “I’m big into collaboration and developing partnerships. And those partnerships tend to create networks.” Bobier sees growing support around the multisensory arts in galleries and museums today, though he feels we are still in the early days of this alternative practice. He is hopeful about what this means for Deaf and disabled artists who have historically been marginalized by art institutions. “In my own work and at VibraFusionLab, I always look at who is in the audience and who isn’t. The ones who aren’t in the audience are the ones whom we need to be talking to--giving them authority on what happens next and having them direct us on where we need to go.”
Medium
How Can Art Reach Out and Touch Us?
A primer on haptic tech innovation and new possibilities for access in dance — from dancer, choreographer and product designer
Laurel Lawson
I. “Disability is an art.” — Neil Marcus
The history of dance and disability is fraught.
I refer to disability here as an identity, as personal and political practice. This is divorced from the medical model, which uses disability as a means-tested umbrella term for impairment, and from the social model, which examines the systemic and neglects the personal.
There have always been disabled artists, but a climate that views disability as critical context rather than debilitation has been until recently almost nonexistent. In the United States, small pockets of artists have sprung up more or less concurrent with our disability civil rights movement, often loosely united by shared access needs. The trend of recognizing disability as culture and practice is relatively new and institutions are struggling with the related but different concepts of access, equity and justice.
Community is one source of our strength. Often difficult, the work of uniting across varied bodyminds calls for a practice of de-centering: the conscious awareness that our way of being and sensing is not the only way, and that there is no best way. Disability is an identity which encompasses us however differently we exist in the world. We know that there is no such thing as normal: there is no justification to prioritize the way one person moves or communicates above another. Justice requires a shared commitment to bridging our radically different ways of being.
The multiple and varied experiences of disability offer fertile ground for artistry. What can we create when we decenter our individual, inherently limited preferences? What might we choreograph when we value each new embodiment that enters the room? The experience of difference and multiplicity of em(mind)bodiment is largely unique to disabled people; thus we claim the artistic fruits of infinite variety.
II. Reach out and touch someone
Experiencing performance visually is embedded in English. We go “see a show.” We sit at a remove and watch performers onstage. We are comfortable in the clarity of our respective roles and social scripts. And yet, there is tension between the passivity of viewing and artists’ goals of communication and interaction. Great art should change everyone involved.
Dance communicates primarily through movement: both large, like thrilling lifts or dramatic falls, and small, like the emotional nuance of the turn of a head or crook of a finger. Dancers train for thousands of hours to accurately communicate through this language of the body — and then we further augment the performer’s body with various technologies which create immersive and spectacular effects. Examples include wearable technologies such as the ballet dancer’s pointe shoe or aerialist’s unitard and environmental technologies such as lighting and projection, music and sound effects. Do these seem, well, low-tech? Behind the scenes, they are controlled by carefully programmed software cues and hardware ranging from a single laptop to racks of servers backstage. The hour or two we enjoy is the tip of an infrastructural iceberg.
And still, these widely used technologies cater to only two channels of perception: vision and hearing. Critics of ocularcentrism remind us that vision is our perception of reflected light; it separates the perception of a thing from the thing itself, creating objectification. There is safety in this perceptual, physical and psychological distance. Dance is a kinaesthetic art, transmitted most directly through taking on movement. To decrease separation we should turn to another sense: touch.
Two couples: one pair compassionate and softly embracing, one pair confrontational and polarized. Two nondisabled dancers straddle the laps of two wheelchair users. Gazes are intent and colors are spare and stark. Touch (2013), chor. Douglas Scott, Full Radius Dance. Photo Neil Dent.Touch is the most universal of our senses and the most biologically necessary: we do not thrive without skin contact. Many forms of perception live in our skin, with complex and individually different sensitivities in how and where our bodies experience touch. Kinaesthesis and proprioception are the truest senses of dance: the perception of our body in relation to itself and the space around us. Touch is devastatingly intimate, a direct form of knowing; someone close enough to touch us might be a threat or a lover. How can art reach out and touch us?
III. Haptic technology
You are likely familiar with haptic feedback: it’s the tiny vibrational blip with which your phone rewards you for interaction. It’s fast, effective and goes almost unnoticed except for the quick dopamine hit. But the potential of haptic experience goes far beyond this tiny affordance. Haptic is not quite the same thing as touch: it has specifically to do with our perception of objects. We can manipulate those perceptions by changing how our skin and muscles react using vibration or electricity. We can change the shape or texture of a physical object, create objects that don’t physically exist or imagine the conversion of ideas into something you can feel.
Towards a practical approach, haptics could be imagined as the intersection of touch and sound: after all, sound is our perception of vibration in air. Just as we use technology to augment the performers’ body, we can augment our receptive capacity. If you were seated onstage, you might feel secondary effects like the vibrations of the soundtrack from the speakers, from dancers landing on the floor. How might we imagine an experience of dance that is crafted to be felt?
IV. Practical Experiments
This is where I began my own explorations. Having experienced various kinds of vibration-based therapeutics, I had direct knowledge of how precisely calibrated vibration and tiny spurts of electricity can trick mind and body into perceiving intangible objects or imaginary movements. I wanted to explore three ideas: direct interpretation of sound; translation of proprioception; and communicating complex and abstract ideas.
VibraFusionLab is based in the city of Hamilton just 45 minutes west of Toronto. Founded by hard of hearing artist David Bobier, they are among the field leaders in developing new devices to record and transmit touch-based content. I met David at a gathering of international access tech leaders, and, through the screen, his snowy beard and twinkling brown eyes gave him the look of an impish, endlessly inquisitive wizard. Vibrafusion’s projects include devices held or worn by each audience member through human-scale constructions which can play recorded content or interpret bodily movement from artist-worn devices on the fly.
A gesturing white man with white hair in a ponytail, a white moustache and goatee and dressed in dark clothes is standing in a darkened room looking slightly to his right. To the left of him in a row on the floor are four aluminum pizza pans filled with water. A transducer is attached to the underside of each pan and each transducer is wired to individual amps on a table to the right. Four individual sounds are channelled through the amps and into the transducers causing them to vibrate independently. The sound is translated through vibration as ripple patterns on the surface of the water thus presenting a way of experiencing sound as a visual experience. The individual sound compositions are from water recordings celebrating water as both the source and the medium of the installation. Photo VibrafusionLab.With Vibrafusion’s guidance, I assembled a simple implementation for Kinetic Light’s Wired (2022), an aerial meditation on barbed wire created and performed by disabled artists. Audience members hold a strand of wire which carries the show’s soundtrack interpreted into vibration. The music was vibration-ready: half of it created by a hard of hearing composer, half by a disabled composer working in layered sound and rhythm. The result was a striking and artistically communicative experience.
Kinetic Light, an intersectional disability arts company, espouses a practice of many entry points into our work. Audiences could have this haptic experience in combination with watching the stage or listening to the multi-track audio description delivered through the Audimance app. First tested in Wired’s Chicago and New York premieres, this technology proved so popular and powerful that we quickly adopted it for our other shows. And yet this only begins to touch (lightly upon) the potential of this new medium.
V. Centering disabled joy
Making art that values and centers disabled knowledge and joy means centering people with direct experience. We can find leadership in the medium of touch in DeafBlind practice. Created by and in DeafBlind community, Protactile is a language of the skin: perceived through touch, pressure and proprioception. It is distinct from tactile ASL (American Sign Language), which attempts to use touch and various forms of haptic feedback to translate visually-centered ASL to a nonvisual form. Protactile grew out of personal and cultural imperatives for direct experience, connection and communication.
Meaning never develops in a vacuum. We interpret language and art based on our cultural context, and we modulate our understanding according to the medium of our experience. Protactile and other touch-centered systems often use multiple interpreters to communicate complex meaning and rich aesthetic experiences. Small clusters of people form in space, self-organizing cells which blur the distinctions between artist, interpreter and audience. This might suggest challenges for larger audiences or smaller venues, and this is exactly where disability-centered technology can serve as a way to extend and amplify our artistic intentions. What can we reimagine when art is contextualized through touch and consensual, collaborative co-creation?
A close up of Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson suspended in the air, arms outstretched and clasping each other’s hands. Alice is a multiracial Black woman with coffee-colored skin and short curly hair; she wears a shimmery deep red costume. Laurel is a white dancer with very short cropped hair; she wears a shimmery gold costume with thick black shoulder straps. The dancers are somehow upside down and horizontal at the same time, their wheels shining and facing out; if they let go, they will swing like pendulums. Photo Robbie Sweeny/Kinetic Light.
When access is segregated from the practices of creating and experiencing art, it’s easy to fall into a worldview where access is finite and scarce. If we consider that all forms of experience are equally valid, it becomes clear that access is part of the creative process and that both artists and audiences are necessary collaborators in performance. Tactile and kinaesthetic techniques and technologies are an excitingly direct way for dance and movement artists to share work across bodies and media, whether as literal as a shared proprioceptive encounter, or as abstract as a concept vibrated through a novel artistic language which blends physical, created and extended realities.
This piece is part of Immerse’s 2023 issue centering disability innovation in documentary and emerging tech — presenting perspectives from artists, activists, scholars and technologists at the vanguard of storytelling and disability justice. You can find other featured stories and more information about the issue here.
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Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and Dot Connector Studio, and receives funding from Just Films | Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Gotham Film & Media Institute is our fiscal sponsor. Learn more here. We are committed to exploring and showcasing emerging nonfiction projects that push the boundaries of media and tackle issues of social justice — and rely on friends like you to sustain ourselves and grow. Join us by making a gift today.
READi 2022-2023
David Bobier & VibraFusionLab
- About
- Work: David Bobier & VibraFusionLab
- Approaches
- Motivations
- Emergent Themes
- Creating Accessibility in Physical Arts Spaces
- Intersectionality and Arts Space Mindsets
- Future Projects and Possibilities In Arts Accessibility
- Affinity Diagram
- Conclusion
- References
(Photo: David Bobier, an older man in a black sweater with a white ponytail and glasses, stands behind and operates one of his art installations. It is a projector that shines light through a reverse-braille film-like strip)
(Credit: vibrafusionlab.com)
About
David Bobier (he/him) self-identifies as a hard of hearing media artist with a mental health diagnosis. He is the founder and director of VibraFusionLab, “an innovative centre for arts-based, vibrotactile research and creative practice” based out of London, Ontario, Canada. His work has been featured in several exhibitions throughout Canada and internationally, with 16 solo exhibitions and over 30 group exhibitions. In addition to his artistic work, he partnered with the Toronto Metropolitan University (formally Ryerson) in their Inclusive Media and Design Centre. Bobier worked with Tactile Audio Displays Inc. in Toronto, Ontario, “researching and employing vibrotactile technology as a creative medium.” He is also the recipient of numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Grand NCE, the Ontario Arts Council and the New Brunswick Arts Council. Additionally, he has had a significant role in developing the Deaf and Disability Arts Equity programs for Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
Work: David Bobier & VibraFusionLab
David Bobier’s artistic practice is focused on vibration and tactility as a form of creative expression, language, and communication. Through multi-sensorial and experiential art, Bobier’s work examines how the vibrotactile can foster accessible and inclusive artistic landscapes for both the artists and the audience. VibraFusionLab accomplishes this by re-imagining artistic practice as well as art consumption in ways that are not limited to the visual or auditory.
This re-imagination manifests VibraFusionLab’s interactive exhibitions that often rely on various forms of audience participation or interaction with art installations. The result of this approach is an intersectional re-imagining of who can or should create art, who is supposed to experience art and through what means, and how art can be exhibited and engaged with by the public.
(Photo: Three images show a different angle of an art installation that features a small, projector-like device that is mounted on a wall, there is a feed of “negative braille film” passing through the device over a projector light. To the left of the device is a vertical, wooden model hand affixed with transducers on the fingertips.)
(Credit: David Bobier, @vibrafusionlab, Instagram)
David Bobier and VibraFusionLab’s approach is rooted in the notion that vibration is a type of language and communication. Bobier parallels language and sound, suggesting that we can experience language and sound by communicating through other means, such as vibrations, smells, and different tactile experiences.
Additionally, Bobier emphasizes the importance of audience support and participation in his approach, noting that many of his works “rely heavily on the audience to activate the work, control it, and participate in it.” Observing how audiences engage with the installations, the environment, and the overall experience can help to diversify VibraFusionLab’s approach even more.
Motivations:
One of David Bobier’s central motivations is “the misconception that Deaf people don’t have any experience or any appreciation of sound or music; people say it’s not possible; well, I convince people through vibration that it is.” Some additional motivators include his experiences with his own hearing loss, raising two Deaf kids into adulthood, becoming a part of the Deaf community, and experiencing Deaf culture; Bobier states that “sound became a real focus for me.”
_____________________
“The emotional impact of vibration has a way of communicating with people on a sensory level that we don’t fully appreciate or understand…what impact does vibration have and what information does it carry? Does it have emotion? Does it carry emotion? Can you experience emotion through vibration? Can you communicate through vibration? And to all of those questions,
I answer, yes.”
__________________
(Photo: A series of four staggered vertical photos show David Bobier setting up various interactive art installations at different exhibits) (Credit: David Bobier, @vibrafusionlab, Instagram)
Emergent Themes: Creating Accessibility in Physical Arts Spaces
Citing the social model of disability exemplified in Roy Haynes’s work (among others), the social model states that the built environment and the attitudes that are cultivated in that environment are ultimately responsible for the barriers that people face; David Bobier discusses in detail the various physical barriers within most performance venues and gallery spaces.
Bobier states that the question of an artistic space being “accessible for all” (artists, participants, employees, and audience members) is, of course, “a very large question,” he continues, “any place that supports artistic practice has different requirements and does different things. He cites some spaces he’s worked in, which include black box theatres, large theatre spaces, galleries, and museums. Bobier also highlights some practical and logistical factors in setting up vibrotactile technology in an existing space. This includes vests or belts that an audience member can easily adjust to their body and handheld systems or pillows that a person can squeeze or place on their lap. Bobier describes how most of this technology could be installed permanently in performance venues or gallery spaces quite seamlessly; this might entail the technology being available to use on-site when required or perhaps that the technology becomes a permanent part of a theatre chair, creating a more accessible art space, and ultimately a more immersive experience for all audiences.
Bobier discusses the importance of encouraging performance venues, specifically theatres, to commit to a more significant level of accessibility by installing vibrotactile technology permanently. This commitment includes ensuring that a venue’s entire tech staff is trained on how the equipment works and making them aware that the set-up, pre-performance testing, and tear-down might differ from a show without these pieces of technology.
This also means committing to more accessibility in a physical performance space to support all audience members in attendance as well as the artists and the staff, “enough parking spots for wheelchair users, doors, and floors (and vibrotactile floors in the performance space).” Bobier suggests that the smaller theatres (across Canada) will likely be the ones to take the risk and commit to accessible buildings and art spaces that house vibrotactile technology more permanently.
(Right photo: a series of three vertical photos – top: a close-up shot of the wearable vibrotactile vests, called a “Woojer,” middle: multiple folding chairs for an audience, each equipped with a Woojer vest, and bottom: David showing the vest to CBC host, Kwabena Oduro who is wearing the belt Woojer.)
(Credit: CBC News YouTube & David Bobier, @vibrafusionlab, Instagram)
Intersectionality and Arts Space Mindsets:
In addition to physical accessibility, David Bobier emphasizes the importance of an intersectional accessibility discourse. He states, “the obvious thing is physical accessibility, that’s what most people understand as accessibility, and maybe that’s another area of misconception for many people since accessibility goes far beyond that.” Bobier continues:
__________________
“When I think about an accessible space, I think about who the audience is or the people that work there and how they use the space for whatever purpose. Also, who is missing from the audience, and who is missing from the staff? Who is missing as artists?”
_________________In terms of permanently installing sensory technology into performance venues, Bobier discusses the mindset of those who hold power, stating, “galleries are maybe as far behind as anyone in terms of supporting artists and creating accessibility around their work. Then once [the artwork] is installed, creating accessibility around the installation, like making sound available, for instance.” Bobier posits that a more permanent commitment to physical accessibility is perhaps perceived as a risk for some venues or even perceived as rendering existing structures vulnerable.
Bobier has observed that some larger art spaces (and their funders) are perhaps reluctant to install vibrotactile technology within their theatre seats because they are protective over their spaces. Similarly, while many tech staff at these venues are eager to learn more about the technology and its possibilities, sometimes they are very protective about their spaces and how they are “supposed to be.” Bobier also notes that larger theatres and their sponsors are perhaps hesitant to spend money to disassemble their seats, install the technology and put them back together differently.
(Photo: In a series of three horizontal images, there are three different traditional seating configurations found in theatres of varying sizes)
(Ottawa Little Theatre, via globalnews.ca – National Arts Centre, via nac.ca – The Great Canadian Theatre Company, gctc.ca)
Additionally, Bobier suggests that it isn’t necessarily just about the seats and the money; rather, there is a more extensive discourse around elitism, ableism, racism, and how these systemic structures manifest in art spaces. Kat Holmes, author of “Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design,” states that you can “ask a hundred people what inclusion means, and you’ll get a hundred different answers. Ask them what it means to be excluded, and the answer will be uniformly clear: it’s when you’re left out” (4). Bobier stresses an often resounding attitude: “it’s not affecting me personally; why should I be interested?” He states that observing and dismantling these misconceptions about who belongs in art spaces is crucial. This extends beyond the audience members, clearly communicating which artists’ work enters a venue and who is on the staff.
Bobier also notes, “we have a huge aging population, and with aging comes disability, inevitably. The other answer is that any one of us can become disabled in an instant. So, we’re assuming all kinds of stuff about ourselves that we don’t want to know about.” He concludes by stating, “I don’t know the full answer to this question, and I think that’s something that I really want to look into more over the next few of the projects coming up.”
Future Projects and Possibilities In Arts Accessibility:
David Bobier is busy with multiple projects, all of which continue to explore the diverse ways people make and experience art. VibraFusionLab is preparing for various performances in Edmonton, Halifax, and Toronto in the coming months. One project is a vibrotactile wall outfitted with 12 channels of sound and vibration. We’re working on sizing it kids’ size or to a wheelchair user, so it has to be adaptable in many ways. Bobier explains, VibraFusionLab is “working towards a set up where people anywhere in the world can use their computer or their phone to voice into the wall, which can be felt by people leaning against the wall. And then we’re hoping to provide these handhelds to selected individuals that are voicing so they can also feel their voice at the same time. So, it’s a bit complicated, but that’s coming up in the spring as well. It’s called Haptic Voices.”
(Photos: In a series of three horizontal images, is the early stages of the “Haptic Voices” installation. The leftmost photo is of a tall, upright, slightly narrow wood frame with twelve circular discs suspended across the structure’s width in four rows of three. The center photo demonstrates a person leaning their back across the frame’s discs, while the photo on the right has a person leaning into the discs from the front.)
(photos: David Bobier, @vibrafusionlab, Instagram)
Looking toward the future and accessibility in the arts, David Bobier notes that VibraFusionLab “relies heavily on audience feedback [after a workshop, performance, or project], which directs where we go, what the future is for a device or system, or maybe a new system entirely.” Feedback from the culture is crucial not only for spurring new ideas but also for creating a sense of community that is unique to Deaf and disability arts. In a 2021 interview for the Studies in Social Justice journal, Bobier touches on whether the Deaf and Disability arts community wants to be part of the mainstream arts culture, especially after experiencing notable growth over the last several years. He says, “we want our identity to be what it is and to find our place within the mainstream conversation.” He notes that there has been a significant change, specifically in millennials and GenZ, regarding awareness, knowledge, and interest in Deaf and disability arts.”
_____________________
“I believe that this whole sort of exploration of multisensory is going to become more evident. I hear people doing their PhDs in smell and taste. So, it’s out there. It’s just a matter of bringing the right people together.”
_____________________David Bobier has been incredibly generous with his time and knowledge, providing an immense amount of insight into arts accessibility across Canada, decolonizing art spaces, arts funding, challenges and misconceptions, and the future of multisensory arts creation and experiences in the Canadian arts landscape. I’m intrigued to learn more from David in future conversations; I am specifically interested in discussing Ellen Lupton’s examination of sensory design and sensory environments as they relate to architect Hansel Bauman’s implementation of DeafSpace design guidelines. I am curious to hear David’s thoughts on whether or not the DeafSpace design would be suitable for performance venues and gallery spaces and if this is something that he predicts could be implemented more frequently in the future, showing a commitment by art spaces to creating a more comprehensive range of accessibility.
References Bobier, David, and Jim Ruxton. “VibraFusionLab.” VIBRAFUSIONLAB, n.d.
https://www.vflvibrafusionlab.com/.
Friedner, Michele, and Stefan Helmreich. “Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies.” The Senses and
Society 7, no. 1 (March 2012): 72–86. https://doi.org/10.2752/174589312×13173255802120.
Gomez, J. L., P. M. Langdon, J. A. Bichard, and P. J. Clarkson. “Designing Accessible Workplaces for
Visually Impaired People.” Inclusive Designing, 2014, 269–79. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05095-9_24.
Hick, Steven, Jackie Stokes, and Roy Haynes. Social Welfare in Canada: Inclusion, Equity, and Social
Justice. Fourth Edition. Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing, Inc, 2021.
Holmes, Kat. Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020.
Ignagni, Esther. “Dispatch: Interview with David Bobier.” Studies in Social Justice 15, no. 2 (2021):
282–87.
Lupton, Ellen, and Andrea Lipps. The Senses: Design Beyond Vision. New York, New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2018.
OtherAbilities. “Transcommunicator & Scored in Silence – Haptic Room Studies,” 2019.
http://otherabilities.org/festival-2019/exhibition/transcommunicator-scored-in-silence/.
Springgay, Stephanie. “Stitching Language: Sounding Voice in the Art Practice of Vanessa Dion
Fletcher.” Studies in Social Justice 15, no. 2 (March 6, 2021): 265–81.
https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v15i2.2431.