Every time I think about creating a piece of Braille art the first thing I consider is the message. It has to mean something, it has to question the reader. Even if the reader can't actually read the message in the format presented. The larger I make the pieces of Braille art the more I move it away from the traditional method of it as a piece of communication, I widen the gap between myself, the artist, and the audience. This falls directly inline with Roland Barthes when he says - 'the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.' (Barthes, R. (1968) The Death of the Author. London. Fontana. University handout). I discussed 'To what degree can the artist influence the reading? The space between the language' in my 3000 word submission for the last unit. I really wanted to explore the distance between creation and comprehension. I did find it very interesting and the deeper you go the more complex it got. Which I won't go into here...
This piece is a metre square and presented many issues in the creation, which I shall detail later, including having to make a special tool at the right size to proportionally get the raised areas the size I wanted them to be.
After I had decided on the message 'Can you read me?' which I wanted to use to question the communication further and the link between the message and what anybody seeing it would think, I also wanted to make it vague and potentially open to interpretation, it was just a question of getting the image prepped. The first thing was to re-organise it as with the previous pieces more stacked as if it was a poster, which suited the type of message, ie; Can you read me? Once this was printed out and tiled together I then reversed it and put x2 bits of wood together to make a piece 1 metre by 1 metre. As you can see in the above pic a couple of the tools. One is a 'hole saw bit', this one 45mm in diameter and then a 'punch' this one made from a massive bolt that Jim in the NUA 3D department found and had started to see if he could shape to a dome. I finished it off with a grinder to get it roughly the sort of shape I wanted. All I needed to do now was mark the holes by drilling a guide hole for the big cutter and then cut them all out before registering the aluminium and punching the holes. Simple.
The actual piece of wood I want to play with using light behind it to see if I can capture the same message with another method. Need to have a play. Once I had taped down the aluminium it was just a case of finding the holes, so i taped the original piece of paper down, obviously all this is done in reverse to make the lumps positive... I clamped the wood and aluminium together and started in one corner and then transferred to the other corner to 'fix it' in place, keeping the registration working. I actually used a small domed piece of wood to make the initial hit to find the hole and then came the relentless thumping with the large tool and hammer... only 37 holes to hammer. One thing I was worried about was whether the aluminium would split but I think with the dome being larger and shallower the trauma to the metal was less and none of them fractured, I did keep checking. I also tried filming the hitting process but I really needed x3 arms. However as a 'happy accident' I managed to get some but as a slow motion film which does prove quite interesting to watch.
Not only does it look quite strange but the vibrations being slowed down give it another layer and the way the sound has altered almost as if it is 'sonar' which I like the idea of as it is a parallel communication technique for seeing without sight. Something I need to go back to at some point.
All the way through the process I was concerned as to how it would look and thinking about the process to get the result, I felt like it was making a print or exposing a photograph, there was a lot of different stages to go through and any one of them could go wrong and affect or even destroy the final outcome. Fortunately this didn't happen and I was pleased when I revealed the final piece. Although what I do with it now is a question I have yet to answer.
Nalu posing with the finished piece.
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