blind writing

Preliminary Ramblings
John Slatin

I'm writing almost a week after the fact. It's hard to know how to talk about the models I have in front of me. In the old saw about the blind men and the elephant, a group of blind men cluster around an elephant, running their hands over different parts of its huge body. They are unable to reach agreement about what animal it is, unable to construct a description of it: each one knows only what's within the compass of his own hands. No one uses this parable (if it is a parable) anymore-- it's wrongheaded and offensive in its bland assumption that these men bring no prior knowledge to their task, as if none of them had ever touched an animal before and none of them had ever had the experience of trying to build up a sense of a whole from a scrutiny of parts.

But the minute someone put the first model in my hands the other night, the "image" of that story popped into my head. And the more I ran my fingers over the individual bits of cardboard that people put into my hands, the more I felt like one blind man trying to reconstruct the elephant from a set of multiple representations of different parts of the elephant. I felt simultaneously pleased and puzzled and disappointed-- pleased at the effort to recast the painting in different modalities, paint and digital photograph and cardboard worked at with Xacto knives and rubber cement(?) and sticks; puzzled by that too, understanding or thinking at least that I understood the move but not having a good way to get at it either; disappointed because, with each model that came into my hands I became less able to understand either the model's relation to the painting or, especially, my own relation to it.

Going to the VisLab for the training on Friday was oddly similar, though in a sense I knew more about at least some of the parts of the elephant than I knew or know about the painting. I understood most of what we were being told, at least at the level of abstraction at which we were working: understood about the graphic "pipes" and "channels," about the different projectors and screens, about the different control mechanisms and so forth. Yet perhaps because I couldn't actually see the devices in any real way (I could see some of the cables and stuff he pointed to, I could see the three monitors he was working in front of at the control console; at one point I could see the pyramid floating and rotating on the screen; but I couldn't see what was happening on the Big Screens in the room at all), I was somehow "free" (?) to notice how crude the whole thing is, how flimsy and jerry-rigged: incredible technologies, each with its own history, its own interface, each devised and designed and developed without reference to the others, so that it sounds as though it's always on the verge of coming unglued, always about to fly apart-- a bulb burns out, pop! and there's $1,000 worth of damage; the modes have mysterious names; interfaces, or the lack thereof, expose administrative crevasses. I wonder what I'm doing here, why I want to be here. What's the role of a blind man in a multimillion dollar Visualization Lab?



The first model I got was a biggish three-dimensional thing, a sort of irregular polygon with rough edges where the cardboard had been cut away; I could feel the corrugations, the strata that comprised the thickness of the material, the air inside that makes it somehow cushioned (not soft). It felt flimsy, too, like I needed to be careful with it. A small stick dropped from somewhere onto my lap. I hadn't realized that there were sticks in the composition until then, and I couldn't figure out where to stick the stick back in, couldn't feel the logic of the piece to know what the stick had joined and held apart. It felt, for some reason, like a crown, so I put it on my head for a moment. It makes me think of a knight's visor the way I might have made one out of cardboard when I was a kid and fascinated by castles and moats and Arthur and the Swoppets with their interchangeable body parts.

The next piece was a surprise-- much much smaller, kind of ovoid, it felt like some outer layer(s) had been scraped away more or less in the center. I turned it over and over in my hands, not knowing what to make of it, unable to establish any kind of relationship between it and the previous one.



Another one that I like-- I'm taking them out of the bag now in whatever order they come to hand, since I can't at all remember the sequence I got them in in the first place and I'm not sure it'd matter anyway. Anyway, I like this one. It has a kind of pleasing almost rectangular shape, except that there's some little angular point at the "top" end (why do I want this to be the top?). It's about 3 or 4 inches wide at the widest point, I think. Along the right hand side (assuming that the angular "point" is at the top left, that is) there's a kind of key-shaped hole cut into (out of?) the cardboard, an empty space; a lock? but I don't think so. Just to the left of that is a spoon-shaped thing that seems to be glued to the surface of the cardboard, so that it sticks up what feels like a pretty long way though it can't be more than 3/8 of an inch or so. Then I notice that there's a similar thing on the other side, as if this solid spoonshaped thing existed on both sides of the plane. And to the left of that is another hollowed-out space, this time with a thin end toward the bottom and widening out toward the top. But I notice that it's not cut all the way through, unlike the first space, the key-shaped thing. So this cardboard has lots and lots of layers, or seems to. Yet I can't read the shapes. Suddenly it occurs to me that these shapes are pretty similar and I run my fingers back over them, trying to tell. I wish I could pull them off and fit them over each other to see what would happen. I have no idea how this is related to the other two shapes I've been given or how it relates to the painting.



I reach into the bag again. This time I come out with something very thin and slight and delicate-- how odd for cut-up cardboard! It's a long, slender, stick-like thing (except of course it's not a stick), slightly curved, and, more or less in the middle, there's some very thin bendy cardboard, sort of cuplike, only it has no bottom; I can't quite tell if it's a single piece of cardboard or not. It feels a little like something an Asian woman might wear in her hair to hold a coil of hair or a bun together-- a long thin hairpin thing with a kind of clasp. I know that's not the right name for those things; sometimes they're made of leather. And the "pin" wouldn't be quite this long... I am beginning to get the feeling that the painting is full of strange shapes that people are trying somehow to capture, but I can't imagine how they relate to each other across the canvas. And I don't know how literal these representations are, how "faithful" anyone's tried to be to the two-dimensionality of the shapes on the canvas.



I reach again into the grab-bag of shapes. Another surprise: this time I come out with something made of wood! At first I think it's popsicle sticks but it's not-- the sticks are too thick and the shapes are wrong and the lengths are wrong. But it's not unlike a popsicle-stick structure-- it's like an A-frame, sort of. There are 5 pieces of wood standing vertically, all at crazy angles; they're different heights, too. Part way down from the top-- maybe an inch and a half from the top of the longest stick-- they're intersected by (or they poke through, but that's not how it feels) a flat rectangular piece of wood, very thin. What's it doing here? Another inch or so and there's another thin piece lying flat, and below that it seems to be braced by a stick like the vertical ones that's glued to the bottom of the flat piece. The structure almost seems to be able to stand up on its own, but it can't quite-- it's not balanced. It's not supposed to be I think. The verticals are much stronger than the horizontals, maybe because the wood pieces are thicker? and I'm much more conscious of the different angles at which they stand in relation to each other. A fax is coming in on a business fax behind me. The noise startled me.



I take another shape out of the bag. Another surprise! This one is even more delicate. It's a very thin, flat piece of I'm not sure what-- when I run my nails over it I can't tell if the sound is the sound of wood or plastic; it's not cardboard, at least; but it's smooth. It has things attached to it, glued on. There are two little points sticking out of the "top" (I keep wanting things to have directionality!). They're slightly different heights, but neither of them sticks up very far. They're sort of toothpick-thin. I run my hands down the surface and am surprised to find that the two sticks run abruptly into something-- two more sticks? two other pieces of these sticks?-- glued horizontally across the "back" of the piece. These horizontal pieces stick out a little beyond the frame, too. Then, the width of my thumb down from the bottom-most of those two sticks, there's a single piece, much longer and very thin, glued horizontally across the "backing" and extending quite far on either side of it; it feels delicate and very fragile. Below that is another thin cross piece that extends well beyond the width of the backing; at either extremity of this cross piece there's a flat piece glued to the back of the cross piece, pointing downward; I envision it as a big letter E turned downwards, but then I notice that there are also two flat vertical pieces glued to the surface of the backing thing, so it's not an E at all anymore. Some sort of Kanji character. Is Kanji a word? It's surprising.



Here's another piece. A sort of irregular oval, the size of a big leaf. I'm trying to remember what elm leaves felt like, looked like. When I was a kid, in Buffalo, there were wonderful elm trees, very tall, that grew on either side of the street (not just my street, lots of streets); their upper branches would touch, or seem to touch each other, so that in summer you got a high green canopy arching over the street. For some reason the leaf-shape of this thing reminds me of all that. 'One side of this shape is very smooth; the other side seems to have grooves cut into it, but it's also smooth. There are 8 "sections" on this side; not exactly regular, but far too regular to be the veins on a leaf. One "end" of the leaf" (the "top" again!) is rounded; the other end comes to a kind of point, angled a little to one side.



I've just pulled another piece out of the art grab bag. I remember getting this one the other night and being fascinated by it. It's cardboard, thin and delicate. It reminds me for some reason of a Valentine card. It feels almost heart-shaped (it's not, but it's sort of rounded). There's a "flap" cut out of it (cut into it? can't decide), which makes it feel very delicate and interesting, because it opens and closes. So it becomes sort of like a big irregular letter "O" with a doorway in it, so you can get from one side (of what?) to the other (where?).



Here's another smallish cardboard thing, also thin. I can't make it out, or at least I can't figure out how to describe it. The side that's facing me is smooth; the other side seems to have some roughness, something maybe scratched into it. Another (highly) irregular polygon, though the edges are too rounded really to call it a polygon; I don't know what else to call it. If I start at the top left and run my right index finger around the circumference, I start with a surprisingly sharp little point, then go up a little, then slightly downward along a relatively straight line for maybe an inch, then come to a slight point and turn more sharply down for half an inch or so to a sharpish point; here my finger comes sharply down and inward in a straight line, comes in at a severe angle and then flares out again an inch or so to a sharp point; then down, then in again (remembering now, maybe...) and then to a surprisingly hook-like point. For some reason I think of this as "the end"-- it takes an effort to make my finger go around this point and back up the lefthand side of the piece. In fact I can't do it now.

This next piece is almost a triangle. It's small, maybe two inches on the longest side, slightly irregular like all the other ones. The side facing me has several things attached to the surface. I can't make out what they are. At first I thought they were pretty much the same, but on reinspection they feel almost Escher-like, planes changing levels so that suddenly what was "up" feels like it's "lower" than something else.



Another one, less angular. Rougher edges. Also small. On one edge there's a kind of groove or inlet, like a little smiling mouth or something. Both "front" and "back" sides have layers, surfaces etched away. My descriptive vocabulary is slipping, or I'm getting tired, or both.

Last one. This one too is an irregular polygon, almost trapezoidal-- well, not really. Upper left corner is a point; then it's almost a straight drop down from there, just a very slight bend, maybe four inches. Then angle down to the right, maybe 35 degrees or so (I'm no good at estimating angles; I thought about this when Ruben was talking about how, at certain resolutions on certain screens, the "geometry isn't right," so that mountains or whatever aren't in the right places; I didn't really understand that). This one too has a layered surface. Oops! I dropped it on the desk, and now it's in among the others that I've already talked about. But I can't tell which one it is. That's a surprise, too-- each one has seemed unique as I picked it up and handled it, ran my fingers over it, described it. But when they're all together like this, in a sort of clump crowded in between the left edge of my keyboard and the pile of papers on the desk beside it, there are suddenly more similarities than differences. That's nontrivial, I think. I still don't have a sense of the painting qua painting, as a visual thing. But I have a strong sense that it must be concerned with shapes and textures, that there are angles and irregularities, that even in that two dimensional space abstract non-representational shapes have surfaces and depths; some shapes seem almost trying to become something you can recognize (the leaf, the crown, the popsicle-stick house, the hairpin, others resolutely won't resolve into anything other than what they are.

Looking ahead

I won't be able to put my hands on the digital things we make, at least not unless we get some haptic interface worked out. We were asked not to touch the screens, even, or at least some of them (I can't remember which ones, and for me it's easier to make a general rule: Don't Touch the Screens! than to try to remember which is which). What will we do with sound? What will we do with words?

Conventionally, digital images that include text include the text as a bitmap, meaning that it's just another set of pixels turned on or off, not something a screen reader like JAWS can recognize. I wonder about the possibility of using Scalable Vector Graphics for some of this, because SVG can include text that's really (from the computer's standpoint) still text, meaning that screen readers can speak it. But what role could that play here? SVG is a format for the Web, not for Perfly (perfly, don't bother me, perfly, don't bother me) and IV vue or whatever the other one was.