Tangible Natives was an experiment on how the resources of a tactile system of communication can contribute to a non-hegemonic system of musical notation, for people with and without visual disabilities. During the three days of the workshop, Ilan Manouach and Maria Arnal questioned the normativity of conventional notation tools, discussed the de-emphasizing of vision in regard to "reading" music and explored the manifold ways sound can be translated and stimulated by touch.
Their goal was to reflect the diversity of the community’s expression through a collectively composed music score using the resources of the Shapereader language. Initially designed for users with visual impairment, Shapereader is a speculative, trans-disciplinary project that promotes an embodied, non-retinal, narrative experience. It is built on an expanding repertoire of free-floating tactile ideograms (tactigrams) intended to provide haptic equivalents for all the semantic features, conceptual functions and textual attributes of a tactile text. It was invented in 2015 with an ongoing outreach plan for raising awareness for a diversified audience, that has been unfolding in a variety of formats, contexts and collaborations.
LOCATION: Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Gent, Belgium.
Tangible Natives (Workshop / Performance)
DATES: March 5-7th, 2020, Saturday 7th, 14h30-19h30 Mokabon
