Category: Work

BLINDFOLDED FEEDBACK was created in response to the workshop WALKING BETWEEN WOR[L]DS WITH LINES (delivered at Convocation II, October 2023), and is intended as both documentation of that event and a work in its own right. The phrase ‘blindfolded feedback’ was generated in response to the call for ‘additional, unscheduled parallel sessions’ to the timetable during Convocation II. I proposed a feedback session that offered the chance for workshop participants to relay their experience of WALKING BETWEEN WOR[L]DS WITH LINES. However, in the event, no one could attend the allocated time for ‘blindfolded feedback’ due to the (many) other commitments already timetabled into the schedule of Convocation II. Rather than this being a problem, the difficulty of scheduling additional space and time in which the feedback could occur generated thoughts related to the workshop itself, and in particular, the imperative to re-attune to (and by default make space and time for), otherwise overlooked interpretations of the world. This in turn caused me to wonder how feedback is received when it falls outside of the allotted time ascribed to it (for I certainly received it), or the sensory modes attuned to it (for I definitely heard it), and how, by attending to feedback received as such, it might be utilised as material for reflective re-presentation: blindfolded feedback.

To explore these concerns I wrote an application to present at the University of Leeds’ Annual Practice-led PhD Symposium. That proposal can be accessed above.

For the symposium itself, I wrote a script for many voices designed to be performed through collective reading. The script is built around citations from the proposal and the workshop text for WALKING BETWEEN WOR[L]DS WITH LINES (available on the page of that name). By offering the text as a script to be performed by the room (a room whose normative attunement is that of a speaker visualising absence through a PowerPoint presentation), I (we) seek to re-attune to the room through the principles of (un)scheduled embodied, blindfolded feedback.

The script and an accompanying audio recording of the collective reading can be accessed below.

_{Benjamin Jenner: Script for the collective reading of BLINDFOLDED FEEDBACK.}

In editing the audio recording of the collective reading, I have chosen to include the ‘voice’ of the speech to text translation service. This voice extends the interpretive imperative of the workshop WALKING BETWEEN WOR[L]DS WITH LINES by generating a new text, one whose ‘mistranslations’ will likely be utilised in future iterations of this work.

WALKING BETWEEN WOR[L]DS WITH LINES was a participatory workshop delivered at Convocation II, Vienna, in October 2023.  

The workshop offered the opportunity to employ self-generated text-based images as tools for exploring a garden space without use of the eyes. 

Through a visualisation process, participants were asked to imagine a space of learning that was important to them.  By following a series of verbal prompts, that space was gradually transformed in mind into a spatialised arrangement of words. Those words were then translated onto a tactile paper surface as an arrangement of graphic lines, like a form of notation. 

In dialogue with a sighted interlocutor the blindfolded explorer would then set out into the garden with their drawing. Rather than lead or guide the explorer, the interlocutor’s role was to support the emergence of the explorer’s blindfolded world in language in relation to the visualisation. As the exploration developed and the relationship between the garden and the visualisation began to get increasingly complex, new words were added onto the drawing by the blindfolded explorer. These new words served to both affirm the presence of the visualised space in the embodied space of the garden – windows merging with trees, tables with bushes, etc – whilst at the same time reminding both explorer and interlocutor of the mediating function of language and its role in defining experience.

Following the workshop, I developed my workshop text into a digital booklet (available below). This text and its re-presentation is a response to the way that my understanding of the workshop developed through its facilitation. The grey text is the workshop text prepared for Convocation II; the highlighted text was written during the workshop in response to the activity; whilst the redacted text was prepared for the workshop but remained unarticulated. The images that accompany the words have been generated from the tactile grid that participants used to make their drawings. As participants explored the grid blindfolded, that structure’s temporal qualities came to the fore, enabling it to relinquish its modernist associations and blend with the garden. This blending was expressed by the participants in dialogue and through their drawings. It is represented here through the deconstruction of the grid’s formal elements in line with the participant’s discoveries.

^{_{Benjamin Jenner: WALKING BETWEEN WOR[L]DS WITH LINES: A WORKSHOP TEXT}}

This workshop and its ephemera are an extension of my own blindfolded explorations of space. They are intended both as a way of making the work public and of enabling others to practice and extend the processes I have developed through my research. As much as these events (workshop/workshop text) are about engaging tactics for blindfolded exploration, they are also about developing an embodied critique of the relationship between language and vision through deep listening and dialogic intra-action.  This relationship is explored further in the work BLINDFOLDED FEEDBACK.

This short digital video is one of eight, made in response to LOCAL SENSES’ participation in Liberty Festival 2022, Deptford, London.

For Liberty Festival, LOCAL SENSES shared their poems, music and meditations with both attendees of the festival and local residents.

The video focuses on the words deployed by the group as they respond to the environment beyond the visual. This focus does not seek to make a narrative of this process but rather to hold open the moment of encounter between the group and the environment. As a result, many subtitles appear on screen at once making a conventional reading difficult to achieve. This encourages instead a type of reading that is more like listening, and a type of listening more attuned to the plurality of voices at play. The video also includes the voice of the speech-to-text translation service employed to generate the subtitles (rendered in green), complicating the embodied environment with the environment of translation and reproduction.

More information about the work of LOCAL SENSES can be accessed by clicking on the tab ‘LOCAL SENSES’, below.

This short digital video is one of eight, made in response to LOCAL SENSES’ participation in Liberty Festival 2022, Deptford, London.

For Liberty Festival, LOCAL SENSES shared their poems, music and meditations with both attendees of the festival and local residents.

The video focuses on the words deployed by the group as they respond to the environment beyond the visual. This focus does not seek to make a narrative of this process but rather to hold open the moment of encounter between the group and the environment. As a result, many subtitles appear on screen at once making a conventional reading difficult to achieve. This encourages instead a type of reading that is more like listening, and a type of listening more attuned to the plurality of voices at play. The video also includes the voice of the speech-to-text translation service employed to generate the subtitles (rendered in green), complicating the embodied environment with the environment of translation and reproduction.

More information about the work of LOCAL SENSES can be accessed by clicking on the tab ‘LOCAL SENSES’, below.

Animated re-presentation as digital video with additional environmental sound.

Delivered at EARN (European Artistic Research Network) Gathering, Academy of Fine Arts at University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland, 27-28^th October 2022.

Subtitles added for application to CEPRA Journal, University of Leeds, 2023.

19 minutes and 42 seconds

Animated re-presentation as digital video.

HOW FAR AWAY IS THAT DOG? is the companion piece to A WALK IN AFTERNOON SUNSHINE.

30 minutes and 54 seconds

A WALK IN AFTERNOON SUNSHINE

This presentation was delivered at the conference Psychosocial Cartographies, held at the Anglo American University, Prague, Czech Republic, 17th & 18th June 2022. The presentation has been adapted in order to be housed in this space.

Animated digital re-presentation

Duration: 20 minutes and 33 seconds.

Animated re-presentation as digital video.

Delivered at CPRA (Centre for Practice Research in the Arts), UCLAN (The University of Central Lancashire), 29^th April 2022.

15 minutes and 05 secs.

RETAINING THE OBJECT IN THE ABSENCE OF VISION: TRANSLATION AND RE-PRESENTATION IN THE WRITING OF ROBERT SMITHSON AND KENNETH GOLDSMITH

DIGITAL VIDEO,

DURATION: 25 MINUTES 15 SECONDS. 

GENERATIVE CONSTRAINT AND THE SITE OF LANGUAGE: LOCATING AN OBJECT THROUGH EMBODIED MUSICALITY IN THE ABSENCE OF VISION. A NAVIGATIONAL AID AS A FILM AS A PRESENTATION.

DIGITAL VIDEO,

DURATION: 10 MINUTES 37 SECONDS

TRIPS INTO TOWN, RECORDED ON 11th NOVEMBER 2019 AND THE 29TH OCTOBER 2020.

DIGITAL VIDEO

DURATION: 25 MINUTES, 37 SECONDS

GENERATIVE CONSTRAINT AND THE SITE OF LANGUAGE: RETAINING THE OBJECT IN THE ABSENCE OF VISION: AN EXPLORATION OF ROBERT SMITHSON’S ‘INCIDENTS OF MIRROR-TRAVEL IN THE YUCATAN’, THROUGH TWO BLINDFOLDED EXPLORATIONS OF THE SAME PART OF THE SAME FOREST, POSSIBLY.  

A PRESENTATION CONSISTING OF DIGITAL SLIDES, TEXT, AND FILM AND PHOTOGRAPHIC FRAGMENTS

DURATION: 16 MINUTES AND FOUR SECONDS