Since the spectacle's job is to cause a world that is no longer directly perceptible to be seen via different specialized mediations, it is inevitable that it should elevate the human sense of sight to the special place once occupied by touch; the most abstract of the senses, and the most easily deceived, sight is naturally the most readily adaptable to present-day society's generalized abstraction.

[Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle]





Synopsis:

Unbelievable adventures have been had in the pursuit of this task, namely by Lank and Loki, who's praxis were the greatest inspiration for me to attempt walking out into public with a blindfold. I knew I could not rival their independent voyages into the darkness, so I didn't even try. Instead, I attempted to apply the project in a different environment altogether, in search of a new palette for blindfolded photography: performance art.

I attended a one-night-only performance art event called Site Unseen, but I did so blindfolded. I observed several pieces of performance art just through sound and feel alone. At one point, this involved stepping on blocks of foam which a mute performer was positioning in front of me as I walked. My experience of the artwork was radically different from what it would have been if I was using my eyes, but hardly diminished. I was affected by the performances in a way that I could never have predicted.

My experiences of Site Unseen are described in great detail below. It is a written response because pictures really can't describe what I was experiencing. If it reads like a term paper, that is because it is. I apologize for the length, but, honestly, I have so much more to say about my newfound perspective of performance work. I don't expect any of you to read it, but I figure I should post it here as part of my proof... and for the entertainment of the exceptionally curious. The photographs I shot are at the bottom.

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Blindfolded at Site Unseen
Chicago Cultural Center
11.13.07

Performance is an art form which I have always understood to be an immersive experience for an audience member, where all senses have the potential to be engaged in the artist’s pursuit of a transformation of the space. And while I often close my eyes when listening to musicians, music is the only performance where I do not assume that the artists are appealing primarily to my vision. When I tied the blindfold around my eyes outside the Chicago Cultural Center before stepping into the one-night-only site-specific performances of Site Unseen, I was expecting an emptiness to my experience. But I was also putting my faith in the genius of adventure, which should always outweigh the potential of failure.

The performers at Site Unseen are asked to present time-based work in a space that they have never seen before, hence the title. I naturally had the idea to interpret this title from an audience member’s perspective, and refused to use my eyes for work that was more than likely developed for a seeing audience. Inspired by the Seeing Beyond Sight Photo Challenge, I took along a digital camera. While others have attempted much more astounding adventures with a blindfold and a camera, I figured that photographing art while blindfolded would be an interesting angle.

I had arranged to meet Terpsichore, my guide, outside the building, although I was hoping to make this experience as independently as was possible: I carried a collapsible white cane, which I’d found at the Salvation Army, and had spent several hours practicing with the blindfold the day before. While I could navigate my own apartment with ease, and could even make it around outdoors, albeit at a snail’s pace, I didn’t want to risk wandering through anyone’s performance space, especially if the audience was being asked to be silent. Terpsi attempted to keep my travel relatively independent by leading me with her voice instead of by the elbow, and only intervened on a few occasions when disaster was imminent. She took it upon herself to interpret the things that she was seeing and to relay them to me by whisper at points where she thought they would benefit my experience. Terpsi proved to be indispensable as an assistant, but she was also enlightening as a collaborator, being both a dancer and a writer.

Of the ten projects being presented in the various rooms of the Cultural Center (a beautiful historical building that was originally an expansive library), Terpsi and I only managed to participate in five. The first of which involved using my imagination entirely, as it created no sound. By Terpsi's description, some performers were constructing something in a large room using sticks. After scanning through the program, she found the description for “HemiSPHERE” by WorkGroup, and determined that they were intent on imitating the structure of the Tiffany dome above them using rolled-up journals. The mental image I constructed was two skinny plainclothed performers lazily building a beaver dam out of paper – an image that probably had little semblance of what was actually going on. Without the recognizable sound of work, there was very little for me to go on besides the recognition of being in a very acoustically large room.

Uninterested in the silence, I directed Terpsi to take us southward. We arrived at a small sign which described a performance called “The Power of Then” by Robert Metrick and John Ploof. Terpsi read the sign aloud to me, which I’ve entirely forgotten, although I still vividly recall the physicality of the sign from having put my hands on it. We entered a small auditorium and took seats near the back.

Terpsi would later describe this performance as being a chant, although I remember it seeming much more like an abstract radio drama. I could discern the voices of several different performers, who would take turns saying slices of text from the stage. I could sense that some were farther upstage than others, even if by only five or ten feet. One of them was speaking into a microphone, which disembodied her position, and thus, strangely, her existence in my perception of the performance. I could not gauge how large the audience was, although I knew from previous experience what the seating capacity should have been. When people were not speaking or moving, they were undetectable and effectively non-existent. I once heard a camera click from behind me, and heard some shuffling from the center of the auditorium. From this information alone, I would have guessed that there were a dozen people at most in the theater. Terpsi told me later that there was a fairly steady stream of visitors walking by us in the aisle throughout the performance, who made no trace of audible passage due to their respect for the performers. I heard two sounds consistently throughout the piece, which I assumed must have been coming from where else in the building: a breathing, like machinery, and an intermittent whistle, like a sports coach would blow. These sounds, along with the sparse sounds of audience movement, formed my understanding of the acoustical space I was in as much as the sounds of the performance, and, in a way that John Cage might champion, became integral in my awareness of what was happening around me.

The sonic texture of the performance would change every few minutes, with each section being about as long as the last and thereby fairly predictable in rhythm. At one point they were reading chunks of text about what we see and what we cannot see. This was followed by a section of rhyming, of the form: “it is not the moisture, it is the lotion,” and “it is not the size of the following, it is the devotion,” and for several minutes the performers took turns saying comical and profound things that ended in the syllables “-otion.” Sometimes the line would be especially funny, and I would get a glimpse of the audience through muffled laughter. The woman with the microphone would sing her line, which added to her mysterious disembodied quality. A man once moved to the back of the room to say his line, and while I couldn’t hear his footsteps, I could easily track his movement down the aisle. This was really the only movement I detected during the entire piece. When you cannot discern the smaller motions of the performers, these broader spatial gestures become the most significant structure.

The final section of the piece was instrumental. A piano played a chord from center stage, and then a second piano played a chord from what seemed to be the hallway behind me. A violinist raked a bow across the strings in a low, atonal drone from stage right. Terpsi later told me that there was only one piano, which had a microphone inside it, and the sound was alternating between being sent to the speaker at center stage and to a speaker which was placed behind us. I was quite fooled. She was so distracted by this visual phenomenon that she missed when the violinist had begun playing. I, of course, recall distinctly the first noise the violinist played. We counted this is an important different in our understanding of the piece. When the last piano chord died away, Terpsi leaned over and whispered, “I think it’s over.” I had no clue, of course, that the performers had left the stage, and didn’t believe that the performance was finished until an official applause followed several seconds later. Without the visual end cue, I had no perception of the envelope of the piece.

Outside the theater we were approached by SEN, who’s voice I recognized immediately, and felt safe with whatever she had in store for us. She was presenting an element of “SNAPSHOT” by Isil Egrikavuk, where visitors are invited to write news stories based on historical headlines, which would then be read aloud by a news anchor who was stationed on the first floor. Terpsi and I chose the headline, Punk Whore Show; Punks Sweep The Country. We sat down on the carpet, in the hallway, and I gave her some dictation which she interpreted liberally. She described the space on the page she was writing in as being a box that was ¾ of the size of the page, which I interpreted as being a lot of space. Apparently her handwriting is rather large, and it turned out to not be so much space. I found, too, that I had a hard time keeping words in my head without being able to see them appear in front of me; I’m used to writing with my hands, not my mouth. All in all, the project was entertaining. We never did deliver the paper to the news anchor downstairs, but the experience was rich even so. After finishing our writing on the back of the page, we got up and decided to track down the two sounds I had heard in the previous performance which had not been part of that performance.

Terpsi directed me firstly toward the whistles, which emanated from a room not so far away. From the whistling and the sound of shuffling coming from the room, I could imagine the position of the doorway we were heading to, although in my imagination it was the only thing that existed – a beacon of bright sonic light that floated in the middle of shapeless void where all I knew was stiff carpet. I heard Terpsi talking briefly to a man she knew, one of her dance teachers, who demanded that she let him know on Wednesday what our project was all about. While I was rather isolated in my own little world of sound and space, I had been drawing quite a bit of attention from the other visitors, which, mostly silent, were entirely beyond my knowledge. As we approached, two older women spoke up, nervous that Terpsi intended to bring me into this room, and warning me that I should not go in. Terpsi calmly described to me that the room was filled with foam blocks which were being shuffled around by performers, then reassured the docents, who nervously allowed me to enter. I was directed by them to step up onto a piece of foam, which seemed to be only a few inches raised off the ground. The docents then told the performers to make sure to take care of me, who answered cutely with a few bursts from their whistles.

I felt the solidness of the foam block beneath my shoes, and felt no danger. I felt the edge of the block with my cane, and knew where it was safe to step. I heard the performers shuffling around my feet, moving foam blocks into position to form a path in front of me. They only communicated by blowing on their whistles, which was as helpful as I could have asked for, as it gave me direction and assurance. I stepped bravely forward, trusting that they were laying blocks in front of me in some sort of path. I imagined them crawling about on the floor, like servants before a despot, laying pavement for me so that I would not have to touch the ground. I didn’t like the status, but I adored the image. As Terpsi described later, they were in fact standing upright on shoes made of blocks of foam, shuttling the other blocks of foam around with brooms. I like this image much better, although I could not have imagined it from the sounds I was hearing, as all the sonic information was coming from below my knees. For the first time that night, a warm glow seeped through the cracks of the blindfold, and I perceived a brightly lit room. Later, on looking back through the program, I realize that this performance, “Island,” by Deva Eveland, was presented in the GAR Rotunda room, which has lights in the floor, and is in fact a rather dark space. My memory of the room, then, is wildly different in character from everyone else’s, because where I perceived I was walking around in full light, everyone else was seeing the room cast in eerie footlights.

The path that the performers made for me led me out into the room, and then politely back to safety. After discussing the experience with Terpsi, I determined that this was the most fun I had had with an installation in a long time, and determined that we should stay a while longer to play. Before we got back into the room, Terpsi said, “this is a woman with a yellow shirt…” and I felt a broomstick lean against my body. The woman whispered her name to me, “Beverly,” then disappeared. I handed away my white cane, exchanged for the broom, and walked back into the room. This time, the performers let me choose my own path. I fumbled around with the stick, feeling for foam blocks and pushing them into place in front of me. I made relatively quick progress, and came rather unexpectedly to a paper flag on a tall plastic pole which was sticking up from its own little foam island. According to Terpsi, there were several of these around the space. I declared myself victorious and headed back to the entrance – which was much more difficult a destination than the center of the room, which was essentially an aimless trajectory.

Finished with this experience, Terpsi guided me toward the second sound I had heard from the auditorium: the mechanical breathing. She took me by the elbow and led me through the audience to a place to sit on the floor, against a wall, facing the source of the sound, which seemed to be an array of loudspeakers. These loudspeakers created an unnatural acoustic environment, completely obliterating my ability to sense the size of the space I was in. I sat and listened for a long while, without any other information, became lost in the ephemeral soundscape, and began to get bored. Terpsi must have sensed this, as she began to whisper to me what was going on in front of me. This performance, “Here Lies Truth” (see photo below for artist credits), involved three dancers who I could not hear, who were wearing broad skirts that I could not hear, and performing silent actions that I could not hear. Terpsi described their movements with the clarity and eloquence that only another dancer could, but she might as well have been telling me about a performance which took place at another time, in another space entirely, because the dancers presence could not reach me with my blindfold on. Even when Terpsi described how there were lights on stage pointed directly at us, making beautiful silhouettes of the dancers, and partially blinding her, I had trouble believing that this was the scene before me – everything seemed dark behind my blindfold.

Eventually the initial soundscape coming from the loudspeakers dissipated, giving way to locatable instruments: a drum kit with a range of ride symbols, and a guitar amp. These two instruments, located distinctly across the room from me, isolated in one location, became the ballast that I could finally rest my perception on. At times, a third sound came in – a woman singing with thick reverberation – which was projected from a loudspeaker behind me, above and to the left. I had to force myself to imagine that the singer was, in fact, somewhere near the other two musicians. I became incredibly involved in the music they played, which was dynamic, confident and emotional. Parts were rhythmic, and reminded me of early Modest Mouse: indie rock with a dominant drummer. I enjoyed the music a great deal, and swayed from side to side to the beat. Terpsi was having an entirely different experience altogether, and in an effort to bring me into the same space, began relating the actions of the dancers with more detail. She described a woman crawling under a white tarp, which looked like water. The woman clawed at the cloth, mouth visibly open but making no sound, as if drowning. I can only imagine what Lisa must have seen in this image, as she has a fear of water; she doesn’t swim. Even so, the image did not feel imminent to me.

I felt as if I was in a space where only a few things really existed: Terpsichore, the wall behind me, a disembodied singer, a drum kit, and a guitar amp. I understood that other events were taking place before me, but the dancers in my imagination seemed like ghosts. Without sonic information, I could not convince myself that they were anything more physical. Until Terpsi described the following: “One of the women has picked up the woman on the ground, and is carrying her on her back. She’s coming off the stage…” a tone of urgency entered into the sentence, “and into the audience…” And several seconds later, I heard an angry apparition breathing frantically off to my right, getting louder and louder as she came, at a run, straight toward us. The air stirred around me, I felt cloth brush against my legs and hand, and the woman that had until then existed in another space and time was suddenly very real, present, and breathing right down into my face. She paused there for several seconds, then huffed back toward the musicians. The event came out of nowhere for me, and I barely had time to jump out of my skin. But as soon as she had come, she was gone, and all that I had was the sound of the musicians and Terpsi's distant descriptions. What was a constantly stimulating performance for the seeing audience was effectively distilled into a single moment of experience for me. I doubt I could have chosen a better way to view this piece.

When I walked out of the Cultural Center at 9 o’clock, I had been blindfolded for two hours and forty-five minutes. I had become so comfortable in experiencing the world through sound and feel that I was reluctant to take the blindfold off. What I had anticipated on entering Site Unseen was that I would experience a lack of information that would result in poor understanding and misinterpretation of the pieces. I should admit that some of the performances were lackluster from behind a blindfold, such as “HemiSPHERE,” and others I totally missed, such as “My Echo is a Brick,” which could have (and likely) walked right by me several times without me knowing. On the other hand, the interactive project of “Snapshot” lost nothing by my inability to see, given that I had Terpsichore to help me write, and “Island” is arguably best observed with a blindfold, such that I might suggest bringing one with you if you ever expect to view it. What astounds me most, however, was the opportunity to have a cathartic experience at “Here Lies Truth,” which, while I missed 95% of the material the performers had generated (apparently there was video, props, and a set in addition to the dancers and musicians), still communicated significantly to a blindfolded observer. I have thusly been inspired to continue experimenting with blindfolded observations of artwork, and will undoubtedly be influenced to make decisions in my own work that will diminish the visual elements and play up on sound and touch.