What about visual art for the blind and color associations
Questions, Reflections, Possibilities: A Dialogue with Piet Devos
On Tuesday, November 16, I had my first meeting with Piet Devos. Piet is a writer, art expert, critic, inquisitor, and thinker. His website: www.pietdevos.be. At the age of five, he was diagnosed with a rare retinal disease, retinoblastoma, which caused him to become blind. He describes his condition in a particularly interesting way: “My dual experience of seeing and not seeing raised questions about our perception, which later led me to think and write.”
When I read this and recall our first conversation, I immediately think to myself: “What an amazing fact!” and I say this with a big “exclamation mark!”
Approaching life this way must bring an exceptional richness. The “being” as a fully harmonious form. A valuable gift that only a few can grasp, being blessed with a deeply rooted awareness within space and time in the universe.
Our hour-long chat then turned into a four-hour-long reflection on art, and of course, more specifically, on dance. To my delight, we couldn't stop talking, and the conversation just went on and on, all the way up to the last seconds before he caught the train back to Kortrijk. Flipping through his biography, his love for words quickly became apparent. Of course, it's logical that Piet places great importance on words, word aesthetics, word choices, and word variation because he is a writer.
Piet, here you go: “I feel a bit shy, I am dyslexic and I have learned to write through trial and error, never reluctantly, quite the opposite, always with great pleasure, but still always somewhat overshadowed by a small gray cloud. In your way of thinking and patterns, I would describe it as a sunny day, where you feel the delightful warmth of the sun on your body and then, suddenly, though very briefly, it’s disturbed by a small cloud in the sky.”
a. Did I put that right? Would you see it that way?
An interesting aspect I find is your search for the relationship between visual references and other sensory perceptions. You do this, among other things, by placing word and sound against color. You also catalog letters and numbers and associate them with specific colors. For you, the following truths apply:
Order:
1 – light blue
2 – red
3 – green
4 – yellow
5 – blue
6 – black
7 – brown
8 – black
b. I have an immediate question: Do you think your color identifications can also be applied to dance?
c. Where do you get your inspiration for each color associated with a number? I like to draw a line and replace the number with a count.
Because as you probably know, most dance phrases consist of eight counts: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
There are eight counts in most ballroom dances, hip hop, street dance, ragga, breakdance, other examples include:
Samba: the accent is on the first and third count
Waltz: the accent is on the first count
Quickstep: accent on the second and third counts
Salsa: the accent is on the first and fifth counts, the fourth and eighth counts are not danced
Bachata: accent on the fourth and eighth counts and so on…
With this reflection, I return to our recurring question:
d. How about aesthetic pleasure experiences for the blind and visually impaired in this context? Can we explore part of this question by (in my opinion, subjective) color analysis and present it to blind dancers?
e. Could we perhaps think about creating a universal aesthetic barometer for the blind and visually impaired in relation to a movement action linked to a dance step?
I would love to think so. Imagine that a count in a dance movement could be definable by associating it with a color. Imagine if we made this exercise and figured it out. What an absolutely insightful experience that would be for sighted people to understand the aesthetic feeling and emotion as the blind experience it. Colors are always linked to evoking certain emotions. We call it color psychology. But color is also illusionary.
And that’s why I immediately ask myself the critical question:
f. To what extent is all of this subjective? To what extent is the chosen color assignment subjective?
Words, conversation, descriptions seem to be very important in my brief experience with the blind. From that, I conclude that they generally find descriptions pleasant and valuable. The way colors are defined is also not objective, and it’s even dependent on language. In different languages, colors are named differently, so the statement of subjectivity holds true. However, associating a dance step with a color, I experience as a sighted person in this context possibly as a true relief. A welcome pause for the sighted to immerse themselves in the blind's perspective and understanding. As Piet emphasizes in one of his statements, we are certainly in Western society very visually oriented and heavily conditioned. I’ve also emphasized several times that the blind or visually impaired person also has a responsibility in the mutual coming together and approaching simultaneous pleasure stimuli (in our case for dance aesthetics). Creating a color palette by a blind person is striving for 100% approximation and understanding. Piet, this seems to me to be very interesting material to explore further.
With this second writing on aesthetics and the related questions, I now return to my earlier inquiries:
In the article about Abramovic, I ask the world questions about aesthetic value and blindness. I complete this by mentioning that I repetitively ask these questions to myself and to the blind. I suspect this will be a long-term project. Already, in my first findings, I need to reassess a few things, possibly adjust them or rediscover them. Piet, in a way, opened the Pandora's box. I align with Piet that research into multisensory experiences should be prioritized and described as the main title.
However, we need to define the inventiveness of a visual classification through color as a tool for the sighted in relation to the placement of a count in the movement for the blind or visually impaired (for dance in general or more specifically for the sighted dancer, and even further, the classical approach to dance aesthetics, which is still the general rule until today).
By “sticking” a color to a “count,” we might offer a clear solution for a possible universal movement classification for both the blind and sighted dancer.
What a wonderful approach! Thank you, Piet.
As a follow-up, I’ll send you the questions in this article, but this definitely needs to be thought through further. I’m already looking forward to the next step.
