Juha-Pekka Alarauhio (University of Oulu, Finland)

The Blind Bard at Work: Senses, Human Technologies, and Paradise Lost in John Milton’s Artistic Production

Since Homer, famously known as “the blind man who dwells in rugged Chios,” (Thucydides), the theme of visual impairment has been central to narratives about poets and their creative abilities. This image of the blind bard, reinforcing the idea of the solitary artistic genius, has shaped cultural perceptions of poets from Homer to Wordsworth, Helen Keller and beyond. In this talk, I explore the impact of John Milton’s loss of vision (around 1652) on his artistic production, focusing on the interplay between his altered sensory experience and the human technologies he used to create his most famous work, Paradise Lost (1667). These technologies, shaped by the social and material conditions of Milton’s era, ranged from the physical tools and support systems available to him to narrative and compositional tools that became essential under the constraints of his blindness. I argue that Milton’s reconfigured sensorium transformed his poetic practices. By analyzing the technologies he adopted, I reveal a compelling example of the adaptability of human capacities in response to profound change.
Keywords: human technology, sensorium, epic poetry, generic composition

Jarkko Toikkanen (University of Oulu, Finland)

Medial Enability and Sensory Access in Solo Role-playing Games

Tabletop role-playing games are traditionally played in a group sharing a collective space, either physical or virtual, but solo role-playing games such as Whispers in the Walls (2023, Pandion Games) enable individuals to role-play without fellow gamers. The booklet the game consists of contains a shorthand set of instructions and a host of verbal prompts mediating the gameplay. As the player draws cards, they are cued to respond to the relevant prompt in their own words through either speech or writing. The booklet gives them a description of the unfolding scene and asks them for a response. In effect, the player creates – or journals – their own story through and around the verbal prompts, constructing the narrative in their preferred manner.
I will explain how the solo role-playing game functions as an experience technology that demonstrates the gains of medial enability and range of sensory access. Experience technologies are media items designed to produce experience in medium specific ways, interactively engaged with through manifold media actuation. The novel term medial enability highlights the diversity of sensory access by which Whispers in the Walls also enables potentially disabled gamers to role- play.
Keywords: medial enability, role-playing games, experience technology

Ulriika Väisänen (University of Oulu, Finland)

Indirect Sensory Worldbuilding in Epic the Musical and Sensory Accessibility

This study focuses on a musical adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey to demonstrate how different media formats can tackle the challenges of accessibility in relation to sensory limitations. The focus is on how Epic the musical ((Rivera-Herrans, 2022–present) as a fully auditory media format evokes sensory perceptions outside the direct sensory affordances of the medium, which provides an example of how narrative storytelling experiences can be adapted to diverse audiences, with or without sensory impairments. I will use the theory of speculative worldbuilding (Roine, 2016) to examine how Epic constructs engagement with the fictional world of the Odyssey. The methodological tool used to analyse the materials is my own model of direct and indirect media engagement (DIME) that combines the multimodal conceptualisation of modalities and modes from Elleström (2021) and the intermedial three-tier model of mediality from Toikkanen (2022). Ultimately, the results of this form-oriented analysis will be examined through the lens of accessibility, the ability of a person with disabilities to engage meaningfully with a media technology (Ellcessor, 2016), using Ellcessor’s “access kit”, which provides a guideline on how to analyse accessibility in relation to media.

Keywords: worldbulding, sensory impairment, DIME method