‘Picture Yourself in a Boat on a River’: A Collaborative Exploration of the Mental Image through Blindness and Aphantasia

This collaborative presentation will explore the mental image from different perspectives on an expansive spectrum of vision, with particular interest in the experiences of seeing and not-seeing within the mind. David is a blind artist whose work explores themes of presence, absence, collaboration, and sensory experience through sculptural and other media. He is currently completing a fine art practice-led doctorate at the Royal College of Art, London, titled ‘Blind Aesthetics: Art as the Currency of Radical Vision’. Kevin’s research applies the intersensory and bodily philosophy of Michel Serres to film, photography, and painting. David is adventitiously totally blind and identifies as hyperphantasic, meaning he experiences vivid and abundant mental visual images. Kevin has healthy vision and identifies as aphantasic, meaning he experiences little or no mental visual imagery. Over the last year, we’ve been probing the meeting points and distinctions between our relative capabilities of mental visualisation as part of an ongoing sensory dialogue. Our discussions overlap between audio description, shared memories, using language to evoke our experiences, and questioning how our respective mental imagery or lack of it situates us in relation to imagined objects and spaces. Our presentation will share these contrasting mental experiences and will then invite the audience to join this sensory discussion by picturing themselves within a landscape of tangerine trees and marmalade skies.
Keywords: mental image, blindness, aphantasia, collaboration, topological thinking

Jason Archer ∆ & Thomas Conner ∆ (Michigan Technological University; University of Tulsa, USA)
3-2-1 Contact!: Haptic Holograms and the Programming of Touch

Two technologies are converging — midair haptics and digital holograms — in service of a project not only to materialize touch but to program it. In this presentation, we examine the emergence of haptic holograms to interrogate the sociotechnical construction of liminal sensory experiences that defy easy categorization as either tactile or visual. These new systems of calculating and projecting sensory experience intersect with and challenge social constructions of the biological senses and sense-making. Bringing together theories of touch and haptics with the media philosophy of Vilém Flusser — namely, his concept of the “technical image” and his own thinking on embodiment and gesture — we posit the notion of the “technical material.” The projection of 3D objects into space not just visually but haptically mixes up ideas, representations, experiences, and ontologies about images and objects, offering a new way of thinking about the social construction of senses. Just as viewing a digital image means viewing a computed abstraction, so does touching what these systems calculate and produce as a surface. The resulting new experiences are of something other than a hologram or even an image — they are unique liminal spaces for the production and experience of new sensory experiences and ways of knowing.
Keywords: holograms, haptics, computation, technical material, sociotechnical