RECREART
A group project with Esteban Poblano
This project seeks to resolve the question: How might we make art within museums accessible for those with vision impairment and other disabilities?
Previous solutions include 3D art recreations that imitate layout, textures, figures, or verbal descriptions of the work. Through these approaches, users can get a great understanding of the piece but it falls short on abstracted paintings that can't have a 3D or oral representation. It also does not work with artwork that heavily relies on the visual appeal of its production, such as pop art or even some concept art. In these cases, the art's essence and subjectivity are lost.
Our solution was to replicate the creation process of the painting, allowing the user to retrace the brushstrokes within the painting. It utilizes cross-sensory techniques including auditory representations of the brushstroke to capture the speed and emotion behind each trace. The paintbrush seen in the image above (to the right of the box), would be used to make the brushstroke, which begins at the white bumps. When the brush is placed at the beginning of each stroke path, the metal coating seen at the base of the brush would activate the sonification of the brushstroke. The sonification and wiring were prototyped using the BBC Micro: bit.
It was largely an iterative process mostly reliant on Cognitive Science concepts learned in class such as cross-sensory gestalt principles and embodied cognition. I also coded a website to present this project (scroll to the bottom to see code for the homepage) on VS Code and coded the BBC: Mirobit on the block programming language.
Original Painting
CAD model of RECREART in the AGO
Final Prototype
This prototype is meant to imitate Arshile Gorky's "They Will take my Island", an abstract surrealist painting found in the AGO. The way the brushstroke would be recreated is through a representation of the painting
It is made mainly out of wood, as it provides an organic, warm feeling to the design, as well as keeping with the AGO's overall look and providing durability. The colours also match that of the AGO's and the blue and yellow. These were specifically used in the prototype, as they are compatible with the most common colour blindness, red-green. Haptic and auditory feedback was used, as these are the two senses besides sight that are stimulated during painting.