Adjustment

Adjustment

Adjustment, multimedia installation (UV black-lights, strobe light, projector, acrylic on canvas, documentary, sound), 2012

The starting point for this work was the desire to, both analyse and try to understand the process of losing sight. The preliminary theoretical research resulted in a simulation of the before mentioned process, in order to bring the issue closer to „us “(people who can see). The work confronts the viewers with a situation in which they lose their ability to visually relate to their surroundings, as well as their ability to correlate with those same surroundings. As the installation progresses the viewers are gradually introduced to questions, feelings and experiences, which people who lost their sight might have experienced.

The nature of memories is rhetorical – it is both visually and verbally coded. Psychological terms of vision – inner vision, imagination, dreams and memories – are as equally stimulated by visual , as by verbal sources. Visual perception never ceases to exist, even when the conditions change. Likewise, the society never vanished. But, the „ rules of the game “changed for those who can no longer see.

On the other hand, the people who subsequently became blind are not deprived of their position as social subjects; nor did they become oblivious to the mechanisms of society; and neither did their awareness of the existence of objects and urban elements (that encircle them) cease to exist. It is not to far off, if we draw the analogy with Kevin Lynch’s (The Image of the City) alienated city – a space in which people (in their spirit) are not capable of drawing their own position in the city, nor the position of the city itself. Here we stumble upon the problem of forming a mental map – a map that enables an individual subject to locate and represent itself in the vast and mostly likely unimaginable totality, that consist of a sum of city’s structural elements.  Cognitive mapping, in a broader context, demands a coordination of existential data (empiric position of the subject itself) with the inanimate, abstract structures of the city’s totality.

How do we position ourselves in such a place? Especially when we are missing one of the key elements for our analysis – our sight?

The work consists of an audio-visual installation and a documentary – in which the partakers of this project explain the conditions and circumstances under which they lost their sight ( either disease or accident ); the symptoms before and results after they lost their sight; the psychological and physical crises they have went through during that period; their adjustment to the situation; the limitations and obstacles the had to face, as well as the ones they will always have to face; emotional depletion; the availability of information; their ability to cope and make amends with the situation they are in; their fears; and most important – their willpower.

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