MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

: Exploring Animation and Virtual Reality To Represent The Perceptual-Experiences of Artists with Sight-Loss

Abstract

Whilst the sighted generally imagine blindness as a dark world, many people with sight-loss have some perception of light, form, movement and shape. As vivid mental images can be generated from sensory modalities, the ability to see is not necessary for the comprehension and creation of visual art. This practice-based PhD project uses VR animation software, Oculus Quill, to represent the perceptual-experiences of three award-winning professional artists with sight-loss. Viewed using an Oculus Quest headset, virtual worlds enable sighted users to understand perceptual-experiences of the participants, whose public commissions and exhibitions include Tate Modern, San Diego Arts Institute, Royal Academy of Arts and the Scottish Parliament. Their practice includes on-site drawing on London Underground trains, casting bronze singing bowls in Burma, concrete installations and giant size sculptures of indecipherable braille. This inductive research adopts an interpretive approach incorporating the strength of exploratory and descriptive case study to compare abstract concepts of blindness to actual lived experiences and aimed to represent the perceptual-experiences of art practitioners with sight-loss, using the cinematic practice of 3D animation, created and viewed in virtual reality (VR).

Semi-structured interviews were conducted in the creative environments of each artist to understand the methods they use and how sight-loss shapes their practice. Transcripts were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) and reflexive thematic analysis (TA) and generated the following sub-themes: Experience of Sight-Loss; Sensory Sensibilities and Understandings; Spatial Comprehension; Active Listening; Internal Memory Data Banks; Comprehension of movement and gait; and Blindness Gain. The sub-themes informed three over-arching themes, namely: The Importance of Autonomy; The Importance of Environment; and Wayfinding using sensory toolkits. The verbatim recordings provide an orthographic account and emotionally compelling story which forms the foundation of the core contribution, being the ‘pull-through’ process and pipeline of creating and visualising thematic data, realised in an 8-minute VR experimental film, which presents a first-person voice of each participant in a virtual animated experience.

Date of Award	2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Dundee
Supervisor	Fraser Bruce (Supervisor) & Caroline Erolin (Supervisor)