Sensory Beyond Sight
Description
The "Misregistration" project brought together a highly interdisciplinary team to investigate how adaptive choreography, immersive sound design, and scientific visualization can converge into inclusive art installations and performances. The project focused on creating innovative performance environments that center the experiences and perspectives of vision-impaired individuals.
A soft spotlight follows a lone figure moving slowly, tentatively, around a darkened space. Suddenly, the dancer turns and propels himself forward in a burst of energy toward a sound emanating from a corner of the room. As more sounds occur, the dancer perceives and interprets the environment, physical gestures triggered from audio prompts, creating choreography from spatialized sound.
The creative and performing arts have often been effective in communicating the range of challenges faced by visually impaired individuals, but the arts have not been used as a tool to facilitate and drive research. This project spotlights the potential of creative collaborations across a range of technologies and disciplines, amplifying the arts and engaging the too often underserved visually impaired community. We will explore ways our individual areas of expertise can work together, across the senses, to develop novel ways of creative, inclusive production, prioritizing audio and embodied movement, and lay the groundwork for future inclusion of the disabled in promoting innovative research and understanding.
Documentation
Building on our large-scale video installation Hidden Within, produced with support from the CCI CyberArts and Design Program (2023-24), our interdisciplinary team—visual artist Janet Biggs, vision-impaired dancer Davian Robinson, mathematicians Agnieszka Międlar and Paul Cazeaux, and sound specialist Tanner Upthegrove—continues to push the boundaries of research and creative experimentation, drawing inspiration from steganography.
At its core, our project explores how information is concealed, detected, and revealed. Beneath the surface, it delves into introspection, examining the many ways hidden information operates— whether as a tool for amplifying voices suppressed by oppression or as a means of spreading and uncovering misinformation.
Expanding across sensory dimensions, we are currently developing a 3D-printed book integrating AR technology alongside a dance performance that experiments with new, inclusive choreographic techniques. Our choreography embraces the strengths of individuals with disabilities, incorporating touch, sound, and echolocation as alternative methods of communication. What remains hidden to some becomes a vital means of connection and support for the dancers, fostering a new system of care.
The performance itself is structured through layered spatial sound, shaped by moiré interference patterns of two frequencies, combined with stroboscopic effects and haptic feedback. Prioritizing auditory and tactile experiences, it challenges conventional notions of movement and perception.
Our book serves as both an archival document and a sculptural object, capturing the essence of our collaborative process. Imagery is printed in relief, inviting touch, while textual content remains hidden—accessible only through augmented reality. Readers must engage multiple senses and technologies to uncover what lies within its covers, mirroring the themes of our work.
Through the fusion of audio spatialization, adaptive technologies, and movement improvisation, our project amplifies personal narratives while advocating for the integration of user perspectives in shaping emerging technologies. Our project will not only facilitate broader avenues of representation, but will also lay the groundwork for future inclusion of the disabled in promoting innovative research and understanding.
Reports
With overall 15 participants representing diverse disciplines and various units within the VT community, e.g., Center for Human-Computer Interaction, Center of Educational Networks and Impacts, School of Architecture etc., the workshops were a big success. Everyone involved was highly engaged and found the experience both informative and insightful, with many describing it as "life changing." Prof. Andrew Gipe-Lazarou, inspired by his own experience during the workshop, expressed interest in hosting a workshop at the VT School of Architecture.
Bright future for Misregistration project
We have had regular meetings, both on Zoom and in person, and are working to realize technical elements of the final installations:
immersive spatialized sound with speaker arrays for more isolated sound, e.g., interference patterns, building up on sounds from the CCI Art Program project Hidden Within, and addition of new music compositions in collaboration with composer Carter Roberts, an undergraduate student in the School of Performing Arts,
furthering the project with external funding and presentations from the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte, North Carolina,
visual elements for upcoming public facing events, including large-scale video imagery of moiré patterns and interactive imagery using tools such as Jitter,
an artist’s book that documents the project with imagery, written text, braille, and augmented reality.
Upcoming major public facing events:
Art Installation and Live Performance(s) in the Moss Arts Center, April 2025.
Art Installation and Performance at Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte, July 2025 (tentative).
Hidden Within / Misregistration installed in the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke.
Impact
Sensory Beyond Sight workshops, October 24th, 2024:
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