Press Coverage

Ninety Five Per Cent Spring 2000 p6-7

Terry lies, outstretched on a canvas of violent colour. With sudden deliberate jerks of his legs, charged with thick, acrylic paint, he creates patterns of black and red, swirls of angry pigment. Focused on him is a video camera, playing his actions onto the wall above his head. He watches himself paint, sees himself dance and adjusts his movements accordingly. And, gradually, the canvas is filled.

This isn’t a typical evening at the ICA. Nor is it a rare chance to see a Dutch performance art troupe at the Roundhouse. This is a session in an inspirational, and probably unique ten-month digital arts project under the auspices of Lighthouse, the Brighton-based multi-media education charity, and taking place with the participation of six young adults with profound physical disabilities at Chailey Heritage Clinical Services in East Sussex.

When I went to watch a session, my preconceptions about digital art were turned on their heads. I had envisaged a room filled with passive screen watching, mouse clicking, image scanning. What I encountered was a noisy, highly creative workshop. An environment meticulously designed to enable six young people with very different needs and interests realise more of their potential.

Combining the physical and the digital

Kate Adams, one of the professional artists involved, explained: “We use a combination of the physical and the digital. It is completely interactive. With Terry’s circular painting, he has full physical engagement with what he is doing.” Whereas, according to Kate, one of the other students won’t go near a pot of paint: “He is much more interested in what still cameras and moving digital video can do. So we try to find different interfaces to help him access paint programs through computers.”

Through a painstaking process of consultation and investigation, an individual program is tailor-made by the artist, which uses appropriate technology to pursue diverse artistic goals. The students can make yes/no responses (through facial expressions, for example) but each has, in addition, a range of communication and speech synthesiser systems to draw on: the Bliss symbol system (where the letters are chosen from a laminated board), the chameleon ( a computer that employs the Chailey Communications system, where letters are selected through a chin-operated switch), and other augmentative communication devices.

Equipment has to be adapted for each student using a range of input devices, like chin switches, joysticks or large buttons or switches. But whilst many computer accessing problems have already been solved in situ, there is still a great deal to do. One challenge is how to manipulate a cursor across a diagonal, using buttons and switches, for free style painting and drawing. The artists have experimented with prototype input devices, the most successful of which was a large tracker ball mounted onto a switch mechanism, placed under the student’s chin. But the student for whom this was designed found this frustrating, as he did not have sufficient control of head and chin movement. In addition, when it came to clicking on the mouse, a second operator was required to interrogate and click on the options with a second switch. So, it was back to the drawing board.

This can make it a slow process.

Malcolm Dick, a digital installation sculptor (and the other artist working on the project), explains: “It’s a learning process for us. For me, actually. I work quite fast, so I have to slow right down.” “You have to be more considerate,’ adds Kate. But whilst communication can be quite slow at times, making art fast: “After twelve weeks of working on the project, we have enough material to fill a large exhibition at the Tate.”

Autonomy and self-determination

And Kate is adamant that the technology involved is simply a means to an end: “The am is to find a way of helping people to make art. That’s it. “She points out that art is an expressive medium: “It is not about “I want a coffee with two sugars”. It is about something else and we don’t want to define it. We want to find out what it’s about.” And for people who have spent much of their lives up to this point being told what to do, this can present a hefty challenge. Luckily, the whole ethos of care and education at Chailey is about helping people who have limited means of communication to make choices about their lives, so these students have a good basis from which to explore their artistic desires.

Autonomy and self-determination are central to the creative process, as Kate makes clear: “The primary aim of the project is to facility individual creative expression using digital technologies. To do this, we are exploring ways of helping students to be autonomous and independent in making their creative decisions.”

Malcolm is honest about the fact that he is a ‘channel’ in this process and that he has to decide the range of options that the student is being offered to pursue. “When I see things that the students produce, I think: that would look wonderful here or that would look wonderful there - and I end up orchestrating the thing, if I’m not careful.” But provided the artist is aware of this tension, what difference is there between this and any other artist-led workshop process? After all, no art is ever produced in a vacuum.

What began to emerge from my visit to this extraordinary project was a world of almost endless possibilities and limitless experimentation. Because it is unique in scale and intensity it is almost impossible to prescribe its end point. There was an open day last term detailing work in progress and there is talk of a further exhibition, possibly involving an interactive live art video environment and introducing an element of performance.

And after the ten months? Each student will have the option to hold onto the equipment specially adapted for his or her needs. Malcolm is characteristically straightforward: “If people want to go on with it, it would be great to provide software and hardware answers to assist them. “Kate Adams was less prosaic. “All we are doing is searching for a way to create some kind of truth.” And, taken together, these two statements just about say it all: this is one of those rare projects which has its feet on the ground and its head reassuringly in the clouds.

Mind’s Eye Has Vision Of Beauty The Argus, Tuesday June 27 2000

Jason Reif has been taking photos with his mind.

He has been using waves in his brain to operate a remote camera and create digital art. Jason is profoundly disabled. He has been testing the Cyberlink hardware as part of a project to harness the creative powers of disabled people with cutting-edge technology.

Three artists, Malcolm Buchannan-Dick, of Shoreham, Hastings-based Kate Adams and David Prytherch, of Stourbridge, have worked with six young people who have complex disabilities over the last ten months at the Chailey Heritage Centre, near Lewes.

The project is run by Brighton-based art centre Lighthouse and funded by the Arts Council of England. Kate Adams explained: “The project was about trying to get them to do whatever they could. Our approach was about enabling.”

This enabling meant drawing together computer arts technology and the devices normally used by disabled people for control and communication. Kate and Malcolm discovered the chin switch control used by many of the participants could be turned into a mouse. Once plugged into a device known as a Tash, mouse moves let the participants control a cursor and begin to paint. Students also moved trackballs with their chins and operated joysticks.
Everything was connected to the computer to give them control over the artistic process Whole walls became computer screens using data projectors normally seen in conferences and seminars.

Kate said: “We wanted to enlarge the experience of being creative. Some of the students have sensory impairments.” When students such as Terry Marshall, used traditional paints, they were filmed and their images were projected on to the walls, recreating their own art as they created it. Most remarkable was the Cyberlink. Controlling computers with brainwaves sounds like science fiction but it worked for the Chailey students. The Cyberlink detected alpha, beta and theta brainwaves and tension in the face and used the signals to control a camera. The technology was only being tested and is far form perfect but it was a remarkable experience for participants like Jason. Malcolm explained: “There is quite a lot of equipment available but it’s a case of finding ways of applying it and mixing technologies together.”

Jane Finnis, project director, is hoping to use what money remains to fund-raise and give the students permanent access to the technology at Chailey. In the meantime , she hopes to win funding for another course. It is all a long way from the traditional image of bringing art to disabled people where the paintbrush is often held by a teacher. The Chailey project aimed to take away this hand and let disabled people draw and paint for themselves. For many this was a new experience and it revealed talents which had never been properly recognised before. Not being able to easily pick up a paintbrush or pencil meant that the abilities of those with complex disabilities often went unexpressed and unnoticed. Kate compared the typical experience of artists who are encouraged by teachers and peers in the school art room. She said: ‘ I’m not sure anybody has ever said to these students, ‘you’re good at art’. They haven’t been able to paint a daffodil that looks like a daffodil .” The daffodil stumbling block has been an important one for Kate, Malcolm and David.

They have had to encourage the students to recognise abstract work is as worthwhile as perfect portraits. Kate said: “It’s about the validity of what the participants can do. What we wanted to say ‘whatever you do is valid.”
Persuading students there is more to art than recreating what they see was familiar to Kate.
She said it was a lesson which cropped up just as regularly on the foundation art courses she had taught as it did at Chailey. With the help of technology, the students at Chailey have been able to encounter the same satisfactions, frustrations and quandaries of anyone else who has experimented with art. Kate said what they have achieved would not have been possible ten years ago. But the demands of artistic work and the potential of new technology remain enticing. She said: “ If you are trying to be creative, you quickly reach the edges of what you can do.”

Ross Hawkins ross.hawkins@argus-btn.co.uk

Outline
Artists Statements
Participants
Images
Future
Press Coverage
Exhibition
Wheelchair Painting