Writer
and pod cast host Romeo Edmead is using his fingers to unlock a world he has
never experienced before. Edmead lost his sight when he was just two-years-old,
so he has always had a complicated relationship with art and museums.
While
he has heard of classical paintings, he says school trips to museums were
uncomfortable.
“I
knew that what my friends would experience, because I went to public schools
with sighted kids, and knew that what they would experience, I wouldn’t
necessarily experience because they could use their sense of sight and I didn’t
have that. Touching was obviously… prohibited. So it was a double edge sword
growing up,” said Edmead.
He
describes running his fingers over a 3D version of Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington
Crossing the Delaware,” at a library for the blind in New York City, as a kind
of “freedom.”
“All
my life we’ve all heard of famous painters and their works. But to me, that’s
all they were,” he said. “They were like vocabulary words I could write down on
the page but I didn’t necessarily know how to put a physical picture together.
Something like this presents that opportunity, that freedom to get a better understanding.
It’s one thing to have something described to you. But if you never could see
before and have no memory of seeing like me it’s a whole different ball of wax
when you actually get to touch it.”
The
man behind the 3D printed works is John Olson. A former photographer for LIFE
magazine, Olson co-founded a company called 3D Photoworks that developed and
patented their own printing process for works of fine art.
“It’s
a three step process, in which we in step one take any conventional two dimensional
image and convert it to 3D data. Once that data has been converted, we send it
to a machine that sculpts the data out of a block of substrate. It gives that
image length, width, depth and texture. And once that’s been sculpted it goes
through a printing process where we lay the image back down on top of the
relief in perfect registration. So what you end up with is a three dimensional
print that has length, width, depth and texture,” said Olson.
While
Olson met with Edmead to guide him through the works himself, the company has
also developed a string of sensors across the artworks, that when touched, give
the viewer audio information, to contextualize the painting and help the viewer
understand certain key elements.
For
Rowana, who lost her sight when she was 28-years-old, being able to touch the
paintings was a very different experience than Romeo’s. She said having that
context is especially important for someone like her, who uses memory when
visualizing art.
She
admits that she was skeptical, but after touching a 3D reproduction of
Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” which she remembered seeing, it all made
sense.
“It’s
nice because now it’s attainable. Now I could feel it and judge for myself what
I think it looks like. Because even as you look at it I’m sure you see this
differently than he would. You know? So to be honest it just makes me able to
experience it because if I’m in a room and it’s just hanging on a wall … you
know I could stay at home and somebody could describe something to me. I don’t
need to go to a museum to have somebody describe it to me.”
It
took Olson seven years to develop the method, but now he is moving full speed
ahead. He is raising money to scale up the production with a Kickstarter
campaign and has already booked a 3D printed show of photos taken by blind
photographers that will be held at The Canadian Museum for Human Rights in
2016.
“Our goal is to make art
and photography available to the world’s blind population,” he said. “There are
285 million blind and sight impaired world-wide. One person goes blind in the
U.S. every 11 minutes. So our goal is to make this available at every museum,
every science center, every institution, first in this country and then
beyond.”
Originally published by Thomson Reuters Foundation
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