Statement of Intent

Following the questions that we asked ourselves after the tutorial and before the presentation about our idea we needed to be more direct and precise with our idea. As a result we produced a statement of intent:

Once you’ve lost a Sense, What Are You Left With?

Imagine what it would be like to be blind? This is extremely difficult, even for the most imaginative, because how could you possible imagine a life without something that has been there since birth? Our project sets out to give the user an experience of becoming blind, and the confusion surrounding it. The piece will be set in a hospital environment, following a car crash, in which the user has become blind.

The users will be several different students from around university. An individual will enter the room one at a time. The idea behind the individuality is an attempt to highlight the lonely experience that many people who have become blind feel. We thought that a hospital experience would add to the confusion, as the user wouldn’t understand what had happened and why they were there until later into the piece.

The user will enter a room, which will be pitch black where they will soon realize that they have been in a car crash and that their family has been admitted to intensive care in a critical condition. As the user moves around the space, obviously disorientated by the lack of sight, they will trigger different sensors (a series of pressure pads), which will in turn reveal more about the crash and what has happened to the user. The sensors will either trigger a sound, which will reveal further information about the narrative, i.e. conversations with doctors. The other sensors will trigger a rapid flash of slight light across the walls of the room. Many blind are not totally blind and can in fact see either specks or movement in light. We also decided that a quick movement in light would add to the disorientation of the user, adding to the frustration of not being able to see. The sensors will be hidden in several tradition hospital props, e.g. hospital beds, surgical counters, drips etc. Most of the piece’s in the room will have sensors attached which can be triggered by the user engaging with them in a certain way, i.e. lying down on a bed will start sounds that will correspond with a different member of the family.

We decided to use a dramatic situation in the piece in order to fully submerge the user into the piece, as oppose to random sounds being triggered and the user not really knowing what is happening. Through conditional statements the user can progress through the situation, so if they move to somewhere in the hospital before they go somewhere else they will find out certain information that wouldn’t have been accessible without going to the first position in the room.

As this is a dramatic situation that involves the user, i.e. they have lost their sight in the crash; the user will take up a partially acted role in the situation; their movements around the scene will determine what they learn has happened. The piece makes it possible for different users to take different things from the piece, as if they take a different route they may miss certain parts of information that somebody else may receive.