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Artists and Authors
Lai Ping So, Wai Lun Hsu
Editorial, Graphic and Typography
Lai Ping So, Wai Lun Hsu
Bookbinding and Production
Lai Ping So
Publisher
soundpocket
110 × 140 mm, 78 pages
English and Traditional Chinese
Published in July 2021
Industrial printing technology has been employed to achieve mass production with its consequent cost-efficiencies. One negative side of this production process geared towards the maximization of circulation and profits, is that minority positions are neglected. Many minority groups have been denied direct ‘access’ to generic publications. For instance, visually-impaired groups cannot access printed books without assistance or translations.
This book attempts to bring three communities closer together: the visually-impaired, the hearing impaired, and everyone else in communities which are dependent upon different levels of sensory ability, respectively.
The three communities have distinct reading needs: visually-impaired persons need to substitute the sense of vision with other senses, such as with the use of braille to read the text by their sense of touch; on the other hand, hearing-impaired persons are able to read visual texts, but if there are any depictions related to ‘sound’, they may find them inaccessible since they lack the assumed hearing experiences. For example, if the sound of raining was depicted in words, the ideas of the sound of rain being loud or weak, quick or slow, gentle or uncomfortable to the ears– these concepts could be very abstract to a hearing-impaired person. For the everyone else in the communities that have direct experience of such imagery, it is not easy for them to understand the experiential world of persons with sensory impairment. In other words, here are three communities and they see the world and read books with the aid of very different sensory environments. This book has been created using experimental methods, in an attempt to communicate with these three groups of people.
23 clips of recorded sound of raining were used as a creative reference. By observing different characters of the sound, such as its length, loudness, distance, rhythm and so on, the book reproduces these characters by employing methods which requires mixed sensory perceptions, like visual signs, onomatopoeia, and the sense of touch. The recorded sound of raining were selected from 17 pop-culture films, including the arrangement and establishment of the scene. The length of each clips ranged from 10 seconds to a few minutes.
This is an artist book made by artist duo Lai Ping SO & Wai Lun HSU, 35 pieces were made in first edition, published in Hong Kong, all made and produced by the artists.
This book attempts to bring three communities closer together: the visually-impaired, the hearing impaired, and everyone else in communities which are dependent upon different levels of sensory ability, respectively.
The three communities have distinct reading needs: visually-impaired persons need to substitute the sense of vision with other senses, such as with the use of braille to read the text by their sense of touch; on the other hand, hearing-impaired persons are able to read visual texts, but if there are any depictions related to ‘sound’, they may find them inaccessible since they lack the assumed hearing experiences. For example, if the sound of raining was depicted in words, the ideas of the sound of rain being loud or weak, quick or slow, gentle or uncomfortable to the ears– these concepts could be very abstract to a hearing-impaired person. For the everyone else in the communities that have direct experience of such imagery, it is not easy for them to understand the experiential world of persons with sensory impairment. In other words, here are three communities and they see the world and read books with the aid of very different sensory environments. This book has been created using experimental methods, in an attempt to communicate with these three groups of people.
23 clips of recorded sound of raining were used as a creative reference. By observing different characters of the sound, such as its length, loudness, distance, rhythm and so on, the book reproduces these characters by employing methods which requires mixed sensory perceptions, like visual signs, onomatopoeia, and the sense of touch. The recorded sound of raining were selected from 17 pop-culture films, including the arrangement and establishment of the scene. The length of each clips ranged from 10 seconds to a few minutes.
This is an artist book made by artist duo Lai Ping SO & Wai Lun HSU, 35 pieces were made in first edition, published in Hong Kong, all made and produced by the artists.
