Kuti36

JOONAS RINTA-KANTO: COFFEE 2

TOISENLAINEN TAIDEKAUPPA WWW.TABULALAND.COM

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23.5.-6.9.

tänyttä Nyrjämhalaista suo kuvasarja oria huum

2015 AVOINNA

TI–SU 10–17, KE 12–19, LA 10–13, MA SULJETTU

WWW.MIKKELI.FI/MUSEOT

RISTIMÄENKATU 5 50100 MIKKELI

Tactile Literacy A certain awareness regarding artwork accessibility for blind or visually impaired people has been witnessed the last years. For the people of this informal community, touch is the primary way to acquire information, access a work of art and complete their mental image of an object. Museums, galleries and public art spaces are progressively organizing alternative visits, based on the tactile experience, such as touch tours and handling sessions using specially designed replicas, facsimiles, tactile diagrams, and relief structures. The redefinition of their approach stems partly from a general avowal: art apprehension is predominantly visual. Although touch is unanimously considered a mother-sense it has long been detached from the art experience.

Regaining contact with our tactile self seems a necessity and in some instances, museums and curators advocate for a non-segregational frame for these alternative visits. Everyone, not only people with visual disabilities, seems to enjoy experiencing textures, weight, and the feel of objects in art or historical depictions. These visits should be open to the general public.

Ilan Manouach SHAPEREADER© A tactile language for the visually impaired

Furthermore, art practitioners readapt themselves to this new situation and a growing number of visual artists re-orient their practices challenging our sense of touch. In contemporary sculpture, the use of soft materials, like fur, felt, foam, fibers, and fabric, is evidence of the decision to rehabilitate our haptic sensibility in the art field. For artists following more militant pursuits, touch can be a kind of political arena. By the use of tactility in their work, these artists deal directly with accessibility issues by means of tactile canvases, Braille alphabet usage or simply by organizing their production in regard to specific communities with visual disabilities.

Shapereader©

Shapereader© is a repertoire of forms and patterns that constitute an attempt to translate words and meanings into tactile formations. It was designed from scratch with the goal to allow the creation of narrative works of tactile literature for and from a visually impaired readership.

Shapereader© advocates for new publishing grounds and challenges the visual predominance of reading and the storytelling experience.

While it has been mainly created for the purposes of a blind community, the Shapereader© repertoire can also be experienced by the acquainted regular user. Through circumvention of his visual sensorimotor stimuli, it activates the repressed tactile-sensory realm and offers a new diegetic experience by transposing semantic and syntactical structures cognizance to the reader’s fingertips.

Shapereader© is an experimental approach in graphic storytelling, the first of its kind.

The creation of Shapereader© has been generously funded by the Finnish Institute Koneen Säätiö in 2013 during their Art & Multilingualism grant call. Shapereader© and the graphic novel Arctic Circle have been designed by Ilan Manouach.

Communication Boards

Six hand-held communication boards allow the reader to get acquainted with the Shapereader© repertoire. They carry all the index for 210 different shapes, providing the tactile equivalents for the specific features of the story. These shapes are sorted to groups according to their semantic content and function so that they can be easily traced by beginner readers: characters, props, settings, actions, affections, graphic and textual devices.

Arctic Circle

The first narrative work to use the Shapereader© repertoire is Arctic Circle, a 57-page original tactile novel relating the story of two climatologists digging in the North Pole. They are researching for patterns of climatic change inscribed on ice columns.

Arctic Circle consists of:

• 57 wooden plates (50cm x 35cm x 0.6cm)

• 6 communication boards (50cm x 35cm x 0.6cm)

• 210 different patterns from the Shapereader© tactile repertoire and more than 6000 patterns forming the totality of the story • weighs a total of 95 kg

www.shapereader.org

http://www.koneensaatio.fi/

Q’s: Tuomas Tiainen A’s: Jason Where were you when you first became aware of the comics of Norway’s Jason? Slacking in your favourite comic book store searching for something new, surfing the Net’s gutters, demanding a fellow comics aficionado to come up with a list of TOP 5 comic artists right-now-this-second? Whatev er the case, you surely remember the anthropomorphic animal characters. You rememb er the feeling of timelessness. The silence. Yes, you must remember the silenc e.

Jason, born John Arne Sæterøy in 1965, has been utterly prolific, publishing new graphic novels almost on a yearly basis since his international debut Hey, Wait… in 2001. And not just silent comics, mind you. For example, the two Eisner Awardreceived stories (The Left Bank Gang, 2006; I Killed Adolf Hitler, 2007), probably his best-known, do have dialogue. But even when talking, Jason’s empty-eyed characters never seem to forget that silenc e is golden.

It’s about time Kuti talks to the man.

Looking back, Jason, what were your reason s to start drawing comics without dialogue?

Jason: In the beginning, I think it was mostly because I was uncomfortable with writing dialogue. In Hey, Wait… you can see I use less and less dialogue. And then I discovered silent comics, and it was a revela tion; to do comics and not worry about what the characters say.

SS HH HH !

– A Brief Chat with Jason

Did you have any influences that encouraged you to use only pictures to tell stories? Or, in other words, what are your favourite silent comics?

Jason: It’s still frank by Jim Woodring, especi ally his shorter stories, and the silent comics of Fabio, and of Lewis Trondh eim.

Making comics means constructing narratives using images and, possibly but not necessarily, words. How does creating silent comics differ from creating comics with dialogue? What does one have to take into account to keep a wordless story flowing?

Jason: I guess clarity is the most important thing. There shouldn’t be any doubts by the reader what is happening and why it is happening. Even if the story is dreamlike. You can’t explain things in dialogues, you have to explain it in images.

In The Living and the Dead and Tell Me Someth ing you use silent movie-type dialogue panels. How did you come up with this solution?

Jason: The zombie story I originally though t of as a film. A silent film. But I’m not a film maker, so I had to do it as a comic. And when the story takes place in the twenties, it works well to have the dialogues on panels, silent film style.

In what sense are your comics influen ced by cinema?

Jason: Well, clearl y the way I draw is influenced by Hergé from watching films, and Tintin, but I and my biggest sou often get ideas rce of inspiration also like Jim Jarmus is probably Aki Kau ch, Hal Hartley, Wes rismäki. But I films, really. Wester Anderson, and Terren ns, film noir, horror ce Malick. And all MTV and CGI ruined , science fiction, sorts of mostly older stuff, films. from before Do you have any par ticular favourites among silent films?

Jason: I like a lot of the Buster Keaton films. My favourite is probably Steamb oat Bill Jr. In an interview som e years ago you sai d that you had no making The Living detailed script bef and the Dead (2007) ore you started and that you just drawing it. Do you invented the story always follow this on the spot while app roach?

Jason: Yes, my sto ries are always imp rovised. I would los whole script writte e interest, i think, n down. In a worst case scenario, you out that the story ’re halfway into the if I had the doesn’t work, but thankfully, that has book and find pieces of dialogue n’t happened yet. written down, and I will often have often I do thumbnail penciling directly s. But other times on the paper.

I just start There is a certain feeling of ”old” in your work. Do you imagery? deliberately avoid using too modern Jason: Not necessari ly. I’ve drawn peo ple using computers a timeless quality, , but I like the com and if I draw someon ics to have since that’s how a e listening to a rec record looks in my ord it will probab mind, even if I’ve ly be an LP to give the charac bought cd’s for yea ters old-fashioned rs. And I prefer clothes, like a sui better to me. I thi t and a tie. Visual nk I’ve never drawn ly, it looks anyone in a hoodie .

noir. What is example horror and film different genres, for to keep in mind e hav you do es You like to play with rul of appealing? What sort it in genres you find ry? sto re gen a ng t to do ati when cre res. I don’t really wan res t prefer to work in gen Gen jus I e. w. sag kno mes a ’t e don hav I Jason: forbid, serious themes, or, God stuff in there and al son per a serious novel about put ll sti tance. You can ir heads. I gives you a certain dis genres, put them on the work with, or to mix in all my to gun a fun t wn jus dra e are I’v res nk gen of Hey, Wait…, I thi ion should be ept re exc The w. the h kno wit ’t don realised, in my life. Rules, I gun a d hel er nev e books and I’v some fun.

Vehlmann. How laborated with Fabien Graves (2011) you col With Isle of 100.000 n realize?

We talked did this collaboratio work and I knew his. a festival. He knew my at right project. the and e tim the Jason: I met Fabien ing Pirates, It was just about find a fun thing to draw. about working together. and that sounded like s ate pir ut abo a ide He had an ships. at least, not sailing do of plans for the future moment and what sort the at on g kin wor What are you l you have? sixth and probably fina projects. One is the ent fer dif two on g Jason: I’m workin a longer graphic novel. and the other one is French 48-page album of going silent again? but I will Do you have any plans s that are 100 % silent e any plans for storie m. the in els pan Jason: No, I don’t hav ent s that have lots of sil continue to do storie

And last: What is your favourite animal?

Jason: Cats. Animals I’ve never seen: wolves.

Thank you, Jason! http://catswithoutdogs.blogspot.fi/ Fact File: Jason Real name John Arne Sæterøy Born in Molde, Norway in 1965 First published in Norwegian comics magazine KonK in 1981 Started studying graphical design and illustration in Oslo’s National Academy of the Arts in 1989 First graphic novel Lomma full av regn (Pocket Full of Rain) in 1995 Launched the semi-regular comic book Mjau Mjau in 1997 Published in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, and the U.S.A. Bibliography: Hey, Wait… (2001), Sshhhh! (2002), The Iron Wagon (2003), Tell Me Something (2004), You Can’t Get There From Here (2004), Why Are You Doing This? (2005), Meow, Baby! (2006), The Left Bank Gang (2006), The Living and the Dead (2007), I Killed Adolf Hitler (2007), The Last Musketeer (2008), Pocket Full of Rain (2008), Low Moon (2009), Almost Silent (collection, 2009), Werewolves of Montpellier (2010), What I Did (collection, 2010), Isle of 100,000 Graves (with Fabien Vehlmann, 2011), Athos in America (2012), Lost Cat (2013) Awards: Sproing (1995, 2000), Urhunden Prize (2000), Inkpot Award (2002), Harwey (2002), Brage Prize (2005), Eisner Award (2007, 2008)

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