BLIND SPOT_ STARING DOWN THE VOID

BLIND SPOT investigates a sensory phenomenon at the gravitational center of all material knowledge. The project researches the implications of the “blind spot” to artists in the visual and performing arts concerned with the implications of perception in human experience and society. The term “blind spot” stems from medical research into the optics of the eye. “The natural blind spot is due to lack of receptors where the optic nerve and blood vessels leave the eye. Blindness is absence of seeing. It may be experienced as blackness, or very differently it may be nothing. The sudden blindness of switching off the light is blackness (and black is a colour); nothingness is lack of visual sensation, as for the world behind one’s head.” Prof. Richard Gregory and Prof. Patrick Cavanagh (2011), Scholarpedia, 6(10):9618. The term is also used in photography, describing the nodal point of a camera. Beyond its’ technical significance the blind spot is of course a metaphor for a multitude of juxtapositions, between the visible and invisible, the static and fluid, the known and unknown. Blind spot is that which is uncannily present, and at the center, but remains unseen and undescribed. The project works from the artistic potential of the blind spot and its fuzzy surroundings.

The research unfolds between 2016 – 2019 in working groups, residencies and seminars. Blind spot as a topic is activated through performing arts processes, leading to three main productions: one performative production for stage to be toured nationally and internationally; a second research production will result in an exhibition to be presented nationally and internationally; and thirdly, a publication, reflecting upon the artistic and academic process of the research project. The publication NARP-2016/10003 Page 2 (2) Submitted - 25-Mar-2019 also constitutes a collection,a sourcebook of the most diverse artistic material on the subject. The artistic research and production will be accompanied by investigations into the topic through the academic eye of scholarship in contemporary and media archaeology, history, sociology, technology, literature and philosophy. The research is led by Prof. Karen Kipphoff of Norwegian Theater Academy at the University College Østfold in Fredrikstad and partner institutions in Berlin and Bucharest, also including students and research fellows as well as commissioned artists and scholars.