Kieran Boland

Re: Location The Lock-Up, Newcastle
Curated by Critical Animals 2-25 October 2015

Photographed braille translations of film scripts with subtitles and blind contour annotations for a video  ​featuring Rebecca BOWER Lambda Prints 60 x 84cm

Poster sized film scripts reference the practice of providing off-screen cue cards of a similar size during a film shoot—a visual memory aid inaccessible to a blind actor or an actor required to play a blind person. The video for which the film scripts were produced features a blind character walking through a non-site at night who finds coins amongst discarded objects. Incoming questions from (offseen) children via radio transmission occur when she flicks a coin up into the air. Each call is a query about some aspect of life on an international space station. The site is presented as a seamless image in constant rotation akin to a satellite's orbit around the earth—hence there is no beginning or end to the questions posited by the children. The actor uses a different accent for every answer, creating a disparity between her reliability as a witness to the cosmic sights she describes and the mundane setting she explores as a blind person. The scripts derive from a radio interview that took place in 2011 between vision impaired Australian children and an American astronaut residing on the international space station. Its appropriation here is as a "transmission interception" within a wider context of what constitutes outer space.