About the project
The BWP is an accessible and participatory public art work conceived in Australia in late 2006 by Anne Walton (video/performance artist) and Bruce Maguire (braille advocate and expert).
The project materialises on city streetfront windows, where it draws upon elements of writing, performance, sound and video projection to become a truly hybrid form of art. It is a temporary work designed to move from one city streetfront window to another, celebrating braille and exploring the nature of the visible world through a lens of braille.
It was first staged on the streetfront window of Gallery 4a in Sydney's Chinatown district in January 2007, with a Quick Response Grant from City of Sydney, in-kind support from the NSW Branch of The Australian Braille Authority and Quantum Technology.
It will be staged throughout Australia, and possibly overseas, in 2008-2009, at appropriate events and venues, including (but not limited to):
- The General Assembly of the International Council on English Braille (ICEB), and The Round Table on Information Access for People with Print Disabilities Inc., being held at the Mantra on Russell, Melbourne, in April 2008
- The Art of Difference Festival in Melbourne in March 2009
- The Melbourne Writers Festival in August 2009
DVD of the project
After piloting the project in January 2007, an audio-described and captioned documentary DVD was produced with the support of the Australian Caption Centre. We're proud that this was the first fully accessible DVD authored and produced in Australia. It was screened and distributed at the international conference of The Round Table on Information Access for People with Print Disabilities Inc. in Adelaide in May 2007, at the Arts Activated Conference in Sydney in September 2007 and at the Art Beyond Sight Conference in New York in September 2007. It has been distributed to interested individuals around Australia and in the US, UK, New Zealand and Sweden and will be screened at the ICEB General Assembly in April 2008, where we are presenting a paper on the project (ICEB Paper download below).
The full-length DVD is approximately twenty minutes duration. Please contact us if you would like to order it.
