Gallery 4a, Chinatown, Sydney
In January 2007, the BWP was first staged on the large streetfront window of Gallery 4a on Hay Street in Chinatown, Sydney, with a Quick Response grant from the City of Sydney and in-kind support from Quantum Technology. That part of Hay Street is closed to cars and is a main artery for workers, shoppers and tourists, walking between Central Railway station and the top end of Sydney's CBD. It also carries the light rail - a re-incarnation of Sydney's historic tram.
Over a three week period, twenty braille readers of all ages visited the gallery for an hour or two, to touch-read the window in full view of the passing parade and to contribute their writing on braillers installed on the footpath. Of the thousands of people who walked past the gallery during that time, hundreds stopped to look and touch and many of them engaged directly with braille readers about the project, about reading and about their lives more generally.
To experience the project at Gallery 4a in Chinatown, enjoy these bytes.
Braille bytes
and I forgot the element of chance introduced by circumstances …
calm or haste,
sun or cold,
dawn or dusk,
the taste of strawberries or abandonment,
the half-understood message,
the front page of newspapers,
the voice on the telephone,
the most anodyne conversation,
the most anonymous man or woman …
everything that speaks,
makes noise,
passes by,
touches us lightly,
meets us head on.From "The Practice of Everyday Life" by Michel de Certeau, Translated by Steven Rendall, University of California Press,1984, p xvi.
Sound bytes
- Transcriptions
- Audio from Gallery 4a recordings converted into text.
- Anne and Gwen (mp3 572 kb, 1 min 38 secs)
- A blind person and a sighted person sit together in Hay Street, Chinatown, sharing their impressions and brailling.
- Carleeta (mp3 232 kb, 40 secs)
- A deafblind woman at the braille window, talking about braille versus synthetic speech, through an Auslan tactile interpreter.
- China (mp3 508 kb, 1 min 27 secs)
- A passer-by from Hong Kong stops at the braille window and talks with Bruce about blindness and tactility.
- Dot word (mp3 164 kb, 28 secs)
- A Japanese woman passing by, spells out the Japanese word for 'braille'.
- Kid's talk (mp3 216 kb, 37 secs)
- A young girl and her mother stop at the braille window and thank a young braille reader for showing them how he reads braille.
- Musk (mp3 256 kb, 43 secs)
- A young braille reader with a physical disability reads braille characters with his mother's help.
- Nelson (mp3 256 kb, 1 min 13 secs)
- A teenage braille reader talks with Anne about braille and about the brailled reflections on the window.
- Upstairs (mp3 464 kb, 1 min 19 secs)
- Upstairs from the gallery, a round table talk about the braille window project.
Eye bytes
View slideshow with short and long descriptions
