How we're doing it
The project first goes public by coating the outside surface of a large streetfront window with A4 transparencies embossed with braille. The braille text on the window is a montage of impressions gathered from the city's street-life streaming past the window - reflections produced by people who are blind or who have low vision, in writing workshops held prior to the BWP's appearance in a given location.
The venue for the writing workshops is in the neighbourhood where the BWP is scheduled to make its next appearance. Workshop participants go on guided walks around the nearby city streets so that their writings reflect the locale - present and past, real and imagined, remembered and sensed. A principal writer runs the workshops, edits the text as a whole and contributes his or her own writing to it. A small number of local professional writers are invited to contribute to the text also, after a reflective stroll around the same neighbourhood.
Once the text is published on the window, touch-readers are invited to visit the BWP to do public readings, walk around the nearby streets and make contributions to the text either on-site with a brailling machine or later from home, via our Braille Window Project Weblog. Local professional writers are invited to be guest writers at the BWP also - to interact with braille readers and members of the public and to spend time observing and writing about the place. In this way, the text is refreshed by a combination of amateur and professional writers.
The project also involves night-time video projections. With permission, a video camera inside the space during the day, films visitors touch-reading the window against a background of the streetscape and its passing parade. This footage is back-projected onto the braille-coated window at night, producing a faint trace of figures touch-reading a membrane of gossamer braille all through the night.
