Here’s a guide to creating your own “darkness residency.”
Living in a state of quarantine right now involves developing a strange, contradictory relationship to stimulus; the quiet pace of life indoors belies the frantic, endless flow of news from outside, if you choose to follow it. A Delicate Sight, a project that launched online Wednesday, speaks to this disconnect, inviting the public to experiment with the effects of sensory deprivation on creative work.
Five years ago, visual artist Sam Winston began creating work without using his sight, and soon began commissioning pieces from others, who each undertook a “darkness residency” in total blackout to create their work. The result is a book with writing from Bernardine Evaristo, Max Porter, Don Paterson, and Raymond Antrobus, among others.
In a conversation with Alison Flood for The Guardian, Porter pointed to the pandemic’s blackout effect on our senses, describing “a degree of weird clarity regarding systemic things, scale, sound, selfhood in relation to the world, family, time etc … combined with a very trapped, spectacularly blank, nothingness.”
If this sounds like your thing, the project’s website also published a guide for you to create your own darkness residency. When we’re all stuck inside anyway, we might as well commit to it.
[via The Guardian]
