Multisensory Technologies for Inclusive Exhibition Spaces: Disability Access Meets Artistic and Curatorial Research

Abstract

This article discusses applications of technology for sensory-disabled audiences in modern and contemporary art exhibitions. One case study of experimental artistic and curatorial research by The OtherAbilities art collective is discussed: a series of prototype tools for sensory translation from audible sound to vibration were developed to be embeddable in the architecture of spaces where art is presented. In the article, the case study is approached from a curatorial perspective. Based on bibliographical sources, the article starts with a brief historical reference to disability art activism and a presentation of contemporary accessibility solutions for sensory-disabled audiences in museums. The research for the case study was conducted during testing and feedback sessions on the prototypes using open-ended oral interviews, open-ended written comments, and ethnographic observation of visitors’ behavior during exhibitions. The testers were d/Deaf, hard of hearing and hearing. The results focus on the reception of the sensory translation of audible sound to vibration by test users of diverse hearing abilities and on the reception of the prototypes in the context of art and design exhibitions. The article closes with a reflection on how disability scholarship meets art curatorial theory in the example of the article’s case study.

1. Introduction

One of the many uses of technology in the presentation of art and culture to the public is fulfilling the purposes of accessibility and inclusion. Curators and educators often rely on technologies, from audio guides to robots, in order to make exhibitions, heritage sites or immaterial heritage accessible to, and inclusive for, the various audiences they wish to serve.

In this paper, I will discuss uses of technology conceived for sensory-disabled audience members in museum exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. The paper focuses specifically on how experimental applications of digital technologies in the context of modern and contemporary art exhibitions can be interesting for recent developments in both rethinking art curating, as well as in integrating diversity and inclusion as key principles. The interests in this paper reflect a broader horizon of research of which the paper forms part: namely, the reconsideration of the “normal” infrastructure of the medium of the art exhibition, as well as the attempt to move away from a mindset of separating the curation of exhibitions from the ticking of boxes to comply with diversity policies, and towards a mindset of mutual integration and learning. Therefore, the leading question behind the broader research, of which this paper is a part, asks: what could art curating learn from disability activism and, in reverse, how could we bring experimental and theoretical approaches of contemporary art and art curating to inform and become beneficial for approaches of accessibility and inclusion?

I will start by drawing a very brief historical background of disability activism in the cultural field. This will be followed by some examples of technological tools used in exhibitions to facilitate the inclusion of disabled audiences and the critical discussions they have raised. These discussions take place mostly among disability scholars and activists, museum and heritage scholars and professionals, and other professionals involved in the design of digital applications for exhibitions. The critical disability discourse in the cultural field has been developed largely against the background of the so-called two models of disability: the social and the medical model [1]. These two models respond to different perceptions of disability and respective strategies of addressing disability in daily life in contemporary Western societies.

Against the above background, I will then introduce, as a case study, the practice-based research I conducted in the Netherlands between 2020 and 2022 as curatorial advisor for projects of the art initiative, The OtherAbilities. This research was undertaken in the context of the interdisciplinary artistic research project, What Do I Hear? (WDIH?), which led to a series of prototype tools for sensory translation from audible sound to vibration. The prototypes were developed to be embedded in the architecture of spaces in which art is presented, such as exhibition or concert spaces. Second, I will consider observations I made on applications of selected prototypes from WDIH? in later projects, entitled Haptic Room Studies (HRS), which were developed and presented in public from 2022 until the present. I have been involved in only two HRS exhibitions because I left the curatorial advisor’s role for OtherAbilities at the end of 2022. Since then, I have continued my research at the Center for Applied Research in Art, Design and Technology, Avans University of Applied Sciences.

In the last part of this paper, I will move from the reflection on the discussion of practice-based research to a brief theoretical reflection based on a theory of the curatorial as proposed by Beatrice von Bismarck [2]. The aim of this closing piece will be to demonstrate that from the perspective of what constitutes the curatorial as a field of relational practice, the consideration of diverse bodies that sensorially or otherwise engage in diverse ways with an art exhibition is not an external imperative, but inherent to the core of the curatorial.

Hence, the article combines research and theory from the fields of contemporary art curation, disability studies and exhibition design, with an emphasis on the applications of digital technologies in these fields.

Methodologically, the argument of this paper adopts the aforementioned theoretical framework for the curatorial proposed by Beatrice von Bismarck [2]. Bismarck defines the curatorial as “a field of cultural activity knowledge that relates to the becoming public of art and culture”, and she presents it “as a domain of practice and meaning with its own structures, conditions, rules, and procedures”, in which “the focus is on the relations created by the curatorial, relations that also constitute it” [2] (p. 8). According to Bismarck’s approach, the forms of dynamic relations developed between human and non-human agents—e.g., exhibition visitors, staff, architecture, display props, and technologies—have an infrastructural function in the curatorial [2] (p. 18). I am interested in how digital technologies become part of the relationality of the curatorial as they serve the purposes of disability activism, since technological applications have been instrumental in attempts to enhance access and inclusion for disabled audience members.

2. Historical Background of Disability Activism in the Cultural Field

The claim to make art institutions accessible and inclusive for diverse audiences can be traced back in the history of the 20th century by taking different paths. Probably the most obvious path traces back disability activism in the context of the civil rights movements of the twentieth century, alongside the activism of feminists, LGBTQ+ and other ethnically, racially and culturally diverse people who claimed that cultural institutions represented only a very particular group of creators and audiences: male, heterosexual, white, Western, able-bodied and mostly middle-class. Artists from other parts of the population would rarely find their works exhibited, let alone bought, by public art institutions up until the late 20th century. Accordingly, their identities and stories were rarely represented in the art they saw. When they were represented, it was through the eyes, once again, of primarily Western, white, able-bodied, mostly middle-class and male authors [3,4,5].

Parallel to the activism detailed above, academic fields linked to minorities emerged. Specifically for disability studies and art, the work of Rosemarie Garland Thomson about the representation of bodies in American culture and the arts has been instrumental in establishing a critical art and disability discourse [6,7]. Moreover, exhibited art was also inaccessible and, therefore, not inclusive for all art audiences, such as those who were physically prohibited by the architecture or the exhibition design from visiting art shows, or those visitors who lacked the education, cultural background or social habitus to “understand” the codes of contemporary Western art.

Critical approaches to assumptions of the universal inclusivity of 20th century art, and especially of its institutions, also emerged from a very different direction. This was the institutional critique made by artists of what Brian O’Doherty called the “white cube” ideology of the gallery space [8]. The white cube is the spatial expression of the assumption that an empty, white room allows everybody to enjoy equally the universal aesthetic experience of art. As if, by entering the white cube, audiences were transformed into disembodied eyes, any identities carried in their bodies were parked outside the gallery. As if the vacant space deactivated the body’s senses, except for vision, as well as created a vacuum of social, cultural, bodily and other individual references, differences and experiences.

The concept of the white cube museum exhibition was introduced at the MoMA in New York in the 1930s [9,10] and gradually became the dominant international paradigm for modern art museums and galleries in the post-World War II years. It was also closely linked to prominent ideas in early and mid-twentieth century art and design, such as the primacy of the visual in abstract art or the priority of functionalism in architecture. White cube shows that facilitated a mainly visual sensory experience of art required little adaptation for 20th century museum audiences: the active use of any sensory organ other than the eyes had already been abolished from museums since the early 19th century. Before that time, visitors to museum exhibitions had significantly more freedom to engage sensorially with exhibits than we dare to imagine today. Touching, smelling, even biting were acceptable ways of engaging with artefacts on display [11,12]. Nonetheless, when museums started receiving ever larger numbers of visitors, because of opening up to the working class, museum curators became increasingly worried that the uneducated masses would defile or damage the valuable exhibits. Visitors were therefore banned from touching them [13,14].

During the last decades of the twentieth century, multisensory experiences returned to museum exhibitions in general and, more recently, to art museums in particular (e.g., ‘Tate Sensorium’, Tate Britain, London, 2015 [15]; ‘Delinking and Relinking in the Van Abbemuseum collection’, Eindhoven, 2021–2026 [16]). Multisensory art exhibitions can be seen as one among the many expressions of the opening of the exhibition format to quite broad experimentation [17]. Specifically for visitors with sensory disabilities, re-activating the senses beyond vision is a matter of basic access to exhibits. A systematic change came with local laws and regulations. For example, in the United States, it was the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 that established standards of access for disabled users of public buildings, including museums [7] (p. 6) [18,19]. In the United Kingdom, it was the Equality Act in 2010, and in the Netherlands it was the 1976 Public Disability Act [20]. In addition to such regulatory initiatives of state governments, the International Council of Museums (ICOM), the most important association for museum professionals world-wide, published in 1991 the seminal book Museums without Barriers. A New Deal for Disabled People [21]. Various smaller initiatives, usually linked to institutions by and/or for disabled communities, have also been working towards making culture accessible and inclusive for these communities. For example, the initiative Art Education for the Blind was established at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York around the same time as ADA was introduced. It still exists today, independently from the Whitney under the name of Art Beyond Sight [22,23]. In the Netherlands, the so-called Musea in Gebaren (Museums in Signing) is a platform that promotes museum access for the Dutch d/Deaf community (The spelling “d/Deaf” uses lowercase “d“ to refer to the physical hearing loss. The uppercase “D” refers to those who also belong to the Deaf community, because they share a culture connected to sign language. Not all deaf people are connected to the Deaf community, language and culture) [24]. Among other activities, they train deaf individuals to become museum guides in Dutch sign language, and they also collaborate with various museums in arranging guided tours, embedding sign language in films, etc. Musea in Gebaren is part of a foundation called ‘In Gebaren’, which was established by two Deaf sisters.

2.1. Technologies for Sensory Accessibility in Exhibitions

Advances in technology continuously inform the ways in which exhibitions are made accessible for sensorily diverse visitors. For blind and partially sighted visitors, the traditional ways of facilitating access to the experience of the art museum visit were, for example, guided tours that facilitated patrons in moving around galleries and provided them with oral descriptions of artworks [25], translations of display captions in braille and three-dimensional tactile models of two-dimensional art works (e.g., paintings and prints). Currently, various assistive technologies are used to enhance visually impaired visitors’ accessibility [26]. For example, portable audioguide devices and, increasingly, smartphone applications make available prerecorded oral descriptions. In cases such as MoMA in New York [27], the Art Gallery of South Australia or the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, the oral descriptions are also tailored specifically to individuals with limited to no past experience of seeing. In addition to descriptions of art works, applications on portable devices support autonomous indoors and outdoors navigation for visually impaired visitors [18]. Other portable technologies can increase the size of the text on museum walls or brochures. Accordingly, web technologies make information on websites more accessible (layout, font size, colour contrast, audio articles, etc.) not only for visually impaired, but also for dyslexic readers.

To improve the experiences of d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing visitors, SDH subtitles offer translations of what is said alongside clues about music, background sounds and the location of sounds in a scene. In some cases, mobile applications for guided tours or information offered in videos are accompanied by sign language (e.g., Rijksmuseum Amsterdam). With the expansion and improvement of hearing aids, hearing loops are also installed in museums and monuments. Live captions can be used during theatre or other live performances with spoken word [28]. In very exceptional cases, technologies for music concerts include a few pieces of the so-called sound shirt (e.g., at the Junge Symphoniker Hamburg or the Lyric Opera of Chicago). The sound shirt is a haptic garment product by the wearable technology brand Cute Circuit that translates audio signals to vibrations through haptic sensors embedded in the fabric. Different channels spread the sensation to different body parts [29]. In other examples, vibrating vests or pillows have been used during music gigs or other performances [30], and the so-called Emoti-Chair has been developed as a sensory substitution system that transfers a high-resolution audio-tactile version of music to the body [31]. These last examples of technologies developed for access to music are more likely to be found in music or dance performances than in art exhibitions, but they can be used for films or works of sound art. In rather exceptional cases, it is the artists who decide to either make accessibility an integral part of their works (e.g., VibraFusionLab [32], Constantina Zavitsanos [33], Fayen D’Evie [34], Ann Cunningham [35]) or embed accessibility tools in the presentation of their work (e.g., Constantina Zavitsanos).

2.2. Points of Critique

Museums are obliged to demonstrate that they find ways to make their exhibitions accessible and inclusive for disabled audiences, and all the aforementioned tools and provisions are relevant and applicable. However, depending on how they are applied, and despite the good intentions behind them all, these ways of facilitating access and inclusion are often seen with scepticism. An often-heard point of criticism is that access and inclusion are afterthoughts for exhibition curators and designers [5]. This means that after everything has been decided and planned, some solutions to the access and inclusion requirement are added, such as special guided tours or handouts in braille. Such tools or solutions might sometimes be provided only upon request rather than being readily available in the exhibition rooms. This approach is sometimes called “disability accommodation”, which, as Amanda Cachia points out, “is an old-fashioned and reductive phrase that comes across as patronizing ... [it] is meant to be a convenient and short-term arrangement” but, in practice, it demonstrates an attitude of compliance with, rather than commitment towards disabled audiences by institutions and their curators [5] (p. 2).

Criticism is also heard when accessibility tools and solutions that might be incorporated early on in an exhibition’s plans and be readily available are so specifically focused on targeting particular groups that they then feel exposed as guests with special needs. Finally, a quite central point of criticism by disability activists is focused on whether access is designed with the participation of disabled people or not, and when it is, what kind of agency the design process allows them [18]. Are, for instance, experience experts invited as individuals or in focus groups only to give feedback on access proposals put together by able-bodied museum, design and education experts? Or are experience experts structurally involved in the exhibition design process and are they co-creating access? The latter point is summarized in the slogan of the disability movement: ‘nothing about us without us’. Beyond this fundamental claim, it should be noted that sceptics from within the milieus of sensorily disabled people do not always agree with one another.

Many critical approaches can be related to the division between the so-called medical and social models of disability. The medical model reproduces for disability the logic of health vs. sickness: a healthy body represents the normal condition. Hence, sickness is a problem to be addressed with treatment that aims at bringing the patient either as close as possible to a “normal” state of health or at enabling the incurable patient to inhabit the world as it is designed for the healthy. The issue with this model is that it establishes disability as a problem and a deviation from the normal, and legitimizes the fact that the world is tailored to the able-bodied. This was, for example, Ingun Moser’s critique of the strategy of the generally rather generous Norwegian welfare state in the early 2000s, with its extensive apparatus of public services and measures for the disabled. Moser refers in particular to the mobilization of new technologies that aim at compensatory solutions for disabled bodies, so that they approach, as much as possible, the abilities of the “competent normal subject” [36] [p. 228]. According to Moser, this strategy achieves its goals at the high price of perpetuating the boundaries between abled and disabled, normal and deviant humans: “technologies working within the order of the normal are implicated in the (re)production of asymmetries that they and it seeks to undo” [36] [p. 228].

By contrast, the social model of disability considers disability as a social construction rather than as an individual’s impairment. It is society that sets apart and marginalizes those bodies that do not match the standards of the “normal” average. The establishment of such standards can be traced back in the history of anatomy, medicine and statistics [37,38]. The social model views all people as diverse. Consequently, people become disabled when society is organized and spaces and processes are designed for a (supposedly) average able-bodied human. This is why one of Rosaline Garland-Thomson’s major aims in her groundbreaking book, Extraordinary Bodies, first published in 1997, was “to move disability from the realm of medicine into that of political minorities, to recast it from a form of pathology to a form of ethnicity” [7] [p. 6]. The social model is also popular with inclusive designers who are keen on working with universal design, meaning design that, from its inception, serves as many diverse users as possible, instead of discriminating between normal designs and special solutions.

Among advocates of disability rights in the cultural field, there is a broad acceptance of the critique of disability offered in the social versus the medical models. Consequently, activists target primarily the change in mentalities advocated in the social model, moving away from the accommodation of disability that understands addressing disability as trouble-shooting [5]. Nonetheless, the social model is not accepted by everyone wholesale. There are voices that express critique of [39], or at least scepticism towards aspects of the social model, which they find to oversimplify disability. One example of the latter is Tom Shakespeare, whose criticisms take a historical and feminist perspective [40]. Shakespeare maintains that those who introduced this model of disability were mainly male wheelchair users in the United Kingdom, for whom a differently designed architectural and urban environment indeed were key for social inclusion. Despite their dependant mobility, they could be vocal and lobby hard for the social model. This was not the case for other disability rights advocates with different or heavier disabilities that compromised their very mental or physical capacity to lobby as efficiently for their positions. Examples included those with learning or mental disabilities, or those who depend regularly or heavily upon medical treatments. From an intersectional angle, we should also add people whose socio-economic class or ethnic, gender or race identities, in addition to being disabled, make them matter less in the political sphere.

2.3. Case Study: Artistic and Curatorial Experimentation with Haptic Architecture

My engagement with questions of sensorily inclusive exhibition spaces and, more broadly, with the inclusivity of the public’s experience of art and culture, originates in my involvement, between 2018 and 2022, with the Amsterdam-based art collective, The OtherAbilities. A central motivation behind all projects by OtherAbilities was the attempt to combine art and technology in innovative ways that would contribute towards shifting mindsets from thinking in terms of dis-ability towards other-ability [41]. The research results used in this article were sourced through testing and feedback sessions with experience and professional experts conducted during the interdisciplinary artists’ research project, What Do I Hear? (WDIH?), in 2021, as well as ethnographic observations during both WDIH? and the presentation of the later Haptic Room Studies #1 and #3 in 2022.

WDIH? ran between May and December 2021 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. It was initiated by the OtherAbilities collective (artist Adi Hollander, art historian Eva Fotiadi) in collaboration with VibraFusionLab in Canada (artists David Bobier and Jim Ruxton), and developed together with a team of artists, musicians, engineers, a composer and an architect. The WDIH? team included the following members: Adi Hollander, artist and Eva Fotiadi, curatorial advisor (The OtherAbilities); David Bobier, artist and Jim Ruxton, artist (VibraFusionLab); Ildikó Horváth, artist; Mark IJzerman, artist; Rebecca Kleinberger (PhD), voice specialist and engineer; Alina Ozerova, artist and film director; Andreas Tegnander, artist; Akito van Troyer, musician, technologist and artist; Michele Abolaffio, sound engineering consultant; Mor Efrati, technical consultant; Claudio F. Baroni, composer and advisor; Yonatan Cohen, architecture consultant; Maria Kandyla, acoustic engineering consultant; Albert Manders, financial manager; Debbie Parliament, American Sign Language interpreter; and Jenelle Rouse, advisor. The aim was to create prototype tools for sensory translation that would be embeddable in the architecture of spaces where different forms of art are presented. The main focus was on translating audible sound to another sensory modality. A significant departure point was the use of Woojer tactile speakers, usually found in the Woojer haptic vests used by players of VR games to enhance their immersive experience [42]. These Woojer transducers had already been used experimentally by VibraFusionLab for deaf access to performing arts events [32]. David Bobier from VibraFusionLab had also been involved in the development of the Emoti-Chair [43].

The vision of the initiators of the WDIH? artistic research project was that the prototype tools for sensory translation would become something that both cultural institutions and artists would be interested in using. For example, an idea (as yet not realized) was to install, in a museum, concert hall or other cultural institution, a capsule space equipped with sensory floors, walls etc., in which sound art, music pieces, films, dance pieces and so on would not only be performed but, potentially, also created. Such a space could offer artists, composers, choreographers, dancers and other creators new opportunities to experiment with haptic sound and the tactility of sound. The common ground that brought together the artists’ team was a shared interest in sound and tactility, and a couple of them identified as hearing-disabled.

WDIH? made possible other projects, entitled Haptic Room Studies (HRS), in which selected prototypes from WDIH? were developed further and applied in various contexts. I was involved in one such project during the 2022 Dutch Design Week, in the exhibition of the Design Embassy of Inclusive Society at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Adi Hollander from The OtherAbilities still continues today with developing further and presenting new HRS.

The research project, WDIH?, resulted in five prototypes. One was a hexagon Floor Tile (D-120 cm) made of acoustic foam, rubber and wooden plates, with four embedded Woojer speakers and four sound inputs (Figure 1). Another was the so-called Porcelain Membrane, a modular tiling system for walls (Figure 2). A further prototype was the Piping prototype, made of vibrating conductive pipes placed vertically, connected to tactile and audio speakers, mounted on a wooden frame and covered with a soft, conductive pillow (Figure 1).

Another prototype was the Tactile Wall, designed to be leant against by users with their backs, and made of transducers mounted on four elastic bands, all of which can be easily moved and reconfigured. Additionally, this system offers the user the possibility of controlling the movement of the vibrations with a tablet or joystick (Figure 3).

The final prototype was the Feathers prototype, made of multiple feathers placed either in an array or inside a frame, with each feather attached to a transducer with a piece of copper wire that moves when the transducer moves. The Feather prototype was conceived as something to look at or touch, like an object placed in space, rather than as a functional architectural element. Detailed descriptions of the prototypes can be found in the forthcoming proceedings of the 2021 conference, Design as Collective Improvisation [44].

Testing and feedback sessions with professional and experience experts took place in three phases, from October to December 2021. The first phase was in the studio of the project team during the development of the prototypes. The second took place during a research exhibition of the prototypes in the art gallery, Bradwolff Projects, in Amsterdam. The exhibition was organized with the intention of offering a real gallery setting for testing. A short, undocumented third phase took place back in the project studio with a few final guests.

My role in this project was as a curatorial researcher and advisor. In this role, I was involved in all aspects of organizing user tests. While the feedback and testing sessions were focused on the aims and questions of the artists and sound engineers in the team, the following aims were also relevant to the questions derived from my curatorial perspective.

• Aim 1: To explore how various types of sound input ‘translated’ into vibrations were received by testers with diverse hearing abilities and diverse levels of familiarity with vibrotactile experiences in art and music.
• Aim 2: To test the reception of the prototypes as tools in the conditions of a formal exhibition space, a white cube.

The first phase took place between October and November 2021 at the team’s shared studio. In preparation of the feedback and testing sessions, a pool of questions was created, in which the project team members formulated questions derived from specific problems and dilemmas arising from the prototypes they had been developing. All participants in the sessions were invited personally. Many of the d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing experience experts who participated in the testing were also mainly professional experts, such as designers, artists or other professionals in the arts. Hearing professional experts were specialized in multisensory translation and in disability studies. The two kinds of expertise (experiential/professional) were important for the focus on technical improvements to the prototypes. The project team members tried to keep the atmosphere professional (e.g., use of consent forms), but also informal (feedback through discussion, no use of questionnaires or structured interviews) in order for the guests to feel comfortable in the busy atelier, which was tailored to the needs of creators rather than audiences.

Regarding the format of the feedback sessions, almost all the test users were invited by individual appointment. d/Deaf test users were accompanied by a Dutch Sign Language interpreter. There would usually be between two and five project team members present. First, the project team members would try to make the test users feel comfortable as guests in the studio space, and they would provide basic information about the project, its aims, the team and each prototype, avoiding input that would precondition or influence the test users about what they would experience. A consent form was used to ask permission in order to take photographs or videos during testing. Test users took a few minutes per prototype, sometimes experiencing them with multiple sound inputs. The discussions would usually start with test users talking freely about how they experienced the vibrations on their bodies, before they received specific questions. Their responses were registered in handwritten notes.

Generally, these sessions were loosely structured. This was mostly due to practical necessities: not all prototypes were available or functioning during each session. Most prototypes were still under development during the first testing phase in the studio, so there would always be one or two prototypes that were dismantled or reconfigured when guests visited.

The second testing phase ran between 21 and 28 November 2021 and took place during the exhibition of the prototypes at the gallery space, Bradwolff Projects, in Amsterdam. Test users were either invited as guests by appointment or members of the general public who visited during regular opening hours.

In the exhibition space, a light wooden architectural frame was constructed, to which the prototypes were attached. The frame divided the space into three testing hubs, within each of which variations of the prototypes were embedded in different spatial arrangements. The technology used in each of the prototypes was mostly visible. There were at least two project team members present in the gallery during appointments. Due to coronavirus measures, the size limitations of the space, and the subtlety of the tactile experience offered by each prototype, groups larger than four people were never invited at any one time.

In addition to the consent form, there were three other A4 handouts in the gallery: (i) a single-page list of the sound and music fragments that were played on a loop; (ii) a yellow handout with an image of one prototype per sheet and free space for visitors’ comments; (iii) a blue handout, almost identical to the yellow handout, except with texts with information on each prototype instead of empty space. Testers and random gallery visitors were initially welcomed and received information about the project from a project team member. Next, visitors could take a copy of each handout (or, ideally, leave the blue handout for later) and spend their time freely experiencing each prototype. Most visitors who took the yellow handout wrote about at least one prototype. Seven individuals wrote about all prototypes (see Appendix A for anonymous samples). During the visits, some team members also engaged in a kind of ethnographic observation and occasionally took notes about the behavior of visitors, including how they moved around the space, how much time they spent on each prototype, when they appeared to relax and spend time sitting/standing still, when they adjusted themselves in various positions while engaging with a prototype, when they appeared to search for the function and sound and when they seemed to instantly understand what experience a prototype could offer them, etc. From the curator’s perspective, these observations were extremely useful, but for other team members, they were optional, based on each member’s interests, and notes were not shared. Most of the visitors would also have an open-ended discussion with project team members either during or after testing. These discussions were open-ended. Depending on visitors’ expertise, the issues discussed would evolve around, for example: the depth, movement, or spatial distribution of vibrations; body comfort and relation to the physical space as aspects of user-friendliness; comparison between the experiences created by each prototype; how the testers could imagine the devices embedded in an exhibition space or a concert hall; and what influence the specific space (Bradwolff Projects) had on the overall experience.

3. Results and Conclusions

With regards to the first aim, the testing manifested that for most hearing people, it was something novel to be actively aware of and to concentrate on the tactility of sound in an exhibition space. Accordingly, the content and the vocabulary in their responses evolved around their sense of comfort/discomfort, pleasure or lack of it, and memory associations. More nuanced verbal responses that regular art or music consumers are likely to express about the aesthetics of art or music experience were very rarely given for the haptic experiences. Almost all the invited or random users were regular art or music consumers, including many professionals.

The feedback by d/Deaf users yielded some different insights. During the first testing phase of WDIH?, there was a one-time possibility to test during a full concert of contemporary classical music with a d/Deaf test user (artist, educator and PhD in applied linguistics), who had also been an advisor for the project since its early stages. A Piping Prototype and one Floor Tile were placed together to form a haptic seat for the tester. This improvised seat was placed close to the rest of the audience, facing the musicians. At the end of the concert, the tester’s feedback and comments were closer to those of the concert visitors who engaged in nuanced discussions regarding what they enjoyed and appreciated about the music and the performance as a whole. In other testing cases with two other d/Deaf users in the project’s studio (first phase) and at Bradwolff Projects (second phase), and with sound input that either the users did not know in advance, or that was different from music (e.g., animal voices), the users expressed a desire for simultaneous visual input [31].

The conclusion of the tests with the users with diverse hearing abilities, and under different conditions, was that there was interesting potential in using sensory translations of sound to vibrotactile experiences. Among the hearing and some of the hard-of-hearing testers, the haptic experience mobilized curiosity. At the same time, there were also several aspects to which the users needed to adjust: the fact that the prototypes were meant as architecture; the intervention of the multimodal sensory technology in the architecture; and the intervention in the aesthetic experience of the artwork. All these factors were somewhat less surprising to the d/Deaf people who, contrary to what hearing people tend to assume, are likely to be interested in, and familiar with, sound and music through modalities other than listening, such as through vibrations [12,45]. It was, rather, the hearing people who lacked familiarity with the experience.

The second aim could only be pursued by means of ethnographic observations of people using the sensory translation tools of WDIH? in 2021 and the installations of HRS #1: Porcelain Membrane Wall (Figure 4) and #3: Conversation Piece (Figure 5).

During the testing at Bradwolff Projects, it was not easy for the guests to concentrate on their experiences when there was other activity in the space: movements, sounds, discussions were disturbing. This meant, for example, that it was often difficult to discuss with one test user while another user was testing elsewhere in the gallery. Generally, the spatial and environmental conditions, such as the size and shape of the gallery, the arrangement of the prototypes in the space, the echo and the presence and activity of other visitors, all had a strong impact on the quality of the experience. At the Van Abbemuseum (HRS), this aspect was improved.

At Bradwolff Projects, the WDIH? prototypes were the only items installed in the gallery space. No film, music or sound art pieces were exhibited or ‘translated’. A list of sound and music fragments were used to test the prototypes. In the 2022 presentation at Van Abbemuseum for the Dutch Design Week, Haptic Room Study #1 was made of a large Porcelain Membrane wall and a floor, which together formed a space within the space of an existing gallery room. The gallery room in which HRS#1 was installed was as a permanently dark room set up for a single film projection on a large screen. We also combined HRS #1 with a film from Van Abbemuseum’s collection. While this application was the closest to becoming architecture, in both cases (WDIH?, HRS #1 and #3), the sensory translation tools were visibly temporarily installed. Many visitors would refer to them casually as “art work”.

A quite significant parameter, especially when working with existing artists’ works, is that technologies and their effects can feel very present in an art exhibition space. Moreover, in the case of the modular Porcelain Membrane wall, the rather unusual materiality and different shapes of some types of porcelain tiles might also feel quite present. Unsurprisingly, they might also be taken themselves as (parts of) an autonomous artwork, depending on how they are installed. Museum audiences are used to having a rather clear differentiation between what is art and what is a display prop or gallery furniture, with the latter intervening as little as possible in the aesthetic experience of the former. They are likely not to welcome an unusual layer of technical hardware influencing their experience of an exhibited art work. This might be less of an issue in other museums, such as archaeological, historical or anthropological museums. In these museums, curators (rather than artists) have the last word on installation matters, and audiences are used to exhibition designs that play a quite prominent role in the communication and interpretation of displays.

For curators, the integration of sensory translation tools poses a number of further practical challenges. Ethically, and sometimes even legally, e.g., when an artwork is linked to a purchase contract that includes specific exhibition instructions or limitations, curators need to ask permission from the artists whose works are to be presented with sensory translation. In the experience of the HRS, contact with the artists was often requested anyway, because to connect a film or a music piece with various instruments to the sensory translation tools, it was almost necessary to have access to the audio master files. Another challenge is that curators, and sometimes even exhibition technicians, are not sufficiently skilled to integrate such technologies and, of course, these technologies raise costs and complicate preparations and reparations.

4. Discussion–Theoretical Reflections

The above results and conclusions on the experimental applications of WDIH? and the HRS are the outcomes of subjective feedback from testers (aim 1) and ethnographic curatorial observations during exhibitions (aim 2). These conclusions are useful for improving aspects of this specific project, as well as for promoting creative access for sensory diverse artists and audiences. Nonetheless, they also have certain limitations connected to fixed categories that they implicitly rely on and hierarchies that these categories entail. By fixed categories, I mean, for example, the notion of autonomous artworks as superior to applied tools, able-bodied and disabled visitors, the agency and intentionality of humans versus the passivity of objects and so on.

To take a step back from such frames of thinking, I am interested in reflecting on creative experimentations with inclusive multimodal technologies from the perspective of curatorial theory, specifically drawing from Beatrice von Bismarck’s approach to the curatorial “as a domain of practice and meaning with its own structures, conditions, rules and procedures” [2] (p. 8). In my view, it is in this sense that curatorial thinking and practice, as well as disability-inclusive thinking and practice, share fundamental operational principles. Therefore, from this perspective, inclusivity does not need to be considered as something forced or imposed upon the notion of curatoriality, but rather as working in tandem with it.

As already noted in the introduction to this paper, the curatorial domain of making art and culture public is inherently relational. Specifically, it creates relations between human and non-human agents, and it is itself also constituted by these relations. Rather than thinking in fixed categories, roles and identities, such as the artist, the artwork, the (disabled) visitor or the assistive technology, in a curated situation, these and any other actors and actants might dynamically swap, change, merge or transform into one another. It is largely the conceptual and ontological flexibility that has characterized the field of the visual arts since the ninety sixties that has enabled an indefinite range of possibilities for what constitutes the artwork, how art is created, and how it is made public. In other words, the dynamics of this flexibility have also infiltrated the curatorial condition of art, entailing endless possibilities for iterations of art exhibitions.

Bismarck uses certain concepts as tools with which she analyzes the curatorial and its relational dynamics. I find most relevant in the context of this article the concept of “constellations”, which, according to Bismarck, “responds to the challenge posed by the presence of both human and non-human participants in the fabric of curatorial relations. With agency being attributed to them all, a definition of the curatorial ensemble must go beyond the restricted group of human social actors” [2] (p. 28). This thinking is interesting for interventions involving technology in the context of disability access in general, and the artistic and curatorial research of WDIH? and HRS in particular, in which the technology often becomes the interface that intervenes between art, visitors and architecture. The architecture functions as a transducer that transforms the sensory modality with which the visitor experiences a work, from auditory to tactile. The HRS are works of art and, at the same time, curated situations inside which visitors, exhibited artworks and the relation between them are changed in a fundamental way.

The constellation is useful as a model for understanding the relationality of human and non-human agents, whether from a curatorial or a disability angle, because a constellation is intrinsically dynamic in terms of space and time. It functions “[b]oth as a spatial metaphor that describes the arrangement of bodies in a three-dimensional field, and as a characterization of the temporality, that mediates between recurring and one-time movements, a constellation is a flexible, relational structure linking individual elements that are themselves subject to change. It thus captures a moment in the configuration of elements that is unstable and ephemeral, and it presents unfinished stages of coming together” [33].

In this view of the curatorial condition, there is nothing fixed, neutral or passive about an exhibition format. If this is the character of curatorial relationality, then it shares some traits with that of inclusivity, since the latter considers humans as diverse and in diverse dynamic relations with other humans and non-humans around them. As we know from disability scholarship and crip theory, there is little that is standard in how diverse disabled bodies experience, relate to and interact with their physical and social environments except, probably, the notion that autonomy is an illusion. Both able and disabled bodies exist in various constellations of interdependencies, with their own temporalities.