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Published in July 2021

Artist Book, Book Design, Bookbinding, Editorial Design

Industrial printing technology has been employed to achieve mass production with its consequent cost-efficiencies. One negative side of this production process geared towards the maximization of circulation and profits, is that minority positions are neglected. Many minority groups have been denied direct ‘access’ to generic publications. For instance, visually-impaired groups cannot access printed books without assistance or translations.

This book attempts to bring three communities closer together: the visually-impaired, the hearing impaired, and everyone else in communities which are dependent upon different levels of sensory ability, respectively.

The three communities have distinct reading needs: visually-impaired persons need to substitute the sense of vision with other senses, such as with the use of braille to read the text by their sense of touch; on the other hand, hearing-impaired persons are able to read visual texts, but if there are any depictions related to ‘sound’, they may find them inaccessible since they lack the assumed hearing experiences. For example, if the sound of raining was depicted in words, the ideas of the sound of rain being loud or weak, quick or slow, gentle or uncomfortable to the ears– these concepts could be very abstract to a hearing-impaired person. For the everyone else in the communities that have direct experience of such imagery, it is not easy for them to understand the experiential world of persons with sensory impairment. In other words, here are three communities and they see the world and read books with the aid of very different sensory environments. This book has been created using experimental methods, in an attempt to communicate with these three groups of people.

23 clips of recorded sound of raining were used as a creative reference. By observing different characters of the sound, such as its length, loudness, distance, rhythm and so on, the book reproduces these characters by employing methods which requires mixed sensory perceptions, like visual signs, onomatopoeia, and the sense of touch. The recorded sound of raining were selected from 17 pop-culture films, including the arrangement and establishment of the scene. The length of each clips ranged from 10 seconds to a few minutes.

This is an artist book made by artist duo Lai Ping SO & Wai Lun HSU, 35 pieces were made in first edition, published in Hong Kong, all made and produced by the artists.

工業化的印刷技術著重大量生產以降低成本，大量生產的書籍亦因此導致印刷資本主義（print capitalism）。而這樣尋找最大普及性和利潤最大化的生產過程中的反面，便是忽略了少數群體。一般的書籍出版或多或少地拒絕給少數群體直接「access／使用」。例如視覺有缺失的群體，就無法單獨或不經翻譯地使用書店裡的印刷書籍。

這本書藉回應「accessibility」（無障礙）的主題，嘗試拉近依賴不同感官的三個群體：視障人士、聽障人士，以及應用不同程度感官的人。

三群人有著不同的閱讀需要：視障人士需借助其他感官替代視覺，如braille（凸字）透過觸覺閱讀文字；聽障人士則能夠閱讀文字，但若然當中涉及描述「聲音」的話，身體沒有足夠聽覺經驗，可能又會產生障礙。例如只用文字形容下雨聲的大小、快或慢、刺耳或温柔，對聽障人士都可能很抽象。至於應用不同程度感官的人，作為能夠無阻礙地得到資訊的一群，或許會難以明白感官缺失者理解世界、閱讀書籍的方法。換句話說，這裡有三種讀者，他們正以三種截然不同的方法閱讀書籍和理解世界。這本書嘗試以實驗性的方法創作，希望能夠同時與三組讀者溝通。

本書借用了23種預錄的雨聲，藉由觀察這些聲音的不同特質，如大小、長短、遠近、節奏等，透過視覺符號、擬聲詞及觸感等等的方法–除了一般視覺/文字以外的方法，去再現這些特質。本書所選取的雨聲來自17齣流行電影，抽取了電影中對雨聲的營造和鋪排，長度為數十秒至幾分鐘。

本書為藝術家組合蘇麗平及許維倫創作，初版印製35本，香港發行，由藝術家製作及釘裝。

↑ full video of the project

Artist/Author Lai Ping SO & Wai Lun HSU
Publisher soundpocket

Editorial, Art Direction, Graphic Design Lai Ping SO & Wai Lun HSU
Bookbinding & Production Lai Ping SO

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