"Shapereader" and the Case for Tactile Comics

Shapereader was specifically designed for users with visual impairment in regards to the production and consumption of tactile comics. Its interface is built on an expanding repertoire of free floating tactile ideograms (tactigrams) intended to provide haptic translations for all the semantic features, the conceptual functions and attributes of a textual expression. Both theoretical and practice based, the different Shapereader works challenge able-body assumptions and exclusionary access within the visual predominance ethos of graphic literature and explore the conditions for synthesizing language through embodied notions of materiality and performativity. Shapereader situates touch in the general sensibility as a conduit for vibrant artistic exploration and demonstrates that comics can address a diverse readership. It is a speculative, trans-disciplinary project that promotes an embodied, nonretinal, narrative experience with an ongoing outreach plan that since 2015 in Helsinki, has been unfolding in a variety of formats, contexts and collaborations. In the present paper, the focus is brought on Shapereader’s early implementation and the first systematic attempt to address the sense of touch in the production of comics. Arctic Circle is a tactile novel, presented as a museum installation including several work-specific communication boards designed both for sighted and visually impaired visitors. I will walk through some of the strategies used to translate concepts and elementary semantic features into haptic formations and explore how meaning signification proceeds through clustering and the use of productive chains of signifiers that ultimately propel the text of Arctic Circle to a structural instability. The research was conducted during the artist’s residency at the Onassis Labs in Athens.