Name: Beatrice Glow
Title of project and short description
UNDERCURRENTS
In the months leading up to SENSE I will take routine walks along 14th Street with my eyes closed while being guided by a partner. I will surrender my sight to get to know the busily transited street through heightening my olfactory, auditory and tactile senses. Written and audio documentation of these experiences will build a psychological portrait of the street. During the festival, I will invite people to go on blind walks with me.
How have you chosen to interpret the theme “SENSE?”
In a world that militarizes images to shock our optic receptors to the point in which violence is normalized, we are becoming desensitized and forgetting our full dimensions as sentient beings. Guided by this impulse to reclaim our humanness and to engage the world fully, I will practice sharpening my senses of perception to get to know 14th Street, a corridor that I transit frequently, in a different light.
This island of Manhattan is ancient. Before it became New York City, it was Mannahatta of Lenapehoking – the original homeland of the Lenape people. Beneath the strata of bustling commerce and asphalt, there is bedrock that has witnessed the transformation of a biologically diverse island to the present urban environment brimming with streams of cars and pedestrians. If I isolate one sense–in this case that of sight–and tune into other senses, might I be able to grasp more of the layered site?
These walks are devised to broaden the sense of perception and go beyond what meets the eye. To close my eyes is to access the invisible undercurrents of our world in-flux; to discover blindspots. Without darkness, we cannot appreciate light. Without light, we would not know that we are in the dark.
Why do you believe 14th Street is a compelling site for creative response?
14th Street is a main artery of NYC where privatization is encroaching on an ever more endangered public space. For many years it was a borderline between Uptown and Downtown, high and low culture, the haves and the have-nots, the buttoned-up and underground. Now this border is blurred with gentrification in full force as mega-chain retail stores are sweeping out the mom ’n pop shops. It is also the strata above the L train line, which represents the conduit of gentrification flowing into Brooklyn.
By engaging with this endangered borderline through activating art in public space (without asking for permission), the festival is aligned to the origins of performance art being a non-commodifiable and anti-capitalistic gesture that responds to urgent questions of its time. Furthermore, the festival’s usage of public space is a necessary people-led exercise against the codes of conduct expected of robotic consumer/citizens. Collectively, AiOP probes and expands the psychological boundaries 14th street.
What reactions are you hoping to draw from the public?
Perhaps passersby may assume I am visually impaired and am being helped by another. If so, I hope they would exercise more compassion and empathy and slow down a bit in their strides for a differently-abled stranger. Perhaps they may realize that I am simply walking with my eyes closed to get to know a place better and would be receptive to alternative types of behavior in public space. For those that listen to my audio recording during and after the festival, I hope it inspires them to try to replicate this practice by inviting another person to trust them to walk with their eyes closed and open their own sense to 14th Street and beyond. During the festival, I will invite a few people to experience this walk with me as a gift of perceiving the beaten path of 14th Street in a new way. When they open their eyes after a prolonged walk, I hope that they would gain new insight and appreciation for the gift of sight.
