Four/For Mona Lisa Mixed Medium: Interactive installation Braille, birch wood, paper, bronze, digital audio, motion sensor Dimensions: 30"x 21' x 8" Presents an interesting viewpoint--what can be seen without seeing. It was created by Jon Berge Four/For Mona Lisa is a wall-mounted sculpture made of birch wood, paper, bronze, and Braille, it provokes questions such as What is seeing? and How do people see? This work hopes to be exclusive of children, the disabled and of people with different social and economic backgrounds. Berge showed a poster of the Mona Lisa to 100 inner-city children aged 7 to 14. The children were asked to respond to the following challenge: Imagine ways of helping individuals who can't see or feel the image to understand what the portrait of Mona Lisa looks like. The project was created to be tactile, so that the visual aspect of the piece is not the focus. The tactility of the piece is reinforced by the use of materials in their natural state. The children's written responses are incorporated in the installation in several ways. All 100 statements written on grade school paper, are thumbtacked to the wall, forming a horizontal rectangle. In addition, four of the statements were translated into Braille, and mounted on birch wood panels; each of these are the same size as the Mona Lisa. The panels are hung in a horizontal row above the statements each held out from the wall by a pair of bronze hands. The artists mounted the panels on the wall at eye height for children and for people in wheelchairs. Touching the piece activates a digital recording of the children reading their statements. My name is Jon Berge and I am a multidisciplinary artist who has been producing interactive art for the past 10 years. My work has been presented in galleries, cultural centers, and informal settings across the US & Europe. Using a conceptual approach and a focus on issues of accessibility in art, I combine site-specific concerns with sculptural and technological elements. In art galleries and museums, access is addressed in limited terms of a ramp, wheelchair accessible toilets, or a touch-tour for the visually impaired. How well are the issues of access, especially for people with disabilities actually understood? The relevance of issues of accessibility to art and the value we place upon them are major concerns that inform our work. The term 'access' must be clarified to include conceptual, intellectual, and multi-sensory access as well as physical access. As the planet turns towards globalization with an increasing emphasis on mobility and technology, new multi-sensory languages and art forms are emerging. I see language and art as forms of transportation, as new kinds of mobility encompassing text, tactility, sound, scent, motion, and visual elements. The technical production of the piece began with a previsualization of the installation using Lightwave 5.0 to construct a three-dimensional wire frame animation of the piece. Digital audio of the children reading their statements was captured using a Sony mini disc recorder and edited using Sound Edit for MAC. Video recording of the children and subsequent documentation of the work was recorded using a Sony CCD Hi8 camera and edited on a PC with Speed Razor non-linear editing software. The interactivity of the piece is governed by a motion sensor.
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