Recently I interviewed London, Ontario, media installation artist, David Bobier, via Zoom. At the time of the interview in late-June, Bobier was between two artistic engagements, one in Savannah, Georgia, USA, where he was in the process of completing the 4-week Residency, ON:View, at Sulfur Studios by ARTS Southeast, with partner, Leslie Putnam, and the other in Chicago, Voices Embodied: Reverberations, at the Design Museum of Chicago, which is a project featuring eighteen artists showcasing their work related to disability and the importance of societal inclusivity. These are just two events that have made up Bobier’s busy exhibition and presentation schedule over the past few years, which to date have recently included exhibitions and workshops across Canada, the United States and in various countries in Europe.
In my interview with Bobier, he talked candidly about his intentions and artistic practice that strongly centre around increasing accessibility in the arts within the Deaf and Disability community. We hear how Bobier, through innovative uses of multi-sensory, vibrotactile technologies, pushes beyond the limitations of the normal gallery experience as he encouraging us to focus on the language of vibration that he understands as “the foundation of life”. Our conversation explores such topics as the necessity for accessibility in the art world, Bobier’s current work outside of his role as Director at VibraFusionLab, and his thoughts on the Disability Arts Movement currently happening in Canada. In this movement, Bobier is a formative player as he continues to effect change in the way disability is viewed and represented, acknowledging the diverse lived experiences of artists and viewers that confound elitist perceptions of artistic works and spaces.
VibraFusionLab is a centre that Bobier started in London, Ontario 12 years ago, and is “an innovative centre for arts-based vibrotactile research and creative practices,” which promotes and encourages the creation of accessible art forms and inclusive technologies for the deaf, blind, disabled and hearing communities, and for a more inclusive experience of those audiences.
Interview between Sarah Oakley (SO) and David Bobier (DB)
SO: So, looking back at your early work, your formal education was in printmaking and lithography. Your practice now involves technological innovation, installation, and the motivation to increase accessibility within the arts, it seems that printmaking has been abandoned. Your first major exhibition, ‘Signing On: Adopting a Cultural Perspective’, in 1995, represents a point in your career when your direction toward producing installation works related to Deafness and disability became established. Can you talk about that transition in your practice and artistic intentions, and have you integrated printmaking into what you do now in any way?
DB: I had no insight into the direction that I was going to go with my work, but I think it was a slow process from working on flat surfaces and becoming frustrated with [that]. I mean, printmaking is a very tactile process, so I really enjoyed that. But, I think it was the fact that I needed to work spatially and it wasn’t allowing me to do that. It was really when I was doing my graduate work at Windsor that I started to break free of, what I felt, were restrictions within printmaking. I think, too, there had been influences from some of the other students and professors that I was working with at Windsor.
Also, I think the fact that Windsor is a very industrial centre. There was an abundance of materials to work with. I was kind of hungry to have an interactive involvement with my work and interested in the role that the audience could play in the activation of the work, rather than being bystanders, or the way the work could allow the audience or participant to play some role in the end experience. So, I was creating works that people could move and change control, beyond my control.
It was really about extending the work and the possibilities of the work, beyond my own limitations, or the kinds of limitations I put on the work at the time. I do think that work in the graphic arts certainly has influenced the way that my sculptural works evolved. I think there’s still a very strong formal graphic quality to them, or at least I see that. So, I think that played a part in a lot of the work that I do now and]the way it’s presented. I think that there is a precision to printmaking that I bring to a lot of my own work that I do now.
SO: There have been some recent projects that you’ve been a part of, for example, ‘Je ne dais pas inonder la mer’ at the MAI Theatre in Montreal (2024), and the international production, ‘Scored in Silence’, brought to Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto (2022). Did that connection between movement/performance art and the technology of sound transduction come naturally; or, was that sort of an intentional decision and path to take?
DB: So, I guess to answer that I have to go back to the formation of VibraFusionLab, which started 12 years or so, ago. In a lot of ways, it’s really hard to separate me from VibraFusionLab. We’re sort of one of the same. To get into the areas of dance and theatre performance was, I guess, to some extent, a kind of natural progression of VibraFusionLab. It was not intentional. I think it came about from others in those fields reaching out to to us at VibraFusionaLb to explore ways of expanding their practice – and accessibility has become a much more familiar intention. I think people are realizing that it is a necessity in the arts now. It’s been pretty much ignored because of the kind of elitist aspects of the arts, until more recently, with the justice and disability voices coming to the forefront and there’s actually an opportunity for them to have this stage.
It’s been an evolution in terms of the projects that we get involved in. But, I think if I look back at VibraFusionLab, it sort of was founded on two principles: one was to provide opportunities for artists from the Deaf and Disabled community; and, the other to support them in being creative through whatever sort of technological means we have; but also to think about audience and greater accessibility to the arts through, again, technology.
In both cases, artists or audience, I pose a question, “Who’s missing?”, and it’s very evident who’s missing. We try to address those questions by finding ways of resolving and providing access.
There are more and more theatres with artists from the Deaf and Disabled community who are working in performance – we’ve been working in burlesque and circus art, so it’s really expanded our reach and our capacity in responding to the needs of those people we’re working with. There’s no generic solution or generic device or system. Every project, every individual we work with, challenges us to find ways of supporting them and their own particular ways of working, addressing their limitations, and reinforcing their capabilities.
More recently, the last year or so, I’ve been working with the condition of synaesthesia. One project I was working on in Montreal was with an artist with multiple synaesthesia. Someone explains a word and they see a colour. I can appreciate there’s obviously a brain function going on that I don’t understand. But this synesthetic artist went on to describe multiple synaesthesia, and his whole world is sort of made up of these synesthetic conditions. We’re going to probably be working with him more. aside from the project in Montreal. In his work, in that particular project, he was employing a lot of projection, different kinds of light projections – colour, text, a range of visible qualities in projection. He’s interested in, somehow or other, experiencing some of those conditions as vibration. It’s kind of like what VibraFusionLab does in terms of experimenting with sound and as sound being something other than just sound, as vibration, or as something that’s visual – we do a lot of work in what’s called sound visualization and that’s trying to interpret sound through a visual. But for him, it’s taking some of these experiences that he has and shifting them into another sensory experience. To me, that sounds quite remarkable and challenging, but challenging in the sense of exciting. You never know when you’re starting out, how this is going to turn out and what the end result is going to be. I find the whole process so interesting.
We started working with a tap dancer, Travis Knights. He is originally from Montreal, but is in the Toronto area now. We did work with him on a show in Montreal: ephemeral artefacts: travis knights. He wants to work further with us.. Of course, when you think about tap dance, it’s all about percussion. Any kind of percussive sound translates amazingly well as vibration. You really get to feel that. It’s almost being like the board that he taps on; you’re feeling that, and when you translate that onto your body, it’s quite an amazing experience.
You’re moving your body and you are feeling the vibration when you’re the one tap dancing, so if the audience could also experience that, you’re much more integrated into the actual performance. I think a physical experience, in some ways, is more profound than a visual experience for an auditory experience. It becomes, somehow or other, more internalized.
SO: Have instances of collaboration beyond working with practicing artists, such as educational opportunities, been a part in your practice?
DB: Yes, we tested some of our vibratactile pillows for students from a school board in the Bruce Peninsula in their special education program and we’re still in a process of finding the best solution and adapting the technology to the classroom. This context sets up other challenges in terms of the movement of students within the classroom, like people who may have somewhat unpredictable movements. One of the things with technology, and particularly working with audio equipment as we do at VibraFusion, is that the basis of the vibratactile is all the wiring and tabling that goes along with that.
We have a prototype now of a wireless pillow which we’re hoping we can start producing later this fall, and that would then free up a student’s movement. For instance, they could move around the classroom freely without limitations of the cabling. So, I think that’s going to be a real exciting solution for those kinds of situations.
But also, we’ve got people waiting now in performance and theatre for the wireless pillows to come out. With these wireless systems, we could actually have a multitude of the pillows in a theatre, or even with the performers on stage moving around with the pillows and without the sort of limitations of tabling [Figure 2]. We see this as being a real step – actually, a fairly huge step – in terms of the development of this technology. There are other vibratactile systems available commercially, but they tend to be designed for the gaming industry, and people who game like really strong sound and vibration. These models are designed for pushing the low frequency of the sound production in the various games, though they’re not as suitable as one might think for the kind of work that VibraFusion Lab does.
SO: Would this process of making technology like the wireless pillow available on the market be a commercialized project? Meaning, would that be something distributed through VibraFusion Lab, or is this a different group that would be established for that process?
DB: Right. Well, that’s a really good question because it comes up frequently. There is certainly a marketing possibility. VibraFusion Lab is going through a process right now – a kind of strategic planning – to look at how we can better anticipate and organize the future of VibraFusion Lab and, hopefully, alleviate some of the time and energy that I put into it. But one of the things that we’re looking at is areas of education and health.
One fellow that was testing the vibratactile pillow was an ex-student of my wife, and he works in the emergency ward of a hospital. He said, if we had these in the emergency ward when people are already in crisis and there’s all kinds of anxiety, they would be ideal for individuals laying or waiting, to be able to hold and listen to their own favourite music or whatever, and offer a calming effect.
But, also in education, there’s a multitude of possibilities in terms of the commercialization of the pillows. That’s not an area that I know or have any personal interest in getting into, but it could be something that the Lab works with a businessperson and a developer to take the route for some of the innovative commercial technology.
SO: I have read about your close partnerhip with Jim Ruxton, and how the two of you had been wanting to develop an individualized user-specific device for theatre and viewing experiences. Is that still a project that’s ongoing, or has that been implemented? Was the vision for people to be able to expect these accessible devices available in public art spaces?
DB: It hasn’t been developed any further.
I think the thing right now is that we haven’t really found anything that comes close to the experience of the vibrotactile pillows. I think we’ve shifted back to working with the pillows. Looking at the experience and exploring other things, for instance, the texture of the covering, the type of transducers, a type of hardware device that emphasizes sound. Right now, we’re using commercial transducers, but there’s also the possibility of developing our own type of vibrotactile, designed specifically for the purposes that we have. There’s many possibilities that we can explore.
We’ve also done work with vibrotactile, so, I think that’s also something that we can push further. If you think about, for instance, someone who is bedridden. There is the possibility of taking the system that we have designed for floors, and creating some kind of fibre-tactile blanket, or something that they could lie on that they can control. I can refer to the ‘Haptic Voices’ wall. The ‘Haptic Voices’ wall came out of the COVID period because everyone was experiencing isolation, but within the Deaf and Disabled communities, it was even more extreme. The idea with the ‘Haptic Voices’ wall was to connect people globally.
To explain, it’s a ten-channel wall with ten transducers that when you lean against it, it essentially covers your entire body, and it’s designed so that you can activate the transducers independently. You can move sound around the transducers. There’s a website called ‘Haptic Voices’ that you can open and it’s designed so that you can voice into your microphone in your computer and your voice would be felt on the wall. You could be anywhere in the world on your laptop and the person that would be leaning against the wall would feel your voice.
SO: Because you address disability and the social issue of inaccessibility within the arts from the position of artists and viewers excluded in conventional practices, conversations, and public spaces – how have your projects been received by museums and galleries? As you’ve acknowledged already, the industry can be described as elitist in many ways. Have there been instances where you were surprised, good or bad, by your encounters with management at the institutions you’ve been involved with?
It was a way of trying to connect people through voice. But, we also commissioned a number of composers to do work for the wall and we intend to continue doing that. That 10 channel system can be enlarged to multiple systems. like eighteen, twenty-four, thirty-six channels, and you could activate a very large floor area with that.
What we found with the wall was that it’s very successful for able-bodied people. Someone in a wheelchair would not be able to access it. So, one of the next areas of research will be to condense the scale of the wall and channel system down to something that could fit, say, on the back of a wheelchair, so that you could actually activate it through a system in your wheelchair, or channel any kind of audio file into it; but it would be on your back as opposed to thinking about the whole body. It’s adapting existing ideas to be more available, more accessible. l
SO: Because you address issues of accessibility for persons with disabilities within the arts. how have your projects been received by museums and galleries?
DB: So, to go back to what we were talking about earlier, I think that the theatre community, right now is being much more proactive. I don’t know the reason why. I mean, there are certainly key theatres that are taking on a leadership role. I’ve travelled across the country from Halifax to Vancouver setting up systems in theatres. And that’s great, because then you’re actually seeing a network across the country, and, of course, once the network is there, it spreads.
I think that the other thing I should say is most of these theatres are not your high-end theatres. These are grassroots theatres. So, I think I find that really interesting – while already working, under financial challenges [they] are being creative. I really applaud these sort of grassroots theatres that are setting these kinds of precedents. I’ve had communications with Stratford and with Harbourfront and there always seems to be an excuse.
SO: Do you care to elaborate?
DB: They’re a different structure, there’s so much bureaucracy within these theatres that it seems impossible. You can speak with someone in their accessibility committee or advisory group, but it doesn’t go any further. That’s [what’s] happening.
Galleries, museums, I don’t think they know what to do. I mean, everybody knows that they have to become more inclusive and the funding is there, but I think they just don’t know where to start. I think the answer is to do a little bit of research. Find out who’s taking on these leadership roles within the Deaf and Disabled community, bring them in, make them part of the conversation, [and] give them some responsibility within the institution. It’s [about] going directly to the source, and that’s not happening on a large scale by any means. I noticed that, say, the AGO in Toronto is showing some obvious efforts – they have an exhibition there right now of women artists throughout the ages: Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400-1800, and there’s a smell factor within that exhibition. So, it is happening.
I have had conversations with curators. One larger gallery within Ontario is the Art Gallery of Windsor, I’ve been working with, AWE [Art Windsor-Essex], and they’ve integrated vibrotactile pillows into one of their previous exhibitions. We’re working, right now, with an Indigenous artist from Toronto and collaborating on an exhibition next year. I think it’s going to be a slower process with the larger institutions. But, I’m hopeful, that I will say.
I will add one other thing: right now, we work with a small organization in Hamilton, Ontario, called Centre [3]. They have a new director, Yvonne Felix, and they’re a blind, artist-director, and we’ve just put in a proposal to the Canada Council for the Arts to work on a beacon system for galleries which would be for anyone, say, blind or disabled, and they can download an app and through this beacon system, access information on the exhibition, interviews with the artist – just a whole range of information that is maybe not currently available. We’ll see where that goes. It’s a process.
SO: In a previous installation you contributed to the ‘After School Project’ in Peterborough, and in the recent collaborative exhibition at the AWE, ‘Love Language’ [Figure 4], both appear to be language-based transductions of sound. You have mentioned that you’ve observed a difference between contexts like theatre taking more leadership than say that galleries have. Do you notice a difference in the process of working with collaborators and the reception of installations by audiences and management in terms of language-centered interpretations versus performance-centered projects?
DB: That’s a very insightful question.
Well, obviously, the way I work in my own studio and the way we work in the VibraFusion Lab space is different, very different. Working in the Lab with people and in performance spaces, there are both limitations and opportunities specific to that genre or that space. Also, we’re often working from their direction. So, in that case, we’re sort of a facilitator – responding to their goals, their ideas, their dreams about what something might be – and we try to facilitate that. As for working on my own, it’s a very different process. I think, first of all, depending on whether I know where the work that I’m doing is going, if it has a certain kind of situation, or an environment that’s specific, then I might address that in the work, or it might influence the development of the work.
For me, communication is a key to what I do. It’s why I’m interested in vibration, because I think vibration carries information. To me, I refer to it as a language in itself. Language communication, in whatever format, is how I work, how I find ways of connecting with the audience. Using oral languages carries information, so, it’s easy to communicate through that format, but, say, through sound or vibration, I might have an intent, but it may not be interpreted exactly that way by the audience. I like to leave things open for interpretation and in that sense, I bring the audience into play and give them an opportunity to have some sort of interpretation from their own experiences. The audience brings something to the work, right? And, if you can somewhere connect in that space in between, on some level, that’s what’s important to me.
The other thing that I think is something that’s important to mention, is something called “Access Aesthetic”. We talk about in it the Crip Community. I don’t know if you’ve come across the word “crip” or “cripping”.
SO: Yes, I would like to hear your definition and understanding of ‘cripping.’
DB: I’ll talk about that briefly. That terminology evolved out of the UK, and the whole Deaf and Disability Arts movement there, which happened about 35 years ago, and it was a very political movement. In many ways, the UK has been at the forefront of the Deaf and Disability Arts movement. In Canada, it has occurred more recently in the last, say, 10 years. But the movement, and on an individual basis, is based on the social model of disability as opposed to the medical model. It’s really turning the whole perspective of disability upside down. And it’s about celebrating the disability. So, ‘cripple’, which was used as a derogatory term, has been chosen to take and turn it on its head. ‘Crip’ and ‘cripping’ means to celebrate.“Cripping the Arts” is about making the arts about Disability, about Deafness, about whatever those sort of characteristics are and celebrating them.
‘Access aesthetics’ is about making art accessible, whether it’s through technology or whatever means, If you’re setting out to make work that is, as much as possible, available to everyone, then the access element has to be there from the start. It’s not an add on. By it being part of the process, it actually affects the end product. The end product now becomes something that is, in a lot of ways, outside of the realm of mainstream. Right? It’s evolved as a result of the process of accessibility within the work. That’s what access aesthetics is.
And, to get back to your question, when I’m working on something, the idea of access is inherent in the development of the work. Therefore, the work is not necessarily dictated by that, but it’s influenced by that. There’s another quote that’s used from a UK artist, Yinka Shonibare, and that is, “Disability Arts can be seen as the last avant garde movement.”
SO: I want to separate you from VibraFusion Lab for a bit. I have come across how you and Leslie Putnam established “O’Honey Collective“. I was hoping that you could explain how this initiative came about, since it seems like a recent effort. It also seems very different from what you do with most of your VibraFusion and solo projects, but it connects to how you have expressed your interest in nature translated to sound.
DB: We’re here in Savannah, Georgia, on residency right now as O’ Honey, and we’ve done several projects.
O’ Honey is about studying our surroundings, the natural environment around us and integrating the human back into nature. Really thinking about nature in its truest form and deconstructing, or disassembling, some of the things that we’ve done as humans.
Probably one of the most noteworthy projects we did was for Nuit Blanche in Toronto. We made a nest made out of willow, and it was about eight or ten feet in diameter, quite a large nest, and we placed it in a room in the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. We were integrating nature into this very familiar location in Toronto. And we set up a webcam to document what was going on in the room, and we sat out in the lobby, watching a monitor that was live streaming the activities in the room.
We were sort of like documenters, we were writing down what we saw. That took place from about seven o’clock at night, until seven o’clock the next morning. There was a sound element to it, too – when you’re sitting there, you were listening to Leslie and I talking about moving furniture around, designing a room. So, people were listening to this when they were sitting in the [willow] nest. It was a take on how people put webcams by eagle’s nests and watch them – it was kind of reversing that role.
That project is probably a good example of what we do. What we’re doing here in Savannah is, we’ve got two large canvas hangings that we’re referring to as ‘site maps’. We’ve sort of layered images of contemporary and historical mappings by sewing and drawing various media onto the surface of the canvas, and we’re doing sound recordings around the community of Savannah. We’re putting locations on these maps with transducers and sound, so that through a system of touch boards, the audience can activate these different sounds and feel them on the surface of the map. So, again, it’s about, location. I mean, Savannah historically is layered with all kinds of complex issues. This was one of the major centres of slave trade, and you still see evidence of disparity now. And then, of course, there’s the whole North-South [politics], which still seems to be quite prevalent. The project is layering these mappings to give them these filters through history, and if you spend time with them, you can go through the storyline that we’ve created in these two site maps.
SO: David, I want to thank you for spending time with me. What you are doing is elaborate and outside the mainstream. I appreciate that you are able to articulate what you are doing and explain it. I have one other question. Since you are a ground breaker and kind of a leader in the field of accessibility art, I am wondering if you have witnessed any new challenges in recent years with the work of accessibility, specifically to the Disability Arts community? Or, would you say that the contributions being made by artists are expanding things for the better?
DB: Yeah, well, there’s a lot to that question, for sure.
I guess one way of answering that would be that everything in the future will be a surprise. We have no way of anticipating who we might be working with or what they might bring in the way of new ideas, new challenges, new directions, in terms of practice – so, that’s one thing.
You know, I worked as a practicing artist intensely, except for about ten years when I was very involved in raising my kids when they were much younger. And, I didn’t really feel I had a place as an artist until I started working within the Deaf and Disability Arts community. I have a hearing loss myself and I have some other invisible disabilities, as do many people, but what I found was that within this community, I could, in some respect, be more myself, and actually acknowledge that these were things that were, would, did, and do still influence the way I work. I always refer to it as finding a family, and others within the community express much the same. It’s a community that already understands and accepts who you are and what you bring. I think that in itself has been a huge factor in my development as an artist.
Generally, in terms of the Deaf and Disability Arts movement in Canada right now, we have a window of opportunity to continue to create something exciting and new. But, I’m fearful of that window closing through political agendas, which may be on the horizon, that are not necessarily supportive of people in minority. I’m fearful of that, but I think there is already a resilience within the community based on their disabilities, they’ve had to be resilient. So, I think the movement will find a way. The good thing that has happened is that through funding, there’s silos all over the place in Canada, and some of those silos and disparate areas of activity have made connections in partnerships. I think that is the more affirmative outlook for me.
In terms of my own work, I’m hoping to make more time available. I mean, I’m still processing the death of my daughter, so, I think that something around that will come out in my work. When we have a void, there is an opportunity to express yourself and I think the important thing is to find that void and a supportive community. I think that I’m really looking forward to my time in the studio going forward.
Sarah Oakley is a recent undergraduate in sociocultural anthropology from Western University. Residing in London, Ontario, writing for the local visual arts community has encouraged her to seek a career in museum and heritage work. Sarah is currently pursuing distanced post-grad studies in Cultural Resource Management at the University of Victoria while working in the heritage industry.
