Shapereader is a tactile language, specifically designed to allow the creation of universally accessible narrative works of tactile literature for, and from a visually impaired readership. While it has been mainly created for the purposes of a blind community, the Shapereader repertoire can also be experienced by the acquainted regular user. Shapereader advocates for new publishing grounds and challenges the visual predominance of language and storytelling experience. Through circumvention of the reader’s visual sensorimotor stimuli, it activates the repressed tactile-sensory realm and offers a new diegetic experience by transposing semantic and syntactical structures cognizance to the reader’s fingertips. The creation of Shapereader has been generously funded by the Finnish Institue Koneen Säätiö in 2013 for the Art & Multilingualism grant call. Shapereader and the graphic novel Arctic Circle have both been designed by Ilan Manouach.

Shapereader is an innovative project, that has been growing internationally. Unbound by the particularities of ethnic and native alphabets of the Braille code, Shapereader is addressed to all readers, regardless their nationality, language, educational level, or the subsistence under any visual handicap. It allows for a universal dissemination as it makes use of the raw tactile sense, and doesn’t involve any technical training except of some simple mnemotechnics that can be learned on the go, as the Shapereader workshops have demonstrated so far. The Shapereader exhibition comes with a built-in scenographic set that can accommodate, with minimal adjustments, a variety of different venues and audiences. A prolonged period of trial-and-error experimentations with different technologies and substrates, established a know-how that allowes larger curatorial manoeuvres, ranging from monumental, perennial outdoors installations to intimate, portable, light and practically disposable instantiations.

Shapereader consists of an ever expanding repertoire of anaglyph shapes called tactigrams designed to provide haptic equivalents for objects, actions, affections, characters and so on. Created from scratch, their design is based on criteria of simplicity, easiness of memorization and distinguishability. For example, a category of shapes assigned to affections includes primary states such as joy, fear or sadness as well as more complex ones such as coercion, remorse and unease. Each affection is available in three incremental intensities and this change of magnitude is intuitively translated by the gradual thickening of the shape’s core pattern. These affections can be combined synergetically allowing for an unprecedented realistic, fine-tuned and rich description of the emotional states of the plot’s characters. These shapes are distributed spatially according to the basic assumptions of contiguity and proximity. Semantic clusters, not unlike linear syntactical structures, determine the belonging to the same group: i.e. the shape that stands for a specific person will be more likely surrounded by patterns that describe both the person’s affective state, his actions and/or the elements that he is interacting with. Due to possible misconstruing, this configuration structurally allows for a more diffused and open-ended syntactical arrangement.

Arctic Circle