Part of a wider collection of tactile images for blind and partially sighted people, this 3D recreation of ‘The Oldest Image of Venice’ is designed to be understood through touch. The original dates from around 1330 and is credited to Niccolò da Poggibonsi, however, in the intervening centuries the piece faded into obscurity and was then re-discovered by Dr. Sandra Toffolo, only then being reintroduced to the public in 2020. The work appears to have been copied previously and was designed with reproduction in mind, something that made it a natural choice when designing accessible work.
Created in partial fulfilment of the requirements of a PhD at the University of Huddersfield, the thesis includes resources and information to aid in the design and creation of tactile images from both a professional and engaged amateur audience.
“There is perhaps a kind of poetry to translating work which has already been so deliberately distributed, wherein through contemporary methods it might be made accessible to a blind audience, in tandem to a kind of visual proliferation through other forms of digital replication.
Much as the foregrounding of elements might draw attention to a specific aspect of a work, the shift in focus offered by a tactile translation might also bring novel insights into the primary instance. To wit, the Oldest Image of Venice becomes a point of interest, in part because of its rediscovery and the emerging context with which its 2020 presentation was framed. In this way, a tactile equivalent is aesthetically interesting, in part because the nature of translation is intimately connected with the nature of the original, wherein the rendition might be thought faithful in both form and in a perhaps more nuanced sense, function.” (Crumlish, 2023)
Download for free: www.thingiverse.com/thing:6042964
