First Experience

I chose to have my first experience be exploration #28 because I wanted to know what it's like being blind. I don't have the best vision in the world so I chose to expand my exploration by not using my glasses/contacts for a period of time. I chose to do my first experience [being blind] on Saturday. I walked around my whole apartment for about 10 minutes. I relied on my other senses and my friend, who kept me out of harms by guidance. The second experience [no glasses/contacts] was done Monday. I spent an hour doing my regular activities. After each experiment I documented them in my sketchbook and took a lot of notes.

Experiment 1
so the first experiment was to walk around my apt with a blind fold, and i started at my room. Surprisingly i could identify 85% of the things in my room. why? because I'm always in my room during school. so i moved to the other rooms in my apt, which was my living room. kitchen, and my roommate's room. So the living room was also a room i could identify and as i move to the kitchen i was not able to identify a lot of the objects surrounding me. My biggest fear was to touch a knife and cut myself! But luckily I had my roommate watch my every room and yell to out "Don't touch that!" So the room I know the least was of course my roommate's room. I felt like I was in a whole different world. I stumbled on everything and I even dropped books and papers everywhere. After that mini accident I was getting a little antsy because I didn't know what i was doing and I was tired of knocking things down. So I pulled the blind fold off and felt relieved it was over!

Experiment 2
So the next day I spent half the day not being able to see without contacts and glasses. I guess the only good thing about this experiment was I could see but only blurry. I have a pretty bad eye sight so everything that had to do with text and images was all in my face throughout the experiment because I couldn't see it from far away, I mostly gave up on reading anything because if I strained my eyes too much I had a headache. What I did notice was i could easily identify colors and shapes. Some shapes I couldn't identify but I knew they were there. I was content in knowing that i knew most of the objects surrounding me.

After my experiments it was hard for me to have visuals to relate to when i was being blind. I had a lot of thoughts and feelings going through my head and i wanted that to be guide my to my connection.



From those feelings I wanted to make a connection with the objects I stumbled upon and felt anxious.
This is my roommate's room and this is the infamous room I felt so lost in and gathered many emotions from.



These are a few of the many objects I touched that I either stumbled, couldn't identify or was scared to touch. And from that I wanted to make a connection with the quotes I gathered from a few books from what I felt from this experience.








From all this experience and talking to polly I want to explore more of what it's like to be really blind. So i will continue by researching how people live everyday with blindness and what do they do different from those who can see.