I don’t quite remember how it came up but I was discussing Braille porn with a friend the other day. While it doesn’t really qualify as porn in my book, Playboy has been translated into Braille since 1970 and we started to wonder how the centrefolds would work - would they be rendered as countours? I have since discovered that:

The Braille version includes all the written words in the non-Braille magazine, but no pictorial representations. That has to be a little frustrating.

Nonetheless I couldn’t stop thinking about how visual representation translates to the felt form. A photo translated to a contour is not going to feel anything like the naked body of a woman, or a man. Blind readers are not schooled in the conventions and condensations of visual representation? Wouldn’t it make more sense to work with certain discrete, life sized contours - nipples, labia, sphincter - which would then have the same metonymic, suggestive function as the partly revealed centrefold?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 6:01 am and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.