PLEASE SUBMIT YOUR DESCRIPTIONS BY DECEMBER 15, 2023
The Blue Description Project (BDP) is an audio description and captioning project—produced by Crip* in collaboration with Voices in the Gallery—that engages Derek Jarman's Blue (1993) via expanded and critical accessibility.
“For Blue there are no boundaries.” (Derek Jarman, Blue, 1993)
Derek Jarman's
Blue (1993) is a multifaceted work that reconciles visual, aural, and textual components to create an expansive and affective experience.
Blue was originally released in film, television, radio, CD, and book formats. Despite being referred to as a feature film,
Blue never existed exclusively in one medium. Its premiere was simulcast on Channel 4 and Radio 3 (UK television and radio respectively), and screened theatrically at the MGM Panton Street theater in London.
The formats in which Blue existed before its formal release, and the various modes in which it was made available simultaneously, decentralize its content and resist simplistic and reductive characterizations that claim it is a film with “no image,” with “nothing to look at” but a “single static shot” of International Klein Blue that you “watch … for the film’s 79 minutes.”. Blue provides multiple points of access that are not indexed by a “primary” or “intended” format through which to experience the work. Blue’s formal variants allow us to reflect upon the ways that art leverages a series of ability-based assumptions (read requirements) to construct an interpretive space for the work to be parsed or understood. Blue complicates singularly formatted work and reveals the degree to which that singularity relies upon willful inaccessibility.
"If I have overlooked something you hold precious—write it in the margin.” (Derek Jarman, Chroma, 1994)
Taking up Jarman's invitation to write in the margin, please help us in creating visual descriptions of Blue that attempt to convey, express, engage, respond, evoke, articulate, replicate, translate, transmogrify, channel, or transcend what Blue is/was/could be....
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Visual descriptions and audio descriptions translate visual experiences into text, a gesture that creates slippages/gaps and in-equivalencies between the primary document and the text description. In response we have asked many, many people to describe their visual experience of Blue. Blue is not a film with "no image". Blue is a feeling as much as it is a visual experience. Blue is a memory. Blue is a poem. Blue is a vast landscape of history and possibility. Blue needs a multiplicity of voices to attempt description!
