Collaborations

The Inner Eye: From the Outside In
by Elizabeth Goldring and Vin Grabill
for Silo Solos 3 (2024)

Poet/artist Elizabeth Goldring and video artist Vin Grabill remember their collaborations from the late 1980's on eye/sight projects and their video, “The Inner Eye: From the Inside Out,” in a conversation recorded at the Goldring-Piene Art Farm in Groton, MA, July 2024.

In the 1980s, the visually-challenged poet and fully-sighted video artist faced challenges in creating visual narratives on vision loss and blindness. It was before the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act when accessibility issues were not always taken seriously. In their 2024 conversation, Goldring and Grabill speak to changing perspectives, shifting impressions of surroundings, the melding of past and present, and the constants of change. Blindness and vision loss has become more accepted, yet inequities still exist due to the technical demands placed on persons with little or no sight. There are many ways “out” to experience the world and still too few ways back into the soul of the sightless.

above: video excerpt from “The Inner Eye: From the Inside Out,” featuring poet/artist Elizabeth Goldring and video artist Vin Grabill, Goldring-Piene Art Farm in Groton, MA, July 2024. The artists revisit their collaborations from the late 1980's on eye/sight projects and the video.

In their early work, Elizabeth Goldring and Vin Grabill created an interactive video installation, "EYE/SIGHT", featuring a live camera and two-channel video display. Viewers were able to peer into a camera lens that was set to insert a close-up image of their own eye into the video mix. The inner video screen showed edited footage of Elizabeth's diagnostic eye exams, and the outer video screen showed video footage of a live video image of the viewer's own eye. Audio from the diagnostic footage is projected into the space, but when a viewer puts on a set of available headphones, the ambient audio is muted, and the voice of Elizabeth speaking poems from her Eye Journals is heard. "EYE/SIGHT" was exhibited in the 1990 "Options" show at the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA), as well as in exhibitions in New York and Germany.

Here is an excerpt from a Vin Grabill and Elizabeth Goldring discussion about visualizing vision at the LightsOROT exhibit in 1988:

above: video excerpt from Goldring and Grabill in conversation at LightsOROT, an exhibition by the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) for the Yeshiva University Museum, New York City. The exhibition was a collaborative effort by 10 CAVS artists to utilize new tools of technology to interpret Jewish concepts of light. LightsOROT was on display from January 31 - December 31, 1988.

Corona Diaries II, for Silo Solos 2 (2021)

Elizabeth Goldring reads excerpts from her Corona journals in concert with flutist David Whiteside's improvisations in the Bell Silo. As the pandemic has become less isolating, Goldring searches for her post-pandemic identity. The silo doors open to let in swaths of blue light, retinal imagery and Goldring’s galaxy retina prints.

Corona Diaries, for Silo Solos 1 (2020)

Corona Diaries (8:46 minutes) by Elizabeth Goldring and David Whiteside. Elizabeth Goldring reads excerpts from her Corona journals in concert with flutist David Whiteside's improvisations. The sounding of Paul Matisse’s bell sets the stage for their dialogue.

Silo Solos 1, in 2020, featuring artists Seth Riskin, Ellen Sebring, David Whiteside and Elizabeth Goldring, in from of the silo locations on the Goldring-Piene Art Farm, Groton, MA 2020

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About Silo Solos

Silo Solos began in 2020 when the twin silos served as safe studio spaces during the global pandemic. Now in its third year, the program features original artistic explorations in the Paul Matisse sound silo and Otto Piene light silo located on the Otto Piene-Elizabeth Goldring Art Farm in Groton, Massachusetts. The participants, many alumni of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT from the period when Otto Piene was director, emphasize environmental work and collaboration. The theme for the 2024 collection is emerging from isolation and discovering the planet we share in a multitude of ways.

Silo Solos has been broadcast each year as part of the B3 Festival of the Moving Image in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Eye Robot, with Robert Wilson (2011)

Goldring and her interdisciplinary team at MIT collaborated with Robert Wilson, American avant-garde stage director and playwright, to develop technologies that address issues of blindness and partial sight using robotics. During a four-day workshop in the ACT Cube, they rehearsed new scenes for “My New Friend SU: The Moon’s Other Side,” a theatrical collaboration in which Goldring’s “Eye Robot” played a role. The piece used Goldring’s texts and seeing technologies.

Elizabeth Goldring and Robert Wilson, “My New Friend SU: The Moon’s Other Side,” ACT Cube. Goldring’s “Eye Robot” played a role (2011). photo: E. Sebring

Elizabeth Goldring and Robert Wilson, scene from “My New Friend SU: The Moon’s Other Side,” a theatrical collaboration during a four-day workshop in the ACT Cube. Goldring’s “Eye Robot” played a role; with light ballet by Otto Piene, 2011.