Cybersight Responsive Art 

Cybersight is a responsive artwork that invites worldwide aesthetic collaboration in creating a databank of those images that the blind would most like to see.  These images are digitized and modified with computer graphics software to create art for the sighted while rendering them accessible to the blind through digital technologies that transform visual images into tactile experiences. Each time an image is contributed to the databank, sponsors donate funds for research to fight blindness.   

Art in cyberspace enhances life in realspace

(An excerpt from the chapter "Responsive art in a postdigital world" in Mel Alexenberg's book The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age, Intellect Books/University of Chacago Press, pages 234-238.)

Cybersight is responsive art that gives art to the blind and hands to art. Art of the past may have expressed social and humanitarian concerns, but it hangs insularly on a museum wall disengaged from issues that define it. In a sense, that art is handicapated. It possessess no hands to help the cause it is advocating.

Responsive systems art plugs into the real world transforming its audience into active participants."We neeed an art that transcends the distanced formality of aesthetics and dares to respond to the cries of the world." (Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art)

Experiencing Images by Touch

Cybersight reaches out to human beings lacking the primary sense required to encounter art as defined in Western culture. It offers blind people oportunities to experience imagery through their sense of touch using specially designed digital technologies. They can gain tactile access to those things they would most like to see and to images from their everday life. 

What is responsive art?

Responsive art redefines art as active process rather than passive object.  Although art as object can express social and humanitarian values and issues, it does not act to effect change.  Responsive art reaches out into the real world, transforming viewers into participants in the creative process and social action.

Cross-cultural Database
Blind people worldwide were asked by the art professor Mel Alexenberg to identify the four things they would most like to see if they had vision.  The results of this cross-cultural research on the visual aspirations of the blind are used to populate a database of images that are made available to blind people who can "see" them through a specially designed mouse that traces the images on their fingertips.

Image Database
The cross-cultural database of responses becomes an invitation to people in all walks of life to submit images of the things the blind would like to see.  In addition, students in art schools across the globe are invited to upload photographs that they take in response to the visual aspirations of the blind. 

Fighting Blindness
Each time an image is contributed, a sponsor donates funds that supports research in laboratories worldwide. Aesthetic collaboration in cyberspace generates acts of human compassion in real space.

What are four things you would most like to see if you had vision?

The following are cross-cultural responses to a questionnaire developed by Mel, Ari and Miriam Alexenberg that was recieved from blind people worldwide including countries as varied as Australia, Czech Republic, Ethiopia, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Korea, Lebanon, Lithuania, Niger, Poland, Slovenia, St. Lucia, United Kingdom, United States, and Zambia.

Sky: blue sky, clouds, night sky, star-studded sky, thunder-lightning storm, rainbow, moon, sun, sunlight, sunrise, sunset, snowflake, planet Earth, comet, eclipse, shooting star

Landscapes: countryside, mountains, a meadow in bloom, a panoramic view of mountains and sea, jungle, trees, trees in moonlight, autumn trees, cityscape, buildings, my neighborhood, stores, castle, a bird’s eye view of the Earth, Castle, Taj Mahal, World Trade Center, Pentagon, Eiffel Tower

Water: water, sea, ocean waves, waterfalls, rivers

People: faces, human beings, myself, mother, father, children, friends, girlfriend, boyfriend, my teachers, smiling people, beautiful women, a bride in a white wedding dress, a baby crying, photos of family members, eyes, nose, ears

Media: computer graphics, print in a book, newspapers, signature, movies, television shows, video games

Sports: football game, basketball game, water skiing, car races

Animals: horse, squirrel, cat, puppy, fox, pig, giraffe, lion, whale, dolphins, snake, fish, mosquitoes, bees, birds in flight, stork, wild animals that I cannot pet, chicks following a hen, dinosaur

Vehicles: spaceship, airplane, group of airplanes at airport, helicopter, hot-air balloon, automobile, roads, traffic, ambulance, school bus, tractor, lawn mower, boat, ship, anchor, ship’s steering wheel, spaceship, tank, elevator

Others: shadows, light, colors, window, mirror, flowers, food, lemon, sugar, chocolate, money, keyboard, compass, upholstered chair, trance music, gold, toys, idols of god, Koran, planting rice, rice fields, clothes

The Artists
Mel Alexenberg is an experimental artist and art educator. Millions throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia have seen his computer-generated art, telecommunications art events, multi-media installations, and conceptual artworks. He has been art professor at Columbia University and universities in Israel, head of the art department at Pratt Insitute, dean at New World School of the Arts in Miami, and research fellow at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. His digital artworks are in the collections of more than thirty museums worldwide. He is known a "Grandfather of NFT's" since his computer-generated artworks span more tha half a century,

Ari Alexenberg is a conceptural artist, website designer, and hi-tech entrepreneur. He published The Weekly Echo, both a technoetic artwork and an interactive news site. It is archived in the New Museum's Rhizome ArtBase of digital art https://artbase.rhizome.org/wiki/Q4772. He collaborated on the artistic design and technical development of a biofeedback-generated interactive system at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He designed web sites for numerous Fortune 500 companies including: Whirlpool, Gap, Gillete, Pricewaterhouse, John Deere, and 3Com.  His forward thinking ideas on web design have been presented in seminars and corporate meetings nationwide as exemplary of innovative uses of the evolving Internet medium. He was president of Stratigent, a web analytics consulting company.

Miriam Benjamin is an artist who has been working in community-based participatory artworks. She collaborated with African-American, Hispanic, and Jewish elders and youth in creating Art Thrones, monumental public artworks in Miami. She studied art at Columbia University, Massachusetts College of Art, and Pratt Institute where she earned her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree. Cybersight is a deeply meaningful art project for her because she has retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease that has made her legally blind. She is Mel's wife and Ari's mother.