Description: an interdisciplinary symposium exploring worlds beyond and beneath the visible
On the 1 st of July 2016 Notes on Blindness, based on the audiocassette diaries of Prof John M. Hull will open in cinemas across the UK. Last year the directors of the film, Peter Middleton and James Spinney , kindly gave permission for their initial Emmy Award-winning short documentary (of the same name) to open the chalk: time sense and landscape, symposium in Winchester.
The symposium was to a very large extent inspired by the writing of John Hull and I was absolutely delighted when John agreed to open the day as our keynote speaker. I was subsequently devastated to learn of his death on the 28 th July 2015. Peter and James continued to support the symposium and had hoped to attend the day in October, but were actually editing the feature length Notes on Blindness at that time. An obituary for John appeared in The Guardian .
I first came across John Hull’s writing in the book Touching the Rock (1990), in which he describes and reflects upon his journey into blindness. The writing maintains the honesty and intimacy of the audiocassette diaries from which it was transcribed, but it is much more than an autobiography of someone else’s experience. As Oliver Sacks writes in his forward to the book: ‘The observation is minute, and it is also profound. The incisiveness of Hull’s observation, the beauty of his language, make this book