Aneta Pawłowska

The article compares experience, often raised in contemporary aesthetic theories, of translating image into words, a relationship of the visible and linguistic with a translation technique, as well as museum experience in order to indicate some regularities in the creation of audio description (AD) of works of art, understood as a new way of making artifacts accessible to people who suffer from visual impairment, as well as one of the areas of practice applied in museology, which, by trial and error tries to adapt artistic means of expression to perceptive abilities of a distinct group of visitors. The first part of the publication discusses theories combining a picture with a word, as well as a description of an image in terms from the perspective of AD. Then it analyses two descriptions of the Neoplastic Room in Museum of Art in Łódź: a description by an art historian, Janina Ładnowska, which was created in the late 1980s as a curatorial description and was not made for the blind, and an audio description created by students of the Department of the History of Art of the University of Łódź with the support of the Audiodescription Foundation and the Culture without Barriers Foundation and through consultations with people with visual impairments in the academic year 2013-2014 dedicated to the blind and visually impaired. The article also deliberates an issue of methods of supporting reception of a work of art with multi-sensory experience. The main research questions are: - While creating descriptions, should we look for beauty/moving elements/emotions (all being inalienable characteristics of all art exploring experience) or should we confine ourselves to simple descriptions?; - Should we create simulacra of works of art (such as the much praised by blind people: typhlographics, 3D prints, referential objects that imitate the feel of the original)?