On Interacting with the Environment

Is It Possible to Interact With Children With Autism? asks a headline in NewsBlaze a few weeks ago.

Most certainly yes!—- as I try to show in the wordless conversations here, in the musical interchanges that pass between Charlie and me. We can teach Charlie the phrases and gestures that are often expected as “interaction”—-hand shakes and waves, “hi” and “bye” and “I’m fine.” And he does them in a practised and dutiful way. But for real “interaction with Charlie,” I have to start where he is, and build up from there, and this takes an act of imagination on my part that I am not always sure I am capable of, or that I execute rightly in regard to Charlie.

One way I know what is, or what might possibly be, on Charlie’s mind is from watching what he does; on entering a room, he often runs back and forth and back and forth, as if acclimate himself in a new space; to adjust to a change in his physical surroundings. Usually that environment is the humdrum of furniture in the house or aisles of products and other goods in a store—and then there’s what Visual Voice Pro can do do a room.

Visual Voice Pro was created by Adam Montandon, the director of HMC Interactive. Via custom software, a computer with a data projector, and a microphone, a digital installation is created: The microphone picks up on any sounds in the room (from a footstep to soft crackling of paper being wadded up to a child’s graphics that are projected on the wall (and that I, always being one to enjoy a visual feast, found quite entrancing to look at). The paneling around here would look rather different as a Soundpool or a Wavestation.

I have to wonder a bit if the intensity of the images might be over-stimulating for my son, though: He likes much to look at certain things in certain patterns, but I think it can be a bit jarring for him to transition away from those things. On the other hand, Charlie much enjoys being in an aquarium surrounded by wall-sized tanks of water and swimming things and I have to think he would find it (indeed, I would find it) something to see his workday room changed into a blue-glowing undersea like world, as if the ocean were right in his home.