Osvěta z.s.
U jezera 2046/4, 15500 Prague, Czech Republic
A practice of processes and methods
Inclusion through Culture
The good practice of our Osvěta Association started in 2017, based on previous personal and practical knowledge of educating visually handicapped children of its founder, understanding the needs of innovative education for our target group of young people and lack of free-time activities for blind people. We ran a movement centre, along with incorporated musical-movement activities and arts centre, especially for learning tactile drawing. The new skills acquired will lead to better employment rate of our target group and to increase their range of activities.
We worked with young people, usually from handicapped background, to whom we tried to provide arts in alternative and accessible forms with special emphasis on filmmaking as a tool for social change. We have also organised workshops about inclusion through arts, organised at general schools and at workshops abroad. We have as well worked with young refugees and their resocialisation. We have also attended, organised or co-organised international conferences about inclusion.
Our current main project, connecting art and science, is a project in late research phase about film technology accessibility for visually impaired people. The technological-art project is based on my own previous unique social and artistic project – a trial film training for visually impaired young people. Here, the handicapped young people were able to try film-making through innovative methods with initial assistance without eyesight. After the lessons with visually handicapped people, we had an idea of organizing similar workshops internationally for general public where in pairs, one person has eyes covered and the other one helps with the filming.
Our goal is to incorporate innovative technological solutions into this learning process. We would like to research an interactive camera with which especially the blind people can profit from an AI responsive hardware (a kind of creative chatbot integrated into the device) to create films with AI assistance that will partly substitute the eyesight in the filming process. This is a mid-step of developing a complex hardware and software solution of a film camera for visually handicapped people which will have interactive features. This camera should in the future give freedom to blind people to shoot their own short videos and audiovisual content, for example for their social media.
Such a camera, among others, should be able to identify and describe visible objects and to assist with basic filming features by voice and simple commands. Our primary target are young people with visual handicap or completely blind.
We try to promote the topic of inclusion and change through culture among general public by organising interactive workshop in different countries to raise awareness of the handicap among young people and their difficulty getting an appropriate job without skills that are at the same time difficult to acquire. We work on a film initiative that will lead to resocialisation of excluded social groups. We also do research in spiritual approach and try to use interfaith dialogue for a more connected and more empathetic world. Our current main project in research phase and early implementation shows how technology (an innovative film camera) can through culture and art (filmmaking) reach not only the general audience in an unusual way, but in its final step also the fragile group of visually handicapped people anywhere in the world. The project makes filmmaking, photography and audiovisual arts in general accessible to people who were cut off from creation. It gives a chance of basic filming to people who have never been able to create videos using emerging technologies, such as AI.
Organisation and practice