Blue Description Project (BDP) is an audio description and captioning project produced in collaboration with Voices in the Gallery—led by Dr. Sarah Hayden Associate Professor in Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Southampton.

Blue Description Project engages Derek Jarman's Blue (1993) via expanded and critical accessibility. As Jarman wrote in his book Chroma (1994): “If I have overlooked something you hold precious—write it in the margin”. BDP has taken up this invitation by creating a new, experimental iteration of Blue on the 30th anniversary of its release, and Jarman’s death.

Jarman’s Blue is an epoch-defining account of AIDS, illness, and the experience of disability in a culture of repressive heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness. Despite being referred to as a feature film, Blue never existed exclusively in one medium. It was screened in theaters, simulcast on television and radio, released as a CD, and published as a book, creating opportunities for many different kinds of sensory abilities—visual, aural, and textual—to experience the work. The Blue Description Project builds on the multifaceted nature of Jarman’s work through newly commissioned and expansive accessibility. Reflecting Blue’s standing as a foundational work of Crip art, the project challenges ableist hierarchies while focusing on the generative possibilities of difference and interdependence.  

The BDP iteration features creative captions and audio description that have been sourced from numerous contributors. It attempts to convey, express, engage, respond, evoke, articulate, replicate, translate, transmogrify, channel, and transcend what Blue is/was/could be....

For those unfamiliar—visual descriptions and audio descriptions translate visual experiences into text, a gesture that creates slippages/gaps and in-equivalencies between the primary document and the text description. In response we have asked many, many people to describe their visual experience of Blue. Blue is not a film with "no image". Blue is a feeling as much as it is a visual experience. Blue is a memory. Blue is a poem. Blue is a vast landscape of history and possibility. Blue needs a multiplicity of voices and perspectives to attempt description!