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About the Flaneur
I walk through my blindness the way I wander down streets in Paris: unfettered and alive, alert to the raw material of the senses. I am a flaneur. Come along with me. Just don’t try to take my arm, unless I ask. What’s a flaneur? Read the first post, Return of the Flaneur to Galerie Vivienne. After that, try Foot Rage and the Blind Flaneur. Then stay tuned.Letting Go of Sight
I’ve canoed on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I’ve been losing eyesight. I return year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call “going blind.” After 35 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. Read Big Water. See more about the Great Lakes.Not This Pig
If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).Media in Transition @ MiT
Disabled Americans today have to negotiate for the kinds of accommodations made for FDR, and the caveat “reasonable accommodation” is built into the law. President Franklin Roosevelt did not have to negotiate. He could summon vast resources of the federal government – money as well as brains – to accomplish the work of disability. And it was accomplished with such thoroughness and efficiency that its scale could be called the Accessibility-Industrial Complex had it been directed toward public accommodations and not solely the needs of a single man. Read FDR and the Hidden Work of Disability [MiT8 2013]
Shepard Fairey claimed that his posterization of a copyrighted AP news photo of Barack Obama was a transformative work protected by the fair use doctrine. In other words, it was a shape-shifter. I claim fair use, too, when I reproduce and transform copyrighted works into media formats that are accessible to me as a blind reader. Read Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]
The social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars in New York never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it, either. In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in 1916, he could not have expected that one day blind photographers would reverse the camera’s gaze. Read Curiosity & The Blind Photographer. [MiT5 2007]
Category Archives: street art
Are You Human? Decoding CAPTCHA’s Into Street Art
One of the biggest barriers I confront on the Internet is the CAPTCHA code. I can’t decipher them without the assistance of a fully-sighted person, who has trouble doing it, too. The accessibility feature that renders a CAPTCHA as an audio representation isn’t much of a solution, either. My ears are trained to hear the subtlest patterns (crossing the street, my life depends on that), so I hear far more information in the garbled audio than the CAPTCHA permits. So, as often as not, I fail to prove that I am an independent, self-sufficient human being. Continue reading
London Street Art Prepares for “The Thousands”
The blind flaneur needs to figure out how to get to London for this. via RJ Rushmore at Vandalog: The street art exhibition I announced last week finally has a name: The Thousands. It also has a special blog where … Continue reading
Imaging Paris: May 1968
Augmented Illusions: passers-by (hoogstraat)
I’ve often wondered how others would respond if they saw the street and its movement as I see it with what’s left of my peripheral vision. Rotterdam sensory artist Alex de Jong created a video sequence of time-lapse photographs that … Continue reading