About the Flaneur
![Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, Rainy Day (La Place de l’Europe, temps de pluie). 1877. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]](../../wp-content/uploads/2009/02/gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day_1877_wiki.jpg "gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day")
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
![Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]](../../wp-content/uploads/2008/04/isle_royale_fog.jpg "Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]")
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]
Tag Archives: fair use
Café Mouffe: Danger Mouse & The Grey Video
James Boyle says in an On the Media interview that if 50-somethings were talking about the golden age of digital sampling, U.S. judges would be more likely to accept it as a significant cultural production worthy of protection under the fair use doctrine. So I am here to testify, Your Honor, as a card-carrying member of the ACLU and the AARP: The Grey Album by DJ Danger Mouse, a 2004 remix of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ White Album, is a brilliant and transformative work of art in its own right. We need the freedom to make more art like it.
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Working in the Fair Use Lab
It may be a while before you find the flaneur out on the street – unless it’s in Cambridge next weekend during the Media in Transition 6 conference at M.I.T. Until then, look for me in the Fair Use Lab, … Continue reading
Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab
My proposal for MiT6. True to form, I met the deadline at the last minute: A blind reader who constructs an accessible text of Harold Innis’ “The Bias of Communication” will find in it some powerful ideas that suggest why … Continue reading
Lessig: To Read Is To Copy
“In the digital age, every single thing we do with creative work on a digital network creates a copy,” Lawrence Lessig said in an NPR Fresh Air interview last month. “The act of reading on a digital network produces a … Continue reading
MiT6 Deadline Is Jan. 9
The Media in Transition 6 conference (MiT6) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is scheduled for April 24-26, 2009. The conference theme is “Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission.” The deadline for submitting proposals is January 9, 2009. Ms. Modigliani … Continue reading
