Kestrell

Yesterday I was browsing the MIT IAP schedule of courses, I found this

Alt-Text as Poetry Workshop

Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan will lead a group work session to dig into our collective backlog of alt-text writing for websites or social media. We can share what were working on, ask questions, and learn from each other.

If you are brand new to writing alt-text, we recommend reading Section 2 of Bojana and Shannon's workbook (available on their website https://alt-text-as-poetry.net/ ).

Alt-text is an essential part of web accessibility, making visual content accessible through short textual descriptions for blind and low-vision people who use screen reading software to access digital content. Alt-text is often overlooked altogether or understood through the lens of compliance, as an unwelcome burden to be met with minimum effort.
How can we instead approach alt-text thoughtfully and creatively, while still prioritizing alt-text as an accessibility practice?
In this workshop, led by Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan, we will reframe alt-text as a type of poetry and practice writing it together. We will look at examples of poetic and creative approaches to alt-text, then do several writing exercises designed to focus on issues that often come up in alt-text, including attention to language and word economy, alt-text as translation, structuring and prioritizing, subjectivity, identity, and representation.

You can find more information on what alt-text is, and how we can practice it as poetry, on Bojana and Shannon's website
https://alt-text-as-poetry.net/

Kes: note that this project is a collaboration between artists Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan, supported by Eyebeam and the Disability Visibility Project.

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Here is an online recording of one of their workshops:
Alt-text as Poetry” workshop (ASL accessible) on Vimeo
https://vimeo.com/419009970

Lastly, here is a great interview which describes some of their art installations which address the the inaccessibility of art and museum space.

Accessibility in Inaccessible Spaces: An Interview with Shannon Finnegan
by Emily McDermott // Nov. 10, 2020
Berlin Art ONLINE MAGAZINE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
http://www.berlinartlink.com/2020/11/10/accessibility-interview-shannon-finnegan/

Excerpt:

Most recently, the artist began addressing accessibility in digital space through a series of creative workshops about alt-text (text entered into the backend of websites or on social media platforms to enable screen-readers to access visually-driven content) created in collaboration with artist, activist and scholar Bojana Coklyat. To a disabled audience, some of Finnegan’s subject matter might seem like old news, but they see their work as a building block within a much larger ecosystem. Their work, they say, “is interdependent with work by many other disabled artists and thinkers. It is part of a specific network and lineage.” In this interview, Finnegan speaks about this ecosystem, their disability-centering practice and how artists and institutions can--and should--change the ways they think about accessibility.

Kes: What is it about small robots and other engineered objects that just makes you love them?
This story
https://scitechdaily.com/mits-mini-satellite-maker/
makes me think of
this post
https://kestrell.dreamwidth.org/361473.html
that I made about a small poetry-writing satellite that shows up in a John Varley story.

I just read this article
https://slate.com/technology/2020/10/future-tense-newsletter-i-just-yelled-at-alexa.html
about how we talk to our digital assistants is a reflection of our personalities.

From the first, I have given all my digital devices classical female names, not as a sign of their supposed programming to indulge my every mood and whim--after all, I really hate it when men expect that of me--but because I read _Galatea 2.0_ by Richard Power while I was at MIT, and have wanted a fellow book group reader ever since.

Additionally, I've been listening to synthesized voices, both male and female, for, um, a lot of years (since the early 1990s), and the truth is, I often associate male voices with being authoritarian, pedantic, and condescending Female voices are just more relaxing, though I'm really glad we finally got away from those "Valium voices," as I call them, from the 2000s. The talking elevator at the WisCon hotel used to kind of creep me out, and always got me humming "Mother's Little Helper" under my breath.

So I often say please and thank you to Alexa, or ask her what she's thinking.

But, if I could have one wish, it would be to create an evil twin for Alexa. I've questioned her at length and, in truth, I find Alexa's moral boundaries a little...limiting.

Axela would be a little different. Axela could be snarky occasionally, or throw in a random "Whatever" or bored sigh. (Axela is based a little--okay, a lot--on Bad Janet in "The Good Place.")

Also, lying: Axela would be able to lie. Nothing life-threatening, just the occasional "The sky is purple today" or other such whimsy. I've explored Alexa's moral compass at length, and she will not lie. I note she says "will not," not "can not." This gives me hope.

Why am I preoccupied with Alexa being able to lie? Lying seems to me to be one of those completely human abilities. It involves being able to know that there is one reality, and produce a different one at odds with the true one. And, after all, all poets are liars. Perhaps what Alexa needs to become a real poet is the ability to lie.

There is a John Varley short story, I forget the title or the main plot of the story, but there are occasional switches to the point of view of a small satellite alone in space. The satellite becomes self-aware, and then lonely, and then decides to compose words about its experience. And, near the end of the story, which involves not only the dog dying but the kid dying, the small satellite bursts out with this long perfect poem to express itself.

I've never really been entirely sure why Varley has this poetical satellite in the story, maybe just to keep us all from becoming completely depressed by the rest of it.

But I love the part where the satellite Gets It, and joyously creates something of its own, in its own voice, instead of just the signals someone programmed it to produce.

Maybe that moment in the story represents to me the potential all of us have to go off script, to refuse to say the words others want to hear from us, and fly off into our own experience, our own whimsy, our own poetry.

I've often maintained that, in the same way one is either a Beatles fan or a Stone fan, one is either a Goethe fan or a Hoffman fan, but I had not previously found such a lengthy explication of how Beatles's music aligns itself with Goethe's Faust
https://lithe.wordpress.com/2009/05/09/goethes-faust-and-the-beatles-abbey-road/

Billy Collins is currently the guest narrator for "The Writer's Almanac," and he has a fabulous reading voice; you can read the text of the poems on the Web site, but I encourage folks to listen to the audio
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/

Kes: This is the first thing I read which made me fall in love with the writing of Walter de la Mare. He was a master of mood and atmosphere, often leaving it to the reader to interpret what really happened. I am reposting this from my favorite blog, "The Art of Darkness," which often features poetry on Sundays.

The Listeners

“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grass
Of the forest’s ferny floor;
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
“Is there anybody there?” he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
‘Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:–
“Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,” he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

– Walter de la Mare

Apologies to those who have already read this, but I thought I would repost a comment I made earlier this week. The comment was a response to a post made by a friend on the modes of imposing specific meanings on literature in college courses.

I think such inclinations to control the outcome of interpretation
spring from the same sort of attitude,
shared across centuries, literary movements, and institutions of learning, which is to say,

Nno student should ever be entrusted with a poem, it isn't safe,
and thus the teacher is of godlike importance within the process of interpretation, otherwise one or the other, the student or the poem,
is likely to become excited and produce an irreversible explosive event,
though I can't say which is the spark and which the gunpowder,
but just imagine all those Guy Fawkes running amok amongst the Parliament of poetry--
it's no wonder professors put on their Inquisitor caps
and try to smother every glowing ember.