Tag: image description

Blind Visionscapes: Making an AI Model with Handmade Datasets at SFPC

I went into Handmade Datasets wanting to build an image-description generator and wound up trying to train a machine to hallucinate blind visionscapes. Handmade Datasets My increasing reliance on AI for my ongoing photography project made me curious to know more. I guest-lectured at the School for Poetic Computation years ago, and I’d been thinking that if I were to… Read more

First Month as an NYPL Cullman Fellow * Photo/Description Journal

From my first mornings entering the New York Public Library as the 2025-26 Jean Strouse Fellow in the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, I knew it would be a very happy year! Perhaps it was the five months away in so many new situations—MacDowell, Yaddo, San Francisco—learning to bumble about with Moses, that made it possible for me to… Read more

Valentin Haüy’s Essai (1786) * On the Education of Blind Children * NYPL Rare books * Image + Description

I wrote about Valentin Haüy and his founding of the first school for blind children in 1785 in There Plant Eyes. My dear friend David Lowe, who is a photo specialist in the Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs at the New York Public Library, read my book (Thanks, David!), and because he did, when he saw Valentin Haüy’s… Read more

“100 Years of Blindness: A Scented Performance-Lecture on Photography” – April 15!

After a sold-out performance on March 1, I’m delighted to announce a second chance to experience “100 years of Blindness: A Scented Performance Lecture on Photography” on April 15, 7pm, at Olfactory Art Keller, NYC! Buy tickets! What happens when we explore photography without sight? In this experimental performance lecture, blind author and artist Dr. M. Leona Godin conjures five… Read more

Image Description and the Critical Blind Gaze * NYPL Public Lecture

*As a 2023-24 Diamonstein-Spielvogal Fellow at the New York Public Library, I was asked to give a public lecture in the Vartan Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities on March 8, 2024 called: “Image Description and the Critical Blind Gaze.” Below is the recording of the lecture—including questions from the star-studded audience!—followed by a cleaned-up transcript of my lecture… Read more

AI Describing AI * Whitney Museum * Photo/Description Journal

Thanks to Bojana Coklyat for inviting me to co-lead a verbal description  tour with Art educator Paula Stuttman at the Whitney Museum on May 9! It was great fun to discuss some of the works in “Harold Cohen: AARON” with the help of Be My AI, an app for blind people powered by GPT4 that produces robust, nearly instantaneous image… Read more