Inhaling Alice in Wonderland
Ouch readers with long(ish) memories may recall being astounded by the work of sculptor Willard Wigan when I last wrote about him on the weblog .
I was very pleased to record the fact that Willard received an MBE for his work in the New Year’s Honours list on .
Not that I’m obsessed with Willard, or anything, but I’ve recently discovered a video interview with him on the . (A video which you can apparently download to your ipod should your mastery of modern gadgetry be considerably greater than my own. Also, it probably helps if you actually own an ipod)
Willard can’t read or write. But he can produce sculptures so incredibly tiny that they can be accidentally inhaled. And he's intending to go smaller yet.
Look, I’m not going to bore you by repeating what I wrote about Willard last year. Just run the video. You won’t regret it.
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I did catch a glimpse of the elephant on the video but had to skip the rest because there were no captions or transcript :-( It IS fascinating to see something that detailed in something so small.
The text under the video clip is the transcript. Or pretty darned close.
I find that happens a lot on websites belonging to American news providers. You can watch the video of the broadcast, or you can just read what was said.
The only problem with that, of course, is that you wouldn't know it to be the case unless you had hearing.
Oh. Thanks for telling me. I had NO idea until now that there was any correspondence between the text on the page and the video on the page--I had always assumed that they were simply related, two different angles of the same story and not necessarily a transcript. As you say: you'd have to be hearing to even realize!
For something as visual as this tape, though, simply reading a transcript isn't really an adequate substitute, unfortunately. And trying to both read the transcript and then see the video mostly leads to confusion, I find.
And it makes me wonder whatever blind people do, given that videos are not any more accessible to them than they are to Deaf people. Maybe even less in this case (unless there is some audio description on the video ... that I can't hear).
And think of deaf-blind people, too. To serve them properly, you'd need a transcript that integrates descriptions of the visual content.
That is one of the most incredible things I've ever seen. That borders on genius in my opinion.