A Rare Sight - Elizabeth Goldring looks for art and gets an eyeful
From: Technology Review, September / October, 1998 - page 86

Poet and artist Elizabeth Goldring's eyes fill with light when she works -
laser light, that is. A degenerative eye disease damaged Goldring's vision,
so she must go to great lengths to see her own art; she uses a laser to
project the video and computer images she creates directly onto a small,
functional part of her retina.  

The device that brings Goldring's work back into her view is a modified
version of a diagnostic tool called the scanning laser ophthalmoscope (SLO).
By connecting the SLO to cameras, computers and even the Internet, Goldring
can see friends' faces, unfamiliar buildings and - for the first time in
years - words. With help from the SLO's inventor and other researchers,
students and artists, Goldring hopes someday to use the machine to share
visual experiences with others she believes have been encouraged
unnecessarily to "turn off their eyes."  

But, as Technology Review's Associate Editor Rebecca Zacks discovered when
she visited Goldring at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, seeing with
the SLO is an intense and tiring experience. And even with the device,
Goldring's vision is too poor to read traditional text. So Goldring is
developing a terse visual language of "word-images," hybrids of letters and
graphics that make intuitive and immediate sense.  

Without the SLO, Goldring sees faces only as "moons," but her gaze is steady
as she speaks: 

"For the last seven years, I've been working on creating visual experiences
and digital language - poetry - for people who have very limited eyesight.
Before that, for close to four years, I saw virtually nothing: some light,
some shadow perception. When my eyesight began to deteriorate, I spent a lot
of time writing about it - both poems and "eye journals" describing what I
saw as I looked out of damaged eyes. I had to try to figure out how to write
with a tape recorder, and its really difficult for a writer to write without
seeing any words."  

Goldring points out a poster on the wall that shows a word-image - a simple
outline of a door flanked by the letters "d" and "r" - projected onto the
veined surface of a human retina.  

"Images from a scanning laser ophthalmoscope have a really indelible quality.
It's almost as though your retina is a stone and the image is carved in by
the laser. This is a healthy retina looking at a word image that I've
created: door. I've worked a lot with this particular word because it's so
difficult for me to see - the two "o"s and the "d" are all so similar, they
get in the way of each other. But if I separate the "d" and the "r" with this
image I can see the whole thing much faster. I've also tried door in another
way, which I'm quite excited about because it is one of the first times that
I have been able to get any sense of depth when using the scanning laser
ophthalmoscope."  

She demonstrates, holding her hands up next to one another, palms toward her
face, and pivoting them apart like swinging saloon doors.  

"The word opened: d-o and o-r swung back like a door, and it worked because
it was separating the "o"s. It also worked spatially and it enhanced the
meaning of the word so that you get it instantly. Bad seeing or significant
visual impairment means, among other things, very slow seeing. So anything
you can do to convey the meaning faster helps. When people with normal vision
read words, they scan across the tops of the letters. Well, I don't - I have
to look around, up and down each letter. By the time I get to the end of a
three-letter word, I have put in a great deal of effort. That's why Im
interested in developing succinct symbols."  

After years spent creating words, poems and video images for the SLO,
Goldring believes she's "on the brink" of being ready to show her work to
other visually challenged people.  

"For people to want to use eyes that don't work very well, they will have to
have compelling visual images. That's really what I'm working on, not only
with language but also other kinds of visual experiences. I think the ways in
which people see whats being presented will need to be individualized: Some
people may need the laser brighter, some people may need it dimmer. In the
case of word images, some people may need curves, others may need hard edges.
I don't think this individualized tailoring is difficult. The hard part is
getting something that is compelling enough and satisfying enough to warrant
the extreme amount of energy and dedication it takes to look." 
