Kat Germain
Drawing on her work as a Visual Translator for Blind audiences/ artists, Kat Germain reflects on media accessibility practices when translating signed music by Deaf artists. Considering the additional complexity of translating art, Germain asks: What is the dichotomy between a Deaf artist’s (silent) work and a Blind audience member’s experience of it? If the audible translation (which is necessarily a creative act) is the only experience an audience member receives, at what point does VT cease being a copy, and when does translation create it anew?
Emily Fitzpatrick
How can we evade being seen, or disappear completely, in our online lives? Fitzpatrick looks to how artists embrace glitches and errors to become unsearchable and un-fileable. Reflecting on how new media artists and scholars embrace cyber-feminist strategies to resist the tangible inequity in AI technologies, and refuse to participate in the machine’s social intelligence, Fitzpatrick will work towards creating encrypted survival tips on how to disappear online.
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Kat Germain is a trained Audio Description and Visual Translator (VT) with over ten years of experience. She is invested in understanding and developing ethics guidelines when describing racialized, Deaf, and disability-identified communities, and other traditionally marginalised groups. Kat’s life’s advocacy work led her to learn American Sign Language, and while once conversant, has only retained a basic understanding through immersion in a community who has little interaction with Signed Languages. However, because of Kat’s respect for the Deaf culture and basic understanding of the language, she has been asked to describe many signed works. Kat continues to perseverate on how to honour the Deaf community’s fight for cultural and linguistic autonomy while also bringing Deaf culture to the Blind community in meaningful ways. Kat has won several writing and producing grants for film. Her film and performance work has toured internationally, and her VT work has taken her around North America.
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