Vanessa Chang: Hi, my name is Vanessa Chang. I'm Asian and
white with shoulder length, dark hair and a black top. I'm in
front of a virtual greyscale background with hemispheres at
diagonal corners. And at the top right, the words Leonardo
CripTech Incubator. I am Senior Program Manager at Leonardo, the
International Society for the Arts, Science, and Technology.
I'm a writer, curator and educator working at the
intersection of art and technology. So I was working on
art and technology shows with an exhibition and curatorial
background that emerged out of and was informed by my
scholarship. I realized there was this gap in how we talk
about art and technology, which was part of a conversation my
collaborator, Lindsey and I, had been having since we met in grad
school at Stanford. While researching media and
technology, I realized that the history of technology is a
history of disability. I saw an opportunity to create an
exhibition from which CripTech Incubator evolved.
Lindsey Felt: Hello, my name is Lindsey Felt, and I am a white
woman with shoulder length, blond brown hair, and I am
wearing a sweater with navy blue stripes. And my virtual
background is a virtual grayscale photograph with
hemispheres at diagonal corners, and at the top right the words
Leonardo CripTech Incubator. My access needs are being met
through the live caption feature on Zoom. So in addition to being
the Disability, Access, and Impact lead for CripTech
Incubator, I am a scholar, curator, and lecturer at
Stanford University where I teach courses on disability,
media, technology, and communication. My research and
curatorial work emerged in response to my own experience
and identification as a disabled person who uses assistive
technologies. I have been profoundly deaf since I was a
young child, and have been a bilateral cochlear implant user
since 2013. The cochlear implant, which is a surgically
implanted, neuroprosthetic device designed for deaf and
hard of hearing people has fundamentally reoriented my
engagement with technology. I am particularly interested in the
ways that disabled people hack and remake technologies for
their own ends (sometimes to make them more usable, but also
as a mode of creative resistance). So access
fundamentally informs the way my body fits and more often than
not, doesn't fit in this world. So this framing of access and
the rubrics by which it guides such fits or misfits of the
world and body-minds serves as a motivating question for our work
in Leonardo's CripTech Incubator. So Vanessa, let's
talk about why this is called CripTech Incubator and most
specifically what CripTech means.
Vanessa Chang: Well, in art and technology spaces, engagement
with disability culture has been limited to thinking about
accommodation, or accessibility as a form of compliance.
CripTech Incubator instead centers disability innovation,
creating a platform for disabled artists to remake creative
technologies through the lens of access. In other words, artists
who crip new media can engender new aesthetic paradigms, forms
of representation, and world-building. "CripTech" takes
root in the Bay Area as the birthplace of the disability
rights movement, while also bridging the history of
technological innovation across the bay in Silicon Valley.
CripTech is a shorthand for the way disabled people disrupt
technology, access, and design, and draws inspiration from Karen
Nakamura's work along with other disability scholars and
activists.
Lindsey Felt: Within disability culture, the term "crip" itself
recognizes disability as a valued cultural and political
identity and community; it actively resists and challenges
the medicalized discourse of disability as pathology or
deficit through the work of disability justice. To cite one
of our key partners, Kevin Gotkin, "crip" marks a space of
something emergent. It is the incompleteness of disability,
the conversation that will happen when someone cringes at
"crip", the ways we just need to get it together. So we wanted to
provide an overview of how we've organized this conversation, and
other ways to make transparent this vibrant ecology we are
cultivating and to bring this lens to arts research practice,
we have invited key members of Leonardo CripTech Incubator's
network to reflect on their understanding of this work, and
on their role in this emerging ecology. We have organized our
commentary to begin with this video to model accessibility
practices, but also to build in multimodal forms of access
throughout. Their reflections are embedded throughout this
commentary as both video and text. Thank you.