Unknown: So, we wanted to ask how do you understand CripTech
Incubator in relation to the Berkeley disability Rad Mad lab
and the work you do now?
You know, I was so excited when Vanessa and Lindsey from
Leonardo reached out to me, from the CripTech Incubator to invite
Berkeley to be part of this. I've always imagined the
Berkeley disability lab to be this place, this nexus where the
community technology, art, science, and the needs of the
disability community can can dovetail. And so when CripTech
reached out, it seems like this is this is ideal to have a
postdoc, to have a visiting artists come and work with us
for a year on these amazing projects seem to be a way to
really stimulate everyone in the community, whether it's the
students, whether it's the existing postdocs in the lab,
the graduate students, and the community members in the East
Bay, I think all of the projects that the CripTech Incubator
artist scholars are working on, it's all amazing. They're all
going to really expand on an idea of what either art is, or
what access is, what the role of technology can be in playing
between those two dimensions. And really, I think push new
frontiers. And that's always been sort of our goal at the lab
is to empower the community to excite people's imaginations and
then to do exciting research. And so it was just a perfect
partnership between the two organizations.
Thanks, Karen. And what do you imagine CripTech Incubator to
be? Or do in a landscape of media art and technology?
What are the things that I think CripTech incubator is doing
perfectly is really trying to create a cohort sense between
the artist scholars, the fellows in the program, through regular
meeting, really trying to create the sense of that their product
is larger whole, really trying to think through? What does what
is yeah, what is meaning? What is technology? And what is
access, I think, much of our imagination for what access has
been in the field of art have been has been very limited has
been very situated in sort of an ableist stick an able bodied
person's imagination of what our access might be, oh, let's let's
give the Braille blind people Braille. Or, you know, let's
have a sign language docent for the Deaf folk. And here, I think
what the imagination is, can we recenter where we think art is
coming from and, and really have a come out of, of their sort of
vivid experiences of the disability community and really
responding to the needs of disabled lives. And there will
come to that really, you know, access is automatically built in
into those projects. And I think by doing that, it'll expand
people's notions of what art is, or expand people's notions of
help people to better understand the lived experiences of
disabled folks of our different varieties. And really, you know,
I think, serve, again to excite excite imaginations, make people
really realize that the disability community is composed
of just unimaginable worlds of experience and knowledge.